Vulnerable suburban Republicans are being squeezed by their party’s fidelity to gun rights, complicating GOP efforts to hold a 24-seat House majority in the midterm.
Suburban voters are pressuring Republican incumbents for legislative action to curtail firearms after a high school shooting massacre in Parkland, Fla., left 17 dead. Those demands are running up against the GOP’s commitment to the Second Amendment, threatening to loosen the party’s grip on traditionally Republican strongholds already drifting because of dissatisfaction with President Trump.
“I think the people in the district I serve — and this would be true of people of New Jersey as a whole — want Congress to act,” said Rep. Leonard Lance, R-N.J., who is leading the charge for a standalone bill to strengthen federal background checks, a proposal many House Republicans have opposed.
Democratic presidential nominee Clinton carried Lance’s suburban district in Northern New Jersey in 2016; she captured the state by 14 percentage points.
The Republican grassroots strongly supports gun rights.
This cohort holds the National Rifle Association in high esteem and can be counted on to show up for Republican primaries, which begin Tuesday in Texas. That could impede new federal gun regulations, as incumbents from safe Republican seats — comprising the majority of the GOP’s 238 seats — resist proposals that could anger their base.
That resistance could anger voters in suburban battlegrounds, with disastrous ramifications for Republicans. The Democrats’ embrace of stricter gun control is problematic for them in rural districts and working class exurbs, but could offer them another carrot to use to woo swing voters and disaffected suburban Republicans.
In 2016, Clinton defeated Trump in 23 Republican-held House districts, many of them them situated in suburbia. Voters there are inclined to vote Republican on fiscal and national security matters. But they are turned off by Trump and aren’t cultural conservatives, skewing to the left on hot button social issues — like guns.
A second tier concern prior to Parkland, the shooting pushed fears about guns to the forefront.
The development is putting Republican incumbents in suburban districts on the defensive, either because of their own record of supporting the Second Amendment or their party’s. Voters there — swing voters and Republican leaners — are beginning to organize and pressing Trump and GOP leaders for measures to limit access to guns.
Rep. Ryan Costello, R-Pa., said he’s experienced firsthand the change in the atmosphere and seen an uptick in activism. “The gun safety issue, or movement, is much more organized, much more effective and it is now taken on a more priority on those quality of life, safety issues, that a lot of suburban voters look at,” he said.
Clinton carried Costello’s suburban Philadelphia district by more than 9 points, although she narrowly lost Pennsylvania.
The CNN poll conducted Feb. 20-23 was revealing. In the survey, 49 percent of registered voters said gun policy would be extremely important to their vote in the 2018 elections. However, that was the case for only 35 percent of voters who rated Trump’s job performance positively, while it was true for 60 percent of voters who disapproved of the president.
The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was committed Feb. 14 by one individual with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
The carnage sparked a national conversation about a host of gun-related issues: Raising the age limit to purchase certain weapons and strengthening federal background checks, as Trump has proposed; keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill; and improving law enforcement response to tips about potentially dangerous people.
Most Republicans in Congress are trying to keep the focus on addressing those problems and away from talk of banning certain firearms.
“We shouldn’t be banning guns for law-abiding citizens, we should be focusing on making sure that citizens who should not get guns in the first place don’t get those guns,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said Tuesday during a news conference. “In this particular case, there were a lot of breakdowns, from local law enforcement to the FBI getting tips that they didn’t follow up on.”
But among Republicans from suburban battlegrounds, the carnage sparked more calls for federal gun restrictions (some of them have long supported more such regulations but didn’t go out of their way to call attention to their views.)
Some, like Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., even announced their opposition to assault weapons, usually verboten except for the few remaining liberal Republicans. Immediately following the shooting, Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., issued a statement that included supporting information on his position on guns that cast a spotlight on his crossing House GOP leaders — and the NRA — with his vote against the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.
Roskam, a perennial Democratic target, represents a suburban Chicago district that went for Clinton by 7 points.
“My constituents are in discussions asking a deeper question: How is it that we have a culture where somebody can be so isolated, so lonely, and so enraged that they resort to mass murder. And, what are the factors going into that,” Roskam said in a brief interview. “Obviously firearms is part of that discussion.”
