A new round of battleground polls shows a tightening race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in critical states like Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, and North Carolina, and in each of those states gun owners could provide the crucial votes needed to put Trump over the top.

Over at Fox News, Johnny “Joey” Jones argues that while Democrats have largely avoided talking about Biden’s gun control plans, even to the point of gun control groups cutting campaign ads that focus on issues other than Biden’s support for anti-gun policies, America’s gun owners are wide awake to the threat posed by a Biden/Harris administration.

After four years of exploiting tragedies and singling out the National Rifle Association, with nothing more than a less than overwhelming midterm win in 2018 to show for it, Democrats are seeing right now, today, that the American people are moving toward gun ownership.

Perhaps this is a rapid response to state governments’ authoritarian policies dealing with COVID-19, and riots breaking out all over the country, and disasters like the California wildfires.

Just this week, Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, giving the court a presumably 6-3 conservation majority on most heavily partisan cases. Although during Barrett’s confirmation hearings Senate Democrats focused largely on an ongoing case dealing with ObamaCare, it’s no small secret that Barrett’s placement on the high court locks in the Second Amendment-friendly majority Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have been waiting for.

To those who may not believe the Second Amendment is a motivating factor for voters in places where it counts, let me be clear, the gun vote exists and we’re listening.

Estimates are that in 2016, Donald Trump won 60% of the gun owners’ vote, and Republicans garnered support from 61% of gun owners in the 2018 mid-term elections. As the Oxford University Press pointed out a few months ago, those figures could be key to a Trump re-election in many swing states.

This is not a small or insignificant political group. Opinion surveys estimate a third to 40% of households have a gun. That percentage increases notably among the all-important rural voting population. Moreover, in several key swing states gun owners comprise a substantial proportion of voters, including Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin. As Democrats remember, in a tight election, gun owners’ vote can be decisive.

Obviously gun control advocates like Michael Bloomberg are spending big to try to drown out the voices and votes of gun owners, but by downplaying their own issue the anti-gun groups have only demonstrated that this year, Democratic candidates are largely running from their gun control plans, not running on them.

That won’t matter if they gain legislative majorities, in which case these same politicians will almost immediately start pushing for their gun bans, increased taxes on gun owners, licensing and registration laws, and other anti-gun schemes, but it will matter on Election Day, where gun owners have the potential to play an outsized role in electing candidates that will protect and strengthen our right to keep and bear arms, as long as we get out and cast our vote in support of our Second Amendment rights.