“There are indications from voters of more willingness to split tickets than in recent past elections, with these splits benefiting either party in different states. (Jason Kander, the Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri, for instance, is running ahead of Clinton there.)”
On election issues of guns, gun ownership, gun access, and gun deaths, it is always about rights, and the GOP relies on conventional means when there will always be red state Democrats who will own guns. Millennial undecideds may find themselves presented with perhaps more interesting choices.
This campaign reminds us how despite the numbers of firearms in the US, they are far from distributed evenly per capita or even spatially. More importantly, most gun owners are not members of the NRA.
(Emerson’s poll found Kander leading Blunt 42 percent to 40 percent although more had Blunt ahead, some closer to MOE)
Roy Blunt, 66, a seven-term congressman before being elected to the Senate in 2010, is a strong gun rights supporter who has the backing of the National Rifle Association — so much so that NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre traveled to Missouri last month on Blunt’s behalf.
- Blunt received three student deferments during the Vietnam War and did not serve in the military.
- Kander, Missouri’s 35-year-old secretary of state, was an Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
The 30-second spot shows Kander standing at a table in what looks to be an empty warehouse, talking while he blindly slams together the pieces of the weapon.
He mentions “attacks” by Blunt on the issue of guns and says that while in the Army he learned to respect his rifle. He says that in Afghanistan, he volunteered to ride with a gun in a convoy of unarmed SUVs.
He notes his support of Second Amendment rights during his time in the state legislature, along with his belief in background checks “so terrorists can’t get their hands on one of these.”
Kander’s campaign said the ads are running statewide.
www.dailykos.com/…
Democrats will require yet another seat if Donald Trump wins the presidential election instead of Hillary Clinton, potentially raising the bar to six seats. While it’s somewhat far-fetched to think that Democrats could reclaim the Senate in the same year that Trump wins the presidency, it’s not out of the question.
Trump will probably finish with more than 37 percent by picking off some undecided and third-party voters. Still, with almost two-thirds of voters holding an unfavorable view of Trump, it’s not clear how many more people he can rally to his side without a big change in tone and message.
There are indications from voters of more willingness to split tickets than in recent past elections, with these splits benefiting either party in different states. (Jason Kander, the Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri, for instance, is running ahead of Clinton there.)
Furthermore, a Trump win would probably be narrow and could conceivably be caused by defections of Democratic-leaning voters from Clinton to third-party candidates who might still vote Democratic down-ballot…
In Missouri, first-term incumbent Roy Blunt has long had middling approval ratings, and Democrats may have a talented enough candidate in Kander, the state’s secretary of state, to make up for Missouri’s increasingly Republican lean at the top of the ticket.
fivethirtyeight.com/...