A few days ago, the AP published this article:
After 2016 loss, Democrats know they need white male voters
The Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary may feature a historically diverse field of women and minorities, but in some ways it is testing how the party appeals to white men such as Heitman. Many Democratic politicians went into the last presidential campaign cycle taking little account of those voters, and banked on a coalition of women and minorities to carry them to victory. Trump’s victory proved that thinking wrong. Many in the party are determined now not to make the mistake again.
“The white male vote is indispensable, it’s a part of any winning coalition,” said Democratic pollster Ronald Lester, who worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. He noted that successful national Democrats perform well with white men, and that includes Barack Obama, whose strength among white men in the Rust Belt helped fuel his White House victories in 2008 and 2012.
That’s undeniably true.
So it is fascinating that the Washington Post WaPo published this article:
Democratic candidates embrace gun control in notable shift
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates are embracing gun control more enthusiastically than in any other campaign in recent memory, with emotional appeals against firearms violence and pledges to stand up to the National Rifle Association.
As with other issues, the change reflects the party’s accelerating shift toward voters who live in cities and suburbs and are more highly educated. And it forecasts a general-election battle that could test the party’s liberal surge against a deep attachment to gun culture in many parts of the country, including some areas that Democrats hope to wrest from President Trump.
So the AP says the Democrats need to swing white men, especially working and middle class white men in Red or Purple states back to Trump, and the Democrats have decided to go with a gun policy that is straight out of the deepest Blue parts of coastal America.
Perhaps for that reason, the dynamic falls short of Democrats’ endorsement of such broad, novel packages as the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all. Instead, the candidates are signing on to a patchwork of individual measures such as an assault weapons ban, universal background checks and “red flag” legislation that allows police and family members to petition for the removal of guns from those deemed a threat.
This is eye opening. WaPo considers assault weapon bans, red flag laws, and all the other proposed restrictions on gun ownership that the Democrats are advocating as less aggressively progressive than the Green Leap Forward to Socialized Healthcare. The really believe that most gun owners are Fudds.
“See Mr. Fudd, you can trust the Democrats. They are not going to take all your guns, just the scary looking ones you don’t like because they are not blue steel and wood.”
“If their strategy involves trying to bring back Trump voters — voters from moderate to conservative areas — you probably don’t want the gun issue to get in the way,” said Robert J. Spitzer, who has written several books about gun politics. “You want to talk about health care or the economy or, from Democratic perspectives, uniting issues.”
I’m pretty sure the gun issue is going to stand in their way.
Still, the tone of this group of Democratic candidates is starkly different from those of years past, driven by a spate of school massacres, the resulting activism and a perceived weakening of the NRA’s clout. In prior campaigns, even a candidate such as Bill Clinton, who favored gun restrictions, played up his participation in duck hunts. In 2004, Democratic nominee John F. Kerry dressed in camouflage, lugged a 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun and fired at geese.
Never trust a Democrat in an orange vest. They want to keep their $3,000 O/U, and know that they will be able to clear every hurdle they they put in the way of gun ownership because they have the time, money, and connections to do it. What they want to do is take away YOUR AR-15.
Even in England, Australia, and New Zealand, if you have the time and money, and are connected enough, you can get a permit for your O/U through a club. It’s the working class guy who wants a rifle to hunt or defend himself with that is banned from ownership.
“The political calculus has changed pretty dramatically,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control group. “Just look at other presidential campaigns, with John Kerry or Hillary Clinton. Before talking about gun safety, they would talk about their bona fides as hunters and shooters. That’s just not the case anymore.”
In a survey of the 18 Democrats running, six own guns. O’Rourke inherited several from his great-uncle, a former sheriff’s deputy and sharpshooter, but he said they’re not in operating condition. Pete Buttigieg, a Navy veteran and the mayor of South Bend, Ind., owns two antique guns that he doesn’t use, and Rep. Tim Ryan (Ohio) has a Remington 12-gauge shotgun that he won in a raffle and hasn’t used (when he hunts, an aide said, he borrows a gun). Former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper owns a shotgun and a rifle, both used for bird hunting.
Under the Democrats proposed UBC law, Rep. Ryan won’t be able to borrow a hunting rifle anymore.
Former congressman John Delaney (Md.) also owns a firearm. Perhaps most notably, so does Harris, a former prosecutor who, unlike the other gun owners in the race, has staked out a liberal identity rather than a centrist one.
Why is this shocking. The one principle the Left has is they are entitled to the privileges that they work so hard to deny you. Other people have too much money, but Bernie can be a millionaire because he wrote a book. Don’t you proles understand your place is beneath the boot?
Four years ago, when Republicans had a sprawling presidential field, The Washington Post found that 15 of the 17 contenders owned at least 40 guns among them.
I want to run for President just for the Washington Post to print the list of guns I have. I figure one Lefty readers get to the suppressors and short barrel rifles, they will have a stroke and be unable to vote on election day.
Most of the Democrats have fired a weapon in one way or another — Warren while growing up in Oklahoma; Buttigieg while serving in Afghanistan and hunting with his father-in-law; Julián Castro while visiting police training facilities as San Antonio mayor — but most did not grow up in a gun culture. Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) fired a gun once while at a Boy Scout camp as a child, his campaign said, but he has never owned one.
I want to talk about Buttigieg for a second.
I saw a response to this on Twitter.
This is the whole picture:
I’d like to thank Lt. Buttigieg for his service.
I’d also like to give a little background to his service.
He served in the Navy Reserve as an intelligence officer with a background in fiance. He was deployed to Afghanistan for six months in his eight year Navy career. His job was tracking terrorist financials.
That is still service, but that doesn’t make him a trigger puller. I think the folded rear BUIS and lack of optic on his weapon sort of demonstrates that.
So once again, we see “he was in the military so he knows more about assault rifles (and why they should be banned) than you do” about someone who was not combat arms.
But in a significant shift, several candidates made gun control part of their campaign rollouts.
Ryan’s announcement video featured him wearing a black shirt saying, “We Can End Gun Violence,” while Rep. Eric Swalwell (Calif.), who announced his bid Monday, plans to make gun violence a centerpiece of his campaign. One of his first events was holding a “Town Hall to End Gun Violence” on Tuesday night in Sunrise, Fla., with Cameron Kasky, who became a gun-control activist after 17 students and staff members were killed at his high school in Parkland, Fla.
I covered Swalwell’s defense of gun rights saying you can keep your handgun, rifle, and shotgun. He only wants to take “the most dangerous weapons” meaning that AR-15 you gt at Cabela’s, “out of the hands of those dangerous people,” meaning you.
It’s about the Fuddliest statement he could make.
Gun control still trails other issues in polls of what is important to left-leaning voters, but its profile has risen. The asymmetry is less pronounced than in previous years, when the voting bloc of conservatives deeply focused on gun rights was not matched by a similar intensity on the left.
Many Democrats blamed losses in the 1994 midterm elections and the 2000 presidential race largely on gun issues and for years after were wary of supporting even modest gun-control measures.
Let’s make history repeat itself.
A significant factor in the changed landscape is a perceived weakening of the NRA, which for years was considered a near-invincible political force. The group has faced accusations that Russia sought to infiltrate it to gain political influence, while figures such as former New York mayor Michael R. Bloomberg have spent significant sums to back gun-control candidates.
I think Miguel is right, for whatever reason or combination of reasons, the gun community just isn’t as united and adamant as it once was and that isn’t just perceived as weakness, it is weakness.
The Parkland Kids may be mendacious, petulant children backed by a big money donor, but today’s politics are instant gratification. How does a protest today influence an election 18 month’s from now? Who knows. But the politicians are not looking that far ahead. They need to see our pushback in real time.
Other gun rights activists, however, warned that the Democrats may be overestimating the support for firearms curbs, and they say that 2020 — with the presidency at stake — will not be the same as 2018.
Michael Hammond, legislative counsel for the Gun Owners of America, said gun-control activists have believed the tide was shifting their way before, only to be disappointed later.
“We’re in the same situation now as following Newtown, following Columbine — a lot of Sturm und Drang but no shift in the fundamental political dynamics,” he said. “Guns are, in many parts of the country, an animating issue that will fundamentally make a difference if they believe — and I don’t think they believed in 2018 — that their gun ownership rights are actually in danger.”
That’s the problem right there. They are in danger, Florida used to be the Gunshine State. Now it’s bumpstock ban central. How the shit did that happen?
Gun control was only the third rail of American politics when we made sure any campaign that stepped on it didn’t survive election.
In a focus group of building trade union members, held in Washington on Wednesday, several local leaders said that the Democrats need to assure voters that their hunting and hobbies will be safe.
“I want to hear them say, ‘I’m not going to take your guns,’ ” said Patrick J. Corrigan of the Cleveland-based Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers Local 3. “That’s a big issue for my members.”
“See Fudds, your guns are safe. We’re only going after the scary black ones.”
For the moment, the Democrats’ views have largely converged. Booker has framed the debate — as Democrats depict many issues these days — as a conflict between corporations and people.
“I am tired of going to funerals where parents are burying their children,” Booker, who lives in downtown Newark, said at a CNN town hall event. “We are going to bring a fight like the NRA has never seen, if they’re going to defend corporate gun manufacturers more than the American people.”
This reveals many things.
First it shows just how Marxist Democrat thinking has become. That there are people and there are corporations which are at odds with one another. It’s not as thought the NRA and gun makers are no made of people with real lives and families and interests, and that some of those interests include gun rights. No, the corporation is some sort of sentient malevolence. This is why they push the NRA blood libel so hard.
Second, it shows that when we don’t make our voices heard, the NRA becomes the focus of the attention.
Third, they believe that the NRA is the tiny, extremist fringe of the gun owners. That gun owners are overwhelmingly Fudds (they love the lie that 93% of people, including gun owners, want UBC’s and full registration and every other “common sense” regulation they can think of) and that an AWB will not hurt them with the vast majority of Middle American gun owners who only want a bolt action 22 to shoot pop cans and are fine with having to give up their magazines that hold more than X-number-du-jour rounds.
The lesson her is that in 2020, the Democrats need to be shown that Most gun owners are not Fudds. We know that if they come for our AR-15’s today, we know they will come for our bolt action “military style sniper rifles” tomorrow and we don’t trust them. We need to show that the NRA is still a powerful organization that should be feared by those who want to take our gun rights.
We need to make gun control the third rail of American politics once again.
Because right now, they are courting the Fudd vote to destroy us.
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