COMMITTED: Democrats Will Run 2016 As "The Gun Control Election"

Democrats can’t run on foreign policy, as Barack Obama’s weakness on foreign policy issues—policies shared by Hillary Clinton, and not even understood by Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley—have made them a laughingstock on the world stage.

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Democrats can’t run on the economy, as the policies shared by all three presidential candidates are the same or much worse (hi, Bernie) that those which have stifled job creation, caused wage stagnation, and have ballooned government under Obama.

Having literally nothing else to run on, Democrats are going “all in” on turning 2016 into “the gun control election.”

In an early preview of how congressional Democrats plan to attack Republicans in the 2016 election, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is buying up radio time to attack vulnerable Republicans over their opposition to blocking people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list from buying a gun.

The ads, which will be 15 seconds long and will be played during drive time radio, will run in 10 battleground districts and will call out the Republicans representing those districts for voting “to keep allowing suspected terrorists to buy assault rifles.” The ads will also supply a phone number for constituents to call their representative.

That attack itself might be a bit of a stretch, as Democrats are using procedural previous-question votes to say that these Republicans are unsupportive of a bill authored by Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) that would end the right of people on the terrorist watch list to obtain a gun.

But the national spokeswoman for the DCCC, Meredith Kelly, contends that these Republicans “have repeatedly blocked consideration of this commonsense legislation.”

Kelly said that Republicans know they are on the wrong side of this issue when it comes to public opinion, pointing to a recent Public Policy Polling survey in which 85 percent of respondents were supportive of barring people on the terrorist watch list from getting a gun.

While Kelly wouldn’t say how much Democrats are actually spending on the campaign — in keeping with DCCC policy — the ads could be a signal that Democrats plan to use the gun issue in 2016, which would mark a rhetorical shift from more traditional Democratic attacks, and might be an indication that strategists sense a tipping point on gun legislation.

In fact, according to Kelly, Republicans are going to see plenty of these attacks over the next year. “These radio ads are the first of many, aimed at ensuring that constituents in these districts are aware that their Republican representative voted multiple times to protect suspected terrorists’ access to guns,” she said.

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Unfortunately for Democrats pushing the “terror watch list” angle, civil libertarians and even reliably left-leaning groups such as the ACLU are jumping on the fact that both the terror watch list and the smaller no fly list are perfect examples of the totalitarian incompetence of Big Brother government.

Hundreds of thousands of people on these lists—which have ballooned under the Obama Administration’s mismanagement to nearly a million souls—have no ties to terrorism in the slightest degree. The only person on either list who has been tied to terrorist groups and who actually played a roll in killing someone is deceased former Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, a “no fly” list member who supported the Irish Republican Army and abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne  to drown at Chappaquiddick.

Democrats seem to be heavily invested in poorly-constructed “issues” polling by left-leaning polling firms with ties to the Party, and are getting considerable confirmation bias that suggests to them making “universal background checks,” “assault weapon” bans, and other gun control issues the centerpiece of their efforts is a winning strategy.

What Democrats are failing to grasp is the hard and irrefutable data that clearly contradicts these polls, such as the 100 million firearms sold in the nation under Obama, accelerating gun sales and gun company growth, and the rapid emergence of “gun culture 2.0” as a cultural phenomena  across age, race, and rural/urban divides.

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They’re going to run a national campaign that appeals to old, white urban liberals, and poor, inner city minorities in some “blue-state” urban areas. They are unknowingly ceding suburban voters of every color, increasingly “purple” urban areas, and have utterly given up on rural voters.

 

Democrats have lost more than 1,000 seats since 2010, and they are setting themselves up for further loses in 2016.

I can’t understand how they can’t see this, but I guess it going to take another round of stunning defeats in 2016 for them to get that running against the most basic of all human rights, the right to self-defense, is a failing strategy.

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