Anti-Gunners Want To Take Texas Like They Did Virginia

The state of Virginia turning so blue almost overnight was stunning, to say the least. The Old Dominion state had been making serious inroads into overturning years of ridiculous gun control laws and then, WHAM!

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Just like that, all those good works were erased. In fact, many of the repealed gun control laws are already back on the books. It was a key motivator for anti-gun lawmakers and the anti-gun groups that backed them.

Now, the brains behind that turnover in Virginia are turning their attention to Texas.

Gun control advocates are gearing up to make Texas their top political battleground in November.

Everytown for Gun Safety announced in February that it would spend at least $8 million this election cycle in the state, mainly focusing on U.S. House and state House races. On Monday, the Michael Bloomberg-backed group announced the first round of that spending — a $250,000 digital ad campaign targeting Republicans in five key congressional races. And on Thursday, the group is naming three staffers to help with its Texas campaign, including two veteran Democratic operatives.

The moves set up Everytown to be one of the biggest players in down-ballot races this cycle in Texas, outside of the Democratic and Republican party committees.

Texas is “clearly emerging as a top battleground state — there’s just no question about it — and it’s why we’re investing $8 million in the state this cycle,” Everytown senior political adviser Charlie Kelly said. “Between the investment and our network of 400,000 grassroots supporters, our goal is to do whatever it takes to elect gun sense candidates up and down the ballot in the state.”

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Their goal is, at least in part, to push gun control down the throats of the people of Texas, much like they did in Virginia.

The key difference is that Virginia had some Democratic-leaning sympathies as a state, mostly because so much of their population were really D.C. liberals who use Virginia as a suburb of Washington. That gave them another high-population stronghold from which to build from.

While Texas looks like another opportunity for that, Texas isn’t Virginia. I’m not quite sure that there’s been enough Californians moving to Texas to flip the state’s politics, especially since at least some Californians moved to Texas explicitly because of the state’s politics.

After all, Democrats haven’t done particularly well statewide as of late, even heavily-touts and heavily backed candidates like Beto O’Rourke couldn’t make much headway against Ted Cruz, for example.

Sure, there are Democratic, anti-gun strongholds throughout the state. That’s true of any state.

With Texas, though, even a lot of their Democratic voters are pro-gun.

I don’t think this is going to pan out well for Everytown, but I’m all in favor of them throwing their money away however they want, especially as there are millions more gun owners in this country than there were just a few months ago. If they don’t like having flush bank accounts, though, I suppose stimulating the economy is just as good a way to get rid of their funds as anything else.

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That said, don’t overlook them either. Virginia did and look what happened.

Instead, stomp Everytown into the dirt so they know not to come back again. That is, unless they want to stimulate some local economies a bit.

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