Trump's Loss and the NRA

[dlh]

First, let me say I am in no way blaming the NRA for President Trump's loss.

However, left-wing groups such as MothersDemandAction are gloating that they
"defeated" the NRA and other similar nonsense over on their website.

Other sites reported the NRA spent only half as much in attack ads on Biden in 2020 that they spent
on Hillary Clinton in 2016. Have no idea whether that is true or not but if so did that make a difference?

Maybe Charles can weigh in on this one.

Regardless, let's hope Repubs win those two senate seats in Georgia or we will be suffering even more for many months to come
with the looming biden/harris anti-gun administration.

[Paladin]

Rumor's of the NRA's loss are highly exaggerated:

Five Million Americans Became First-Time Gun Owners in 2020

That is probably the biggest surge in gun ownership in American history

[Rafe]

I agree with dlh, and posted about it here a couple of times previously. And I'm not pointing any fingers or diminishing my estimation of or support for the NRA. I know the NRA has been facing extremely tough challenges. But to me it seemed that the NRA was very visible at the grass roots level in 2016, and almost entirely invisible in 2020...in an election where I'd argue that Biden went in with more specific and explicit plans to target gun rights than Clinton did.

In 2016 (and for a while after) we had all those wonderful, memorable, and personal "I am the NRA adds" on network and cable television. We had NRA TV and Colion Noir. In 2016 the NRA spent more than twice what it did for the 2012 election (Wall Street Journal, Oct 2016). The NRA's first ad campaign of the 2016 presidential race, a $2 million spend, showed a survivor of the terror attack in Benghazi urging viewers to vote for Donald Trump (USA Today, Jun 2016). Another anti-Clinton ad buy of $3 million was aired around August/September in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada and North Carolina (CNN, Aug 2016). Its fourth ad campaign buy in 2016 was a $5 million spot, "Nightstand," that aired on national cable as well as regional broadcast in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia (NRA-ILA, Sep 2016). And more.

A February 2018 ABC News article wrote:

During just the 2016 election cycle, the NRA spent $54 million in the presidential and congressional races, nearly $20 million of which went to attacking Democrat Hillary Clinton and more than $11 million to support Republican Donald Trump. In 2008 and 2012, the group had spent $18 million opposing Democrat Barack Obama and $10 million supporting Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney.

You can use this link to Google for some info about the NRA's 2020 advertising, but true or not the general picture is that the NRA spent a little over $9 million this election cycle (less than $5 million of that on TV ads), or about 1/6th of the $54 million spent in 2016. It evidently spent a little over $3 million on Facebook and Google ads, which I admit I never saw.

I searched my 2020 emails and, while I know I've deleted some of them, as an NRA life member, contributor the ILA, and certified instructor, I received 5 emails from the training department, several from the the NRA store (I know I deleted most of those after looking through them), a few from member benefits mainly about insurance (also deleted; one of those just this morning), and exactly three from the NRA-ILA...one of those arrived after the election and dealt with Texas's 2013 Legislature. In 2016, I still have 14 emails on file from the NRA-ILA, and I know some of those were deleted, too. So it wasn't just ad-dollar spend; outreach to existing members seems to have been way down, also.

I don't know. I have no ability to comment on reasons or on actual activity other than what I see. But with record numbers of first-time gun buyers in 2020, it just seems that the NRA was conspicuous for its (mostly) absence. Could they have protected us from a stolen election? Probably not. But certainly a better job could have been done of showing all those new gun owners--and all the existing ones--that Joe Biden unabashedly intends to remove, limit, tax, or otherwise infringe on our 2A rights. He had his plans all laid out right on his campaign website. But millions of gun owners didn't know to look, and didn't know what it potentially meant for them and their families. Biden/Harris was able to skate on the gun issue because they were never pressed on it.

[PBR]

If you ask me spending all that money on ads is non-sense. Do you really think you changed anyone's minds with the ads? Most everyone has their minds already made up and they are not gonna change.

[srothstein]

I think the NRA did all it could this election and was wise not to spend extensively on the presidential race. I say this because of two things. First is that the lines were much more clearly drawn this election than with Clinton. People who supported the NRA probably already supported Trump and nothing the NRA could do or say would have convinced the remainder. The people who voted for Biden were either Democrats voting for their party or the Never-Trump crowd of Republicans who would not vote for him no matter what. I do not believe there was nearly as much middle ground this time as there was last time. In the 2016 election, one of the factors that worked for Trump were all the Never-Clinton people of both parties. They could be motivated to come out and vote for Trump instead of just sitting it out. This time, there wasn't a middle ground that could help Trump. If the NRA saw this and instead concentrated on some of the lower ballot races, it would help explain how the Republicans did so well in the House and Senate races over predictions.

The second reason is that I honestly and truly believe that there was fraud in this election, and that it was on a scale much more massive than any presidential election before in the US. It just boggles my mind that anyone could believe that both Biden and Trump received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. And, in case anyone cares, I don't believe the mass media and the politicians who are saying there is no evidence of massive voter fraud. They are ignoring the evidence presented. I note that there has not been much of a response to the finally allowed forensic audit of the voting machines that says they were designed to rig the election. If I am right that there was fraud in this election, nothing the NRA or anyone else could do would have changed the outcome.

[Grayling813]

The NRA could have spent a billion $ and still not impacted Biden’s “best fraudulent voting organization”.

[parabelum]

The NRA could have spent a billion $ and still not impacted Biden’s “best fraudulent voting organization”.

^^^^This.^^^^
I’ll add “ best fraudulent voting organization and Nation, Dominion and Communist China”.

[Rafe]

If you ask me spending all that money on ads is non-sense. Do you really think you changed anyone's minds with the ads? Most everyone has their minds already made up and they are not gonna change.

The NRA could have spent a billion $ and still not impacted Biden’s “best fraudulent voting organization”.

That's purely hindsight, isn't it? Are you telling me that back on January 1 you would have advised the NRA to spend nothing because the election was already a lost cause? That Biden had already won and that there's nothing to be done about it?

[Chemist45]

Parabelum wrote

Grayling813 wrote: ↑
Wed Dec 16, 2020 3:53 pm
The NRA could have spent a billion $ and still not impacted Biden’s “best fraudulent voting organization”.


^^^^This.^^^^
I’ll add “ best fraudulent voting organization and Nation, Dominion and Communist China”.

Agreed. It doesn't matter how many people we convince, voters we get to the poles or dollars we spend.
When the other side can flip votes, truck in hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots and throw the election monitors out, we will lose.
And when the courts and media are in on it we will continue to lose.
Goodbye land of the free, hello banana republic.

[Rafe]

I think the NRA did all it could this election and was wise not to spend extensively on the presidential race. I say this because of two things. First is that the lines were much more clearly drawn this election than with Clinton. People who supported the NRA probably already supported Trump and nothing the NRA could do or say would have convinced the remainder. The people who voted for Biden were either Democrats voting for their party or the Never-Trump crowd of Republicans who would not vote for him no matter what. I do not believe there was nearly as much middle ground this time as there was last time. In the 2016 election, one of the factors that worked for Trump were all the Never-Clinton people of both parties. They could be motivated to come out and vote for Trump instead of just sitting it out. This time, there wasn't a middle ground that could help Trump. If the NRA saw this and instead concentrated on some of the lower ballot races, it would help explain how the Republicans did so well in the House and Senate races over predictions.

The second reason is that I honestly and truly believe that there was fraud in this election, and that it was on a scale much more massive than any presidential election before in the US. It just boggles my mind that anyone could believe that both Biden and Trump received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. And, in case anyone cares, I don't believe the mass media and the politicians who are saying there is no evidence of massive voter fraud. They are ignoring the evidence presented. I note that there has not been much of a response to the finally allowed forensic audit of the voting machines that says they were designed to rig the election. If I am right that there was fraud in this election, nothing the NRA or anyone else could do would have changed the outcome.

I agree on almost all fronts. But I can only think that whatever the NRA's choice was to minimize their participation in this presidential election, it wasn't done with a crystal ball, that no one in the NRA had enough data or was enough of a fortune teller to decide in the Q4 2019 planning stages that Trump was going to lose in 2020 no matter what.

As to lower ballot races, Texas was considered something of a battleground state this round, and I live in Texas's largest city in its largest county. I saw down-ballot advertisements on the TV daily from the Bloomberg machine. I remember a grand total of one--and I saw it only twice--shown as funded by the NRA. Maybe they were more active than I can guess in other states, but those numbers I showed, $9 million spent this election compared to $54 million in 2016, were for the entire election cycle, both presidential and congressional; I don't think tracking of any purely local-level race ad spend was in there. If that's correct, it wasn't a redirection of effort; it was in fact a significant contraction.

What I keep thinking about are new gun owners. The firm McLaughlin & Associates (https://mclaughlinonline.com/), published their "National Post-Elect Survey Results" last November. Among others, this question stood out to me:

"At the time you cast your vote for president, were you aware that evidence exists in emails, texts, eyewitness testimony and banking transactions that the FBI has been investigating since last year directly linking Joe Biden to a corrupt financial arrangement between a Chinese company with connections to the Chinese Communist Party and Hunter Biden’s business, which may have personally benefited Joe Biden Financially?"

Overall, 27% of the voters had been unaware; 36% of those who voted for Biden had been unaware; 32% of all women had been unaware; and 34% of all voters lining in urban areas were unaware.

When I first posted here, and linked to, Biden's gun platform, even a number of our highly informed membership were unaware of the extent of it.

This year has already set massive firearms sales records. As of the end of July, NSSF numbers indicated that in 2020 over 5 million Americans had purchased their very first guns. The NICS numbers are still at record levels. So far, NICS inquiries every single month in 2020 have been greater than any month in the program's 22-year history (see attached chart). As of the end of November, there have been almost 35.8 million inquiries to the system. Last year held the previous record high with 28.4 million; 2016 ended with 27.8 million.

Now, NICS checks can never correspond to actual numbers of firearms sold; I get that. But seems to me like it's a pretty solid bellwether of the market. And if we already had all-time record first-time gun buyers as of the end of July, something tells me those purchases didn't just stop. I think it's very easy to believe that 2020 will see maybe as many as 7 million first-time gun buyers.

If 1 voter in 4 was unaware of Hunter Biden and China when they cast their ballots, and if even many on this forum were unaware of how far Biden's published gun policies would go...I can only wonder how many of those 6 or 7 million first-time gun buyers were unaware of the Biden/Harris plan.

In hindsight, would turning some of those votes have made a difference? Probably not. But those first-time buyer numbers are equal to or greater than the total existing NRA membership.

So, no; in hindsight TV ads and more grass-roots expenditure and effort by the NRA would probably have made no difference in the election's outcome. But does that mean they shouldn't have tried? At least a little harder? Does that mean those efforts might not have paid huge dividends down the road when 7 million first-time gun owners suddenly find themselves with an extremely anti-gun administration in the White House? And that suddenly they may be personally affected by new executive orders and new taxes and new control measures? Could we have gotten a million new gun buyers to join the NRA? Heck, could the NRA have given away a couple million free "special" one-year memberships to try to bolster numbers, awareness, and future membership and donation revenue?

I don't know. I'm just a guy sitting at a keyboard. But a crucial step in winning is showing up. You can't win if you don't play. We can go on and on about "it wouldn't have made a difference," but the fact is we don't know. Because it doesn't look like we ever really showed up.

So I'll flip the question and hope that it isn't too far off topic. What is the NRA doing now to engage and inform those 6 or 7 million brand new, first-time gun owners? To get them to understand the battle for their 2A rights? To get them--and apathetic or simply unaware existing gun owners--to join in to help hold the lines in light of Trump's loss, and an incoming four years of an administration that has openly stated its best-case result would be to effectively disarm America?

[Chaparral]

With Alexander Torshin under US sanction, and Maria Butina convicted and deported, maybe there weren’t as many Russian rubles funneled to the NRA for political campaigning this election cycle?

[srothstein]

I agree on almost all fronts. But I can only think that whatever the NRA's choice was to minimize their participation in this presidential election, it wasn't done with a crystal ball, that no one in the NRA had enough data or was enough of a fortune teller to decide in the Q4 2019 planning stages that Trump was going to lose in 2020 no matter what.

I cannot disagree with you on most of what you said. I am not sure the awareness of either the platform or the corruption would have made a difference in their votes. But I can apologize for not being very clear on what I meant. I did not think the NRA knew ahead of time that there was going to be fraud in the election. I think the decision was made more because they thought there was no use spending the money on the election for the reason I first stated, that there was no middle ground of people waiting to be convinced. I believe as far back as 2019 when they were making their decisions, they knew that people who were voting for Trump were already there, and the rest would not be convinced to. I actually think they thought, as many of us did, that Trump would win.

I believe that there were other non-election related parts that they considered. Remember that they were under attack from several directions, notably the New York attorney general and the mass media. I can understand that they had to take into account the other fights also, especially the accounting scandal that the media was trying to make it look like the NRA had deliberately set up and participated in.

I do wish now, from hindsight, that they had spent more heavily on some of the lower level races. It is possible that we might not have the problem we have in Georgia right now if they had. At least one of the races was going to end up this way anyway, with two Republicans fighting each other against one Democrat in the race, but the other might have been swayed enough to not go to a runoff. And it is at least possible that we could have done even better in the House than we did. But that is with my hindsight and not knowing everything that went into their decision.

[03Lightningrocks]

The NRA could have spent a billion $ and still not impacted Biden’s “best fraudulent voting organization”.

^^^^This.^^^^
I’ll add “ best fraudulent voting organization and Nation, Dominion and Communist China”.

I agree. The NRA could not have spent enough money to overcome the cheating our country just witnessed. We all just set by and watched the greatest election theft in this countries history.

[Ruark]

I think LaPierre has outlived his usefulness. He's been around SO long, the public has a permanent image of him that he can't overcome. Many see him as a raving loony with no credibility, no matter what he says. He's done well, but he has simply worn out his welcome and needs to pass the torch.

[03Lightningrocks]

The title of the thread was Trumps loss and the NRA. The NRA had nothing to do with it and LaPierre's failures also had nothing to do with Trumps loss. Anyone who thinks Trump loss for any reason other than voter fraud is living under a rock.