In recent speeches, Donald Trump has claimed that “gun owners don’t vote” and “gun owners don’t vote very much.” The implication: non-gun owners vote more often.
However, gun owners are more likely to vote than non-gun owners [1]. News media ignore theses (and other) Trump lies when reporting on his rally and keynote speeches.
Mark R. Joslyn, professor of political science at the University of Kansas, told FactCheck.org that “gun owners generally vote more reliably than non-gun owners.”
“Since 1996, the gap between gun owners’ and nonowners’ reported vote is about 11 percent,” Joslyn wrote in his book, which covers federal elections up to 2016. “Turnout among gun owners has increased since 1972 and peaked in 2004 and 2008 at 79 percent. In contrast, turnout declined among nonowners from a high in 1972 of 70 percent to a low of 64 percent in 1996 and 2016.”…
“Controlling for other relevant predictors including gender, age, education, income, church attendance, and race,” gun ownership was a predictor of voter participation in 2020 — meaning “gun owners compared to non-gun owners are more likely to report voting in 2020,” Joslyn told [FactCheck.org].
Think about who was running in 2008.
GOP and National Rifle Association rhetoric — “they are coming for your guns” — has, pardon the pun, exploded in quantity and volume.
In four elections cycles — 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 — the number of candidate ads mentioning guns increased by a factor of 80.. As a percentage, pro-gun ads dropped from 86% to 46%. But 46% of an 80-fold increase is still a helluva lot of ads. And those are just candidate ads.
Over the four election cycles, five percent, or 721,238 of the 14.17 million campaign ads that aired on television, had gun-related references. Overall, 51 percent were gun rights references and 29 percent were gun regulation messages. For 20 percent of political aired ads, the reference to guns was more neutral in tone and did not include an overt gun rights or gun-regulation message…
Various locations in Alabama, Tennessee, South Dakota, and Georgia had the biggest increases in gun rights political ads aired over time… “We see substantial geographic differences in whether and how guns are mentioned in candidate-related political ads,” [according to lead author Colleen L. Barry, PhD, MPP, Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.] “Depending on where you live, you are likely to hear very different messages from candidates for political office about the role of guns in our society.”
Related:
[1] Let’s leave commentary on the public’s voting participation rate for another day. In my home state of Washington, 82% of the eligible population is registered and 84% voted in 2020. Nationally, about two-thirds of the voting age population cast a ballot in 2020.
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The stakes in November have never been more urgent, nor the choices more extreme.
Remember: you are not voting for one person. You are voting for a team.
I’m voting for Team America not Team Russia-Hungary-North Korea.
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