In the Summer of Bernie I remember reading on DKos a comment by someone saying quite explicitly that Clinton’s anti-gun position would be devastating for her electoral prospects. At the time, with Clinton clawing her way through the morass of Emailghazigate, I poo-pooed the sentiment and applauded Clinton for her boldness.
But I still remember that comment, because it bugged the crap out of me.
I was so enthused, so overjoyed to finally finally have a major candidate for President saying that we could and must stand up to the NRA and the gun manufacturers. How could that be a bad thing? How could that cost anyone votes?
And my breath caught in my throat last week as I watched Obama fighting back tears during his announcement of his new executive actions on guns. The tears streamed down his cheeks as he recalled the Newtown shootings and all the other specific and terrible tragedies that unregulated guns have wrought on our children and our society.
x YouTube VideoNow, this is a man I can be proud to have voted for!
And just like that, the national conversation on gun regulation was in the headlines and not because someone had just killed a bunch of people with a gun (though the shootings in San Bernadino were fresh in my memory). No! Guns were in the headlines because The President was taking forceful action! Long overdue, and limited by the constraints of his office, but real and meaningful changes.
As an added bonus, his actions were right in line, feeding off of and into, the proposals and policies being espoused by Hillary Clinton. Obama cried and Clinton gushed! (Sanders press-released) And I swooned! Obama and Clinton teaming together to fight the NRA? What could be more awesome than that?
But something else happened around the same time as Obama’s emotional press conference. The pollsters, after taking a little break for the holidays, started calling people in New Hampshire and Iowa. And the results showed a dramatic shift in the Democratic primaries. Polls which had shown momentum for Clinton with her holding substantial leads, now showed a substantial shift of support away from Clinton and towards Sanders.
I have seen people here explaining this shift as “people are starting to pay attention” but that seems pretty tautological. (That statement would be true even if Clinton were up 10 instead of down 10 after the holidays.) Maybe that’s the case, but I prefer to look for explanations through publicly observable events. And from that perspective, to my mind, there was really only one big political shake-up that happened over the period between these polls: President Obama’s executive action on gun regulation.
Which brought back to my memory that comment from the past summer about gun control being a terrible campaign issue and a vote loser for Clinton. Could it be true? It can’t be true. Can it? Gun control is not a third-rail in Democratic primary politics, except maybe the other way, right?
It’s hard to tell (PPP didn’t even poll the Democrats on the issue of gun regulations) what effect, if any, any one event has on polling. And if my theory is true, you might expect to see a shift in Obama’s approval (or you might not). Rasmussen is the only poll I found in the right date range with previous comparables and they have Obama’s job approval going from -4 to -7 (so inconclusive).
Usually there’s so much happening all at once that it all blends together. But, I fear, that this was actually a moment when the cacophony was unusually quiet. And the message, to me, was even Democrats don’t want gun regulation. And that’s bad news for a cause I feel strongly about and bad for a candidate I feel strongly about.
Crap.
Updated with a new title. I suspect there’s something to this, but I’m willing to accept that the evidence is thin and circumstantial.