I believe that you win elections by two tactics: First, you turn out the people inclined to vote for you and second, you convince people who are "on the fence" or inclined to vote for the other guy to vote for you.
The two tactics are somewhat antagonistic. By working very hard to turn out your base, you can energize those on the other side and turn off those in the middle. The Republicans have had a consistent problem with their primaries, in that by the time the eventual nominee has secured the party's banner, they've said enough really wackaloon stuff to almost cement a loss. And if they haven't, then a few more ill-advised comments do the trick.[1] And even if it wasn't in the current cycle, statements from past campaigns can be easily unearthed.[2]
My unresearched hunch is that beating the drum for gun control will appeal to very few voters that will not already vote for Clinton/Biden, whatever. And even if it turns out some more, it'll probably be "so, what"? Motivating a hundred thousand more voters in the NY/CHI/SF/BOS metro areas to vote for the Democrat moves the needle not a whit.
What it does do is move the needle in the rest of the country the other way. In places where "Opening Day" refers to the start of whitetail deer hunting season, where you can tell what type of bird season is approaching by the display of shotgun shells,[3], talking about gun control in the way that Clinton and the others are doing will hurt them. The issues of economic fairness, the hollowing out of our industrial base by Wall Street and the banksters, and corporate control of our government will get lost under the charge of "the Democrats want to take your guns."
300 million guns translates into many tens of millions of voters who own them.
But maybe they can win the presidency anyway. The Democrats don't need the South, most of the Midwest and the Intermountain West to win the White House. But they do need some of those areas in order to win the House of Representatives. And once you factor that into the mix, then the Republicans start to strip chunks of the "blue states" away from the Democrats.[4]
Recent politics is clear that if you want to advance an agenda, you need to control the White House and both houses of Congress, especially if you want to advance a bitterly-contested issue. I don't see the Democrats standing a chance, now, of regaining control of the House of Representatives. If anything, the crazies in the GOP will get stronger, there.
And you don't need to have a degree in political science[5] to generate a forecast of what will then happen.
Also: Clinton seems to be jumping on this issue as a way of trying to con progressives into overlooking that She is Indeed the Bankster's Next BFF. Which is a trick right out of the GOP's playbook.
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[1] Mitt "47% are Moochers' Romney (`12), Todd "natural rape" Akin, (`14- MO).
[2] Remember when Clinton tried to claim that she was pro-gun? I sure do.
[3] Heavy shot for turkeys, ducks and geese, lighter for doves and quail.
[4] One-third of the NY state and a quarter of the CA congressional delegations are Republicans.
[5] An oxymoron of a degree if there ever was one.
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5 comments:
Thing is, you have 68% of Americans in states likely to vote Democrat in the fall of next year saying they want more restrictions on who is allowed to buy guns to keep them out of the hands of crazy people and criminals, and regulations on things like gun storage to make it harder for guns to fall into the hands of criminals and crazy people, and they don't like those scary black guns either (snark intended), and Hillary can read polls just as well as anybody. As for the notion that Mrs. Clinton has any beliefs at all: Nope. She's a frickin' weathervane. If the polls said that the majority of Americans in Democratic-voting states wanted every American to have a machine gun at government expense, she'd propose the "Machine Gun For Every American Act" the next day.
So it sounds like your beef is with the voters being polled. Gosh darn it, don't they know that more guns will make them safer? Sheesh!
Thing is, how many of those will vote for one candidate over another based on that issue? The history has been that the voters who will vote based on the candidates' gun control stances tend to be gun-owners.
It's not the polls on an issue, it's how people vote based on that issue.
Hillary won't fart without a poll saying she'll get votes for farting, so my guess is that she has internal polling that says otherwise. A weathervane. No personal beliefs other than that she should be President, as far as I can tell.
No personal beliefs other than that she should be President, as far as I can tell.
Which makes her different from Mitt Romney, how, exactly? (Other than she probably doesn't wear supernatural skivvies and she, presumably, squats to pee.)
The only difference, as far as I can tell, is that Mitt Romney actually did have a core belief beyond a belief that he should be President: a belief that the kind of aggressive vulture capitalism typified by Baen Capital, a company he helped found, was good for America. Romney would not take positions that could insult Big Money even if polls said that he should. I'm firmly of the opinion that if polls told Hillary Clinton that boiling infants in hot oil and eating fried infants would make her President, you'd see her chowing down the next day.
Which is better than a President who supports boiling infants in hot oil and eating fried infants just 'cause he doesn't like babies, in that the likelihood of polls supporting boiling infants in hot oil isn't very high, but still.
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