| Wall Street Journal | - |
Presumptive
GOP nominee Donald Trump received the endorsement of the NRA gun-rights
group at its forum in Kentucky on Friday. In his remarks, Mr. Trump
attacked Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, saying she would
abolish the Second Amendment ...
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NRA is now almost entirely a pro-Republican group, spending more money than ever to ensure Congress doesn’t enact any gun safety laws
NRA boss Wayne LaPierre runs a gun group now backs mostly Republicans — and is spending more money than ever to get them elected.
(SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)That era is over.
During the last federal election cycle, in 2014, the gun group’s spending on behalf of Democrats dwindled to virtually nothing, even as its overall election-related spending soared to more than $32 million, an analysis by the Daily News and The Trace found.
During that cycle, the NRA poured money into 46 Congressional races — and got its desired result 72% of the time.
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The Supreme Court’s decision removing the cap on what outside groups can spend on leaflets, postcards and ads supporting or opposing candidates in federal elections — called “independent expenditures” — has helped the NRA maintain its role as one of the most potent forces in American politics.
The group believes the best way to stymie a plague of gun violence that claims 32,000 American lives each year is to arm more people. In the wake of the 2012 mass shooting that left 20 children and six staff members dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said the solution was to place armed guards in elementary schools.
With the 2016 elections just under six months away, the NRA’s annual meeting, which kicked off Thursday in Louisville, Ky., makes clear the organization’s close ties with the GOP’s most prominent figures.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for President, is among the featured speakers, along with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and former GOP presidential hopefuls Sens. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. The roster does not include any Democratic lawmakers.
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“What you’re seeing is that the NRA is now operating at the core of the Republican national party coalition,” says Michael Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, a leading think tank on money in politics. “They’ve essentially zeroed out Democrats. They used to give to them as a way to maintain leverage in both parties.”
When the NRA provides considerable financial support, its preferred candidates generally win. In the 20 races into which the NRA spent the most money during the past three election cycles in indirect expenditures, the group got its desired result 15 times, the analysis by The News and Trace found.
But there are a few notable exceptions, including the 2012 presidential race, during which the NRA spent $9.8 million in independent expenditures attacking President Obama and $2.7 million supporting Mitt Romney.
At this stage of the 2016 election cycle, the NRA has spent nearly $1 million supporting Republicans in both direct and independent expenditures, and just $1,000 supporting Democrats. A substantial portion of that sum — about $420,000 — has been spent attacking Ted Strickland, a former governor of Ohio who is now running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat. Strickland, a longtime opponent of an assault weapons ban, once had the NRA’s support, until he began advocating for additional background checks. He also says he wants to restrict terror suspects from buying guns, a position that puts him further at odds with the NRA.
Democrat Jon Tester says gun-control laws wouldn't stop Newtown
(New York Daily News)
While the NRA hasn’t endorsed a candidate in the presidential contest, there is little doubt the group will spend millions to defeat Clinton.
On the stump, Clinton has said the NRA wields too much power over elected officials, and has sparred with her rival for the nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, over his support for a law that gave gun manufacturers immunity from most types of liability lawsuits.
Since he began running for office, Trump has declared he is an ardent supporter of gun rights, boasting that he has a concealed carry permit.
Donald Trump to speak at NRA leadership forum in May
Donald Trump has declared that he's a big supporter of gun rights.
(Richard Ellis/Getty Images)In 2010, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that dramatically changed campaign finance laws, removing the cap on what outside groups, like the NRA, can spend to influence elections. The law applied to independent expenditures — money that is not given directly to a candidate, and is generally spent on ads without coordinating with an official campaign. Restrictions on direct contributions were not addressed.
In the 2010 cycle, the NRA spent just under $7 million on independent expenditures in 83 races; in 18 of them, the organization supported Democrats.
In 2014, the NRA invested roughly five times as much on just 46 races. None of the $31.7 million was spent in support of Democrats.
Deranged man with guns
(New York Daily News)
Mark Pryor, a two-term Democratic senator from Arkansas who had often sided with the NRA, was among those defeated after the group’s shift to solely backing Republicans.
In April 2013, four months after the Newtown shooting, the U.S. Senate voted on legislation that would have required background checks for all commercial gun sales.
Known as the Manchin-Toomey proposal the bill named for two lawmakers, a Republican and a Democrat, was intended as a bi-partisan response to the carnage. It would have been the most significant gun-buying regulation since the early 1990s, when it became mandatory for anyone purchasing a firearm from a licensed dealer to undergo a background check.
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The NRA ran radio spots thanking the Democrat for listening “to his constituents” rather than “bowing down” to “out-of-state interests.”
The following year, Pryor learned what his loyalty had earned him.
Up for reelection, the NRA mobilized its vast resources to end his career as a lawmaker, spending nearly $3 million in support of his Republican opponent, Rep. Tom Cotton. Initially considered a close contest, Pryor lost by 17 percentage points.
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In the end, his party mattered more than his voting record.
“I tried to find common ground with them, but they just aren’t fair with Democrats, even when they have the same voting record as Republicans. They're not treated the same,” he said. “They say they’re not, but the NRA is now a Republican organization.”
As the country has become more polarized, so, too, has the NRA. It began punishing powerful Democratic allies for isolated infractions as early as the 1994 mid-term elections, after President Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban into law.
NRA boss Wayne LaPierre is all talk and no action
In 2010, as the Tea Party wave rose into a tsunami, the NRA faced criticism for propping up incumbent Democrats who had historically been reliably pro-gun.
"The NRA is Helping Preserve the Anti Gun Democratic Majority," read a headline in Red State, the influential conservative website.
The new single-party conformity may threaten the NRA's long-term influence. Cultivating a bipartisan group of lawmakers helps interest groups insulate themselves against the natural ebb and flow of American politics, a point once made by the NRA itself.
Auction of gun that killed Trayvon is low point of NRA culture
(New York Daily News)
As a matter of overall strategy, during the last three election cycles the greatest percentage of the NRA’s spending was in tightly contested Senate and House races — the leading two being North Carolina and Colorado — in which the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan analysis of U.S. elections, deemed the contests a “tossup.”
While it’s impossible to say to what extent NRA dollars help sway an election, the analysis shows the more the gun group spends, the more often it gets the outcome it wants.
The group’s success in tossup races, where it spent the vast majority of its money, increased from around 40% during the 2010 and 2012 cycles, to 81% during the 2014 cycle, the analysis by The News and The Trace found.
Children cower outside Sandy Hook Elementary School after the 2012 shooting. The NRA's response to the massacre: place armed guards at elementary schools.
(MICHELLE MCLOUGHLIN/REUTERS)Paul Herrnson, a political scientist and election expert, says negative ads "are generally more memorable than positive ones. The NRA wants the biggest bang for its buck."
In 2014, the seat of Sen. Mary Landrieu, a three-term Louisiana Democrat, was considered a tossup. The NRA paid for a television ad against her that showed a young mother putting her baby to sleep and texting her husband, who had just landed in Miami. Soon after, an intruder breaks into her house.
“It happens like that,” a disembodied voice says, “the police can’t get there in time. How you defend yourself is up to you. It’s your choice. But Mary Landrieu voted to take away your gun rights.”
The NRA spent more than $3 million attacking Landrieu, and just over $340,000 supporting her opponent, Republican William Cassidy, who won about 56% of the vote.
From 2010 to 2014, NRA spending accounted for 30% or more of total independent expenditures in seven races. In each of those instances, the candidate the gun group backed came out victorious.
One such contest was a battle for an open House seat in Arkansas. The Democratic candidate, a long-time NRA member named Patrick Henry Hays, was the former mayor of Little Rock. On his website, Hays had promised to “oppose any law, including an assault weapons ban, that would take guns away from law-abiding citizens.”
But he also previously had expressed support for the Michael Bloomberg-backed Mayors Against Illegal Guns. The NRA spent over $1 million to defeat him, a massive sum for a Congressional race, and a figure that amounted to 43% of all outside investments in the race.
Less than two weeks before the general election, the Hays campaign aired a television ad that showed him cleaning his firearms. “These are my guns,” the candidate says in an upbeat voice. “I’m a proud member of the NRA, and I’ll protect our Second Amendment rights.”
He lost the race by eight percentage points, another Democrat squashed by the NRA because of his party affiliation.
“I support a lot of what they do,” Hays said. “But they’re dug in as deeply in the foxhole as you can get.”
The Trace is an independent, nonprofit media organization dedicated to expanding the overage of guns in the United States. Their seed funding was provided by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund and the Joyce Foundation.
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