Next thing you know, you'll have to get a license to drive. What then? Are they going to force us to register our cars & bolt a uniquely numbered, state-issued metal plate on the back? It's a slippery slope that will only lead to an auto-insurance requirement for all drivers. https://t.co/0AcfxLWYXg
— Jon Zal (@OfficialJonZal) May 6, 2019
Gun researchers say the NRA won't recover from its current crisis in time to spend as lavishly in the 2020 election as it did in 2016. https://t.co/lJx1NC6PE9
— The Trace (@teamtrace) May 6, 2019
In case you wondered why the usual GOP suspects were screaming so loudly:
… The president is probably right to be worried by the NRA’s travails. His tweet seemed to signal concerns about whether the once all-powerful group would again spend tens of millions of dollars to back him in the 2020 election as it did so effectively during his 2016 win, say NRA veterans and gun rights analysts…
NRA stalwarts say Trump’s Twitter call to end the organization’s internal battle royale – which featured charges of insider self-dealing involving its CEO and president – and focus on legal and financial threats, suggests that Trump is hoping to bank again on the NRA’s grassroots political and financial muscle boosting his re-election fortunes…
Trump’s 2020 political prospects are expected to turn in part on the NRA repeating what it did in 2016 to back his then long-shot candidacy. The NRA spent a record $30m-plus on ads supporting Trump and mobilized its field operations in critical midwestern swing states where the gun lobby has strong grassroots, helping Trump prevail despite losing the popular vote by 3 million.
The NRA reported that it spent $54.4m on the 2016 elections to the Federal Election Commission (FEC). But two NRA sources with ties to the organization’s board told McClatchy last year that the NRA’s total spending in 2016 was at least $70m, a figure that includes spending on its field operations to mobilize voters and online ads, neither of which have to be reported to the FEC…“For the NRA to be an important player in national politics, it needs to have a visible presence in electioneering,” said Robert Spitzer, a political science professor at State University of New York College at Cortland who has written five books on guns issues. “But given their money and legal woes, that is highly unlikely, meaning that the NRA’s issues and goals will be marginalized in the elections to come.”
Spitzer predicted that unlike 2016, the NRA “will not have the money or resources for 2020 to be an important presence”.
When Democrats regained the House in the 2018 elections, the NRA’s spending was an anemic $9.4m, only about a third of what it spent in the 2014 midterms. For the first time ever, the NRA was outspent by pro-gun control groups...
mrmoshpotato
Fuck ’em.
cain
who is concerned? Are you concerned? I’m not concerned… fuck those folks.
BTW – my former employer is embroiled in crap again as they try to use free speech to defend their right to keep hate speech on their servers.
Cathie from Canada
Didn’t Russia funnel money through the NRA in 2016 to support Trump and Republicans? If they do this again, it won’t really matter whether the NRA itself is well funded or not.
Doug R
NRA didn’t do so hot in 2018:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/09/gun-control-is-winning-issue-in-midterms-as-advocates-gain-in-house-defy-nra.html
Keith P.
They flew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami.
Mnemosyne
@Cathie from Canada:
I suspect that someone inside the Deep State figured out a way to quietly shut off that spigot of Russian money to the NRA between 2016 and 2018. Their financial problems were too abrupt for it to have just been regular ol’ conservative theft and peculation.
smike
@mrmoshpotato:
Indeed, fuck ’em all.
Duane
Run the death merchants out of business.The days of them making policy need to end.
Amir Khalid
The NRA has millions of life members. Can’t it send out an SOS to them and raise funds that way? (he asked innocently.)
Redshift
@Mnemosyne: I agree. I can’t prove it, of course, but I strongly suspect the source of that 2016 money was Russia, and they can’t launder it through the NRA now that they’re being watched more closely.
The more interesting question is how much of their influence before 2016 was paid for by Russia, but we may never know. (Though one can always hope for a total collapse followed by their books being seized by the feds…)
Redshift
@Amir Khalid: Rumor had it a lot of those are actually “post-life” members, and as they say, you can’t take it with you.
Plato
Wish dems something like this to mobilize its base.
NotMax
This is a thing?
NotMax
@Redshift
Guns for mummies! //
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid: Ruckus is right — it’s been alleged, credibly, that the NRA never deletes ‘lifetime members’, not even those who’d be well past their centenary.
Also, for a great many years, ‘lifetime membership’ gifts for young children were ridiculously cheap — a lot of respectable grandparents and uncles gave them as christening gifts to babies in the second half of the 20th century. (Back then, people were NRA members because they went deer hunting in season, or they wanted cheap access to a shooting range — my very urban dad was a member, briefly, in the 1960s.) Michael Moore, IIRC, discovered by accident that he was a ‘lifetime member’ when he found the certificate, while cleaning out his mom’s attic.
The actual number of participating lifetime members is not high… and most of those are probably donating as much as they can afford already.
ETA: Just remembered — the execrable Rick Santorum bragged, during his presidential campaign, that he’d bought his severely disabled infant daughter Bella a lifetime NRA membership. That’s when it became obvious it was a form of clan identity, not an actual social utility.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Redshift: I’m not a post-life member, but I was given a life membership to the NRA as a teen by my dad’s friend. I’m probably counted as a member even though I oppose all that they stand for these days.
sdhays
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Post-life members tend to be lurkers.
JWR
Wow. Seth Meyers just pretty much raked Megan McCain tonight.
Shalimar
I would say wasting $30 million on Trump might be part of why they have serious financial problems, but it seems very likely that money was Russian oligarch cash donated specifically for election rat-fucking.
JWR
Here’s a link:
Meghan McCain Gets Super-Testy with Seth Meyers Over Ilhan Omar: ‘Are You Her Publicist?
I’ll have to send Seth a great big Thank You! note.
Patricia Kayden
I thought that the NRA was able to spend lavishly in 2016 because it funneled Russian dollars to Republicans. I don’t see why that couldn’t repeat in 2020.
sukabi
@JWR: Seth handled her about as well as anybody has. But WHY is she given the air time? She brings nothing at all to any conversation.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@sukabi:
Did you know her father was a POW? He didn’t like to talk about it, but it’s true! //
JWR
@sukabi:
Beats me, though I did hear that when Elisabeth Hasselbeck left, 30% of their audience left with her and they decided they needed a new Conservative to kick around some more. But yeah, I thought Seth did an elegant job of making her look completely foolish just by pointing out the fact she’d just brought up Omar’s “two tweets” again.
JWR
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Really?!! I did not know that. //
Shantanu Saha
@JWR: wow the comments on that site are toxic waste.
Shantanu Saha
@Patricia Kayden: Putin accomplished his goal in 2016. No need to send any more cash now, since he’ll be dead by the time we recover from the Trump era.
JWR
@Shantanu Saha: Yikes, you said it! (Sorry ’bout that.) But that’s Megan’s target audience, I guess.
azlib
@Redshift:
I think the bigger threat to the NRA is NY going after them. They are incorporated in NY.
Searcher
While gun control is in the air, I’d like to start shifting the window by pointing out that guns with changeable magazines have no place in civilian life, regardless of the size of the magazine.
You don’t need them for target shooting, hunting, competition, skeet or self defense. You just need them to shoot a lot of bullets at one or more people really fast.
Bill Arnold
@JWR:
If anyone is curious, here is a story (there were others) about Omar’s Jewish communications director. It’s possible that she knew about this, which would have made the comment more interesting. Not sure, haven’t watched.
Rep. Omar’s Jewish advisor (Ron Kampeas, Apr 04, 2019)
kindness
Yea the NRA had $30M to throw around at Republicans in 2016. That money didn’t come from American conservatives. The Russians gave it to them. I guess Trump thinks they can do it again. Shocked I am to see that gambling is going on in this casino.
I say make them own that money & it’s source.
J R in WV
@mrmoshpotato:
What he said!!
Barry
@Mnemosyne: “I suspect that someone inside the Deep State figured out a way to quietly shut off that spigot of Russian money to the NRA between 2016 and 2018. Their financial problems were too abrupt for it to have just been regular ol’ conservative theft and peculation.”
That’s been my theory. I can see even hard-core right-wingers in the FBI going apesh*t when the KGB has active spies and funding going into a powerful American organization.
Barry
@Shantanu Saha: “Putin accomplished his goal in 2016. No need to send any more cash now, since he’ll be dead by the time we recover from the Trump era.”
If Trump is re-elected with a GOP Senate in ‘20, then Putin will have accomplished his goal. At that point the USA would be a right-wing herrenvold, kleptocratic one-party state at the federal level.
john fremont
@Redshift: From their cold dead hands