When you’re the incumbent, you have a profound advantage when you’re campaigning for office. This is one of those known and established facts in American politics. It doesn’t guarantee a campaign win, but it makes it a whole lot easier.

Yet Rep. Chris Jacobs is currently hitting Indeed.com to look for a new job. He withdrew from the election on Monday despite his incumbency.

As Matt Vespa notes over at our sister site Townhall, this should serve as a warning.

“Get the hell out.” That should be the message to any Republican who is thinking about betraying us on the Second Amendment. It’s non-negotiable, especially now. For Rep. Chris Jacobs (R-NY), he’s learned what happens to you when you announce that you’re working with Democrats to butcher the Second Amendment.

…

Know your party. Know your base. And act accordingly. Supporters don’t want you for objectivity or for doing the right thing. They want you for your subjectivity and the guarantee that you won’t cave on key GOP policy positions. If that’s not how you want to play, decide not to run or change parties. In either case, Jacobs would have lost.

I advise you to go and read the whole thing because Vespa is clearly fired up over Jacobs’s antics.

And I happen to agree with him.

Look, what’s the point of electing someone just because they have an “R” after their name if they’re going to sell out our right to keep and bear arms? Especially when there are plenty of other Republicans ready to step in and defend that right?

Jacobs should be thought of as a cautionary tale, a story Republican lawmakers tell junior members as a warning to remember that their base holds their gun rights sacred and they will not tolerate Republican officials who think they know better than that base.

The problem wasn’t that Jacobs felt obligated to do something. That’s a natural reaction in the wake of tragedies like Uvalde and Buffalo.

No, the problem was that he immediately bought the leftist narrative hook, line, and sinker and is now pretending he was righteous to do so and that the Republican Party is wrong.

However, it’s the voters who make that determination, and that’s nearly universal across the nation in red districts.

Right now, a number of senators are chatting about how they can erode our Second Amendment rights so as to gain some form of popularity with the media, but they’d best remember that it’s the voters who determine if they can keep their jobs or not, not the talking heads on CNN.

Sell out gun rights supporters and they won’t wonder why they should support you. They’ll know damn good and well they should find someone else to back.

Jacobs is merely the first causality of Republicans looking to appeal to a media that will never really approve of them anyway. The big question is whether he will be the last or if others will simply fail to learn from his example.