In Virginia, Democrats campaigned as moderates who wanted to focus on things like affordability. Taking office, though, they pivoted toward gun control and trying to gerrymander the state.
The latter failed, but they’ve made the former happen with alarming speed.
As we head into the midterms, though, the subject of guns, gun rights, and gun control will likely crop up here and there. We know where most Democrats will be staking their flags on the issue, and honestly, it looks like that might be pretty stupid of them.
Stephen Gutowski at The Reload sent out his weekly newsletter on Friday morning and included an interesting bit of information.
The midterm elections are fast approaching, and gun politics have little salience.
Among the three major polls to ask people about their top issues that were released the past week, none of them registered a gun-related response higher than tied for second-to-last place. Polls from Quinnipiac University and The Economist/YouGov show just two percent of respondents ranked guns as their top issue.
Meanwhile, Echelon Insights reported just one percent of the 1,008 likely voters they asked had guns as their top issue. That was tied for last place.
It should be noted that the Quinnipiac poll asked about gun violence, rather than guns more generally. That means those who value gun rights might as a priority might have given something else as a priority from the listed issues.
Of course, Echelon specified gun rights, and there was just that one percent, so that’s not great.
What that means is that while gun rights might not be the biggest issue facing conservative and libertarian voters, it’s also not a winning issue for Democrats. This is despite their constant claims that gun control is popular among all groups.
Sure, the issues might poll well in isolation, but it’s not driving voters toward Democratic candidates, especially this year. If Democrats are going to jump on the gun control wagon this go-around, then look for them to take a page from Virginia and try a bait and switch, where they start from a moderate position and focus on less controversial positions, then pivot once they get into office.
Of course, they’ll all have to run for re-election, unlike Virginia state lawmakers, so that might bite them in the butt. Especially considering that violent crime is down across the board, so focusing on what feels like a non-issue to millions of Americans isn’t going to play well in Peoria.
OK, bad phrase in this case, since Peoria seems to like gun control, but you get my point.
However, it’s not all puppies and roses for the gun rights side, either.
Our right to keep and bear arms matters, not just to us as individuals, but to the security of this country. The fact that only one percent of respondents in Echelon’s poll saw gun rights as the most important issue might just be a reflection of the fact that everything is so damn expensive–cost of living was the number one pick in that poll, after all–but it also suggests that too many people are simply content with where we’re at and aren’t recognizing how much farther we have to go.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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