Opinionator: Guns and Political Suicide

Tom Edsall on politics inside and outside of Washington.

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Ayotte, Kelly A, Baucus, Max, Begich, Mark, Democratic Party, Elections, Senate, Gun Control, Heitkamp, Heidi, Lawrence, John, Luntz, Frank I, National Rifle Assn, North Dakota, Pryor, Mark, Reid, Harry, Rosenthal, Steve

Does Bill Daley, a former White House chief of staff, have the right to complain that Heidi Heitkamp, the first-year Democratic Senator from North Dakota, refused to commit political suicide after taking his $2,500 contribution?

Heitkamp was one of four Senate Democrats who voted against a proposal to require gun buyers to pass a background check for sales made over the Internet or at gun shows. In doing so, Heitkamp joined a successful 46-vote minority that killed a key legislative goal of the Obama administration. The amendment received 54 votes, but failed to reach the 60 vote threshold to overcome a filibuster. The three other Democrats voting "no" were Mark Begich of Alaska, Max Baucus of Montana, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas.

A shift of those four votes would have dramatically changed the politics of the debate over gun legislation. Together with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who voted "no" to preserve parliamentary maneuverability, the four dissenting Democrats would have brought the total number of votes in support of the background check amendment to 59. If gun control advocates had been within one vote of winning, they would have been able to put tremendous pressure on Senator Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, to vote yes. As it is, she is facing an onslaught of criticism in her home state for her no vote.

For Daley, whose family ran Chicago for decades, what Heitkamp, Begich, Pryor and Baucus did was unforgivable. Writing a few days after the vote in the Washington Post, Daley laid down the gauntlet:

I have had a long career in government and politics, but I don't donate heavily to political campaigns. When I contribute, it's because I know the candidate well or am really impressed with the person. Heidi Heitkamp was one of the latter: She struck me as strong-willed, principled and an independent thinker.

But this week, Heitkamp betrayed those hopes.

Two of the Democratic defectors, Pryor and Begich, will be up for re-election next year (Baucus has decided to retire and Heitkamp doesn't have to run again until 2018). Begich and Pryor will be touring the country to raise money, Daley noted:

No doubt they'll come to Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and other cities looking for money to fuel their campaigns. These cities, of course, are also too often the destination for illegal guns flowing in from out of state. So I'll have some advice for my friends in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles: Just say no to the Democrats who said no on background checks.

Daley is not alone among experienced politicians.

I asked Steve Rosenthal, the president of the Organizing Group and a former political director of the AFL-CIO, and John Lawrence, who spent 38 years as a top aide on Capitol Hill, most recently as chief of staff to Nancy Pelosi, about how they deal with question of moral principle versus political pressure when evaluating a controversial vote.

Rosenthal replied by email:

After more than 30 years of doing this work I guess I'm still naïve enough to believe that there are issues that transcend politics – that when real lives are at stake, politicians need to step up and do what is right.

Rosenthal argued that

Elected officials underestimate voters. The underlying questions are; were you elected to do what is right and important for the country, your state, your district or were you elected to get re-elected?

Lawrence, also a supporter of the gun control legislation, replied by email too:

In the case of the gun bill, I thought it [casting a "no" vote] particularly gutless since public opinion is strong on the background check issue, there are resources available to those who took chances to vote the right way, and there was plenty of cover from people in states who might well face a backlash but who still did the right thing.

Members of the House and Senate, Lawrence argued,

have a tendency to overemphasize the importance of a particular vote with respect to their future electoral viability, so it becomes easy for them to justify a self-serving position which may well not be borne out by the facts. Members don't want tough races, don't want to have to raise money, don't want to confront angry people in a town hall, and they will inflate the dangers of a particular vote to avoid such discomforts which do not, in most cases, amount to sacrificing a career.

Taking on powerful interest groups is "unavoidable if we are ever going to confront tough issues," Lawrence concluded.

Using political capital is essential, in my view; otherwise, it becomes easy to simply rationalize every vote as saving your seat so you can "do something important "even though you did not do something important in order to save your seat."

Sometimes a controversial vote will cost you your seat. But is a vote for expanded background checks, in fact, political suicide?

The history of members of the House and Senate who lost re-election after casting controversial votes is complex. The causal relationship between the vote (or votes) and defeat is often tenuous.

Would Heitkamp, Begich or Pryor have lost their upcoming elections if they had cast votes in favor of background checks?

The public opinion data on this issue is extensive. Multiple surveys show overwhelming public support for universal background checks of gun buyers.

Daley and other gun control advocates cite polling conducted by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an organization backed by Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City, which shows that 84 percent of adults in Arkansas adults backing "expanding the gun background check system to include all gun buyers." It's 94 percent in North Dakota (Alaskans were not polled).

The Mayors Against Illegal Guns survey asked respondents "Do you favor or oppose requiring all gun buyers to pass a criminal background check, no matter where they buy the gun and no matter whom they buy it from?"

The replies represented in Figure 1 — of all voters, of gun owners and of members of the National Rifle Association — should give the gun rights lobby pause.

Fig 1.

It's not just liberal organizations coming up with these findings. Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, has found that 82 percent of gun owners support requiring universal criminal background checks for gun purchases, and 80 percent agree that concealed-carry permits should be granted only to applicants who have completed gun safety training. Luntz wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Times:

In most cases, N.R.A. member support for these reforms was slightly lower than that of the gun-owner population, but in all cases, it was well above a majority. N.R.A. members aren't extremist outliers; they are good Americans who happen to think like the rest of America.

A separate YouGov survey published April 17 showed that the general public supports "requiring criminal and mental background checks for all those buying guns, including at gun shows and private sales" by a 77-14 margin, and that Republicans back such checks by a 68-19 margin.

Gun control advocates plan to make the "no" votes on background checks cast by Heitkamp, Begich and Pryor politically costly. They want to change the mental calculations of politicians so that voting against gun control will amount to political suicide.

The Progressive Chance Campaign Committee, for example, has announced plans to run newspaper ads in each of their states, including Figure 2, in North Dakota:

As John Lawrence noted earlier, politicians "don't want to have to raise money, don't want to confront angry people in a town hall, and they will inflate the dangers of a particular vote to avoid such discomforts which do not, in most cases, amount to sacrificing a career." In fact, the fears of elected officials may be exaggerated.

Recently published research expands upon this insight, showing that elected officials magnify the conservatism of their own constituents on a host of left-right issues.

The findings are presented in a study by two graduate students in political science, David E. Broockmany at the University of California, Berkeley, and Christopher Skovronz at the University of Michigan, "What Politicians Believe About Their Constituents." The two authors write:

a substantial and pervasive conservative bias in politicians' estimates of district opinion. Politicians are much more likely to erroneously believe that their constituents are more conservative than they actually are than to erroneously believe that their constituents are more liberal than they actually are.

The Berkeley study looked at polarizing issues including Obamacare, same-sex marriage, regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, abortion and affirmative action.

The study did not test gun rights issues specifically, but generally speaking public opinion on gun rights has closely tracked other left-right indicators.

Conservative politicians, Broockmany and Skovronz argue, overestimate the conservative leanings of constituents by the largest margins – by about 20 percentage points; liberals overestimate by about 10 points; and centrist Democrats like Heitkamp overestimate by about 15 points.

This suggests that Heitkamp, Begich, Pryor and Baucus are likely to have overestimated the conservatism of their constituents in making judgments on the political cost of voting for the background check amendment.

There are broader implications. The Broockmany-Skovronz paper suggests that politicians left, right and center have been making decisions on the basis of mistaken premises about their voters. One hypothesis is that the roots of this misperception originated in the early 1980s, particularly with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, of a Republican Senate majority, and of a working conservative majority in the House.

Those events – followed by the 1994 and 2010 Republican landslides – stunned Democrats from Republican-leaning states, making them apprehensive. Fearing a conservative backlash, they were willing to shift their votes to the right.

The electorate has and will continue to punish liberal excess, but Democrats are only starting to recognize how voters have come to confront the liabilities and costs of conservatism. Democrats do not have a free hand to dole out tax-financed benefits to the liberal interest group community, but the likelihood that they will be punished for supporting common sense measures to contain gun violence is far less than it was two or three decades ago.

In the long run, the best hope for gun control advocates is the changing demographic make-up of the membership of their prime adversary, the National Rifle Association. Not only is the N.R.A. disproportionately dependent on older white men, a declining constituency, but strong majorities of current members, from 74 to 85 percent according to the polls cited above, defy the organization's leadership and support background checks

The fact is that Daley was not calling on Heitkamp to commit political suicide. Instead he was suggesting that Heitkamp make use of her political talents to take on a challenging but not insuperable issue. As a Democrat who carried a state Romney won by more than 20 points, 60.1 percent to Obama's 39.9, Heitkamp should be equipped to demonstrate that even in North Dakota voters can choose to keep guns out of the hands genuinely dangerous people.

Insofar as Heitkamp, Begich and Pryor take the easy way out, they reinforce the stereotype of an all-powerful N.R.A. Challenging the N.R.A. is not a risk-free proposition, but submission serves only to reinforce the image of Congress as the captive of special interests.

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