2024 Will Be “The Year Of The Gun”

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck saying, Fellas it’s too rough to feed ya. At 7 PM a main hatchway caved in, he said, Fellas it’s been good to know ya   Gordon Lightfoot   The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald

That’s just how it is. Don’t get me wrong, 2024 will not be a monolithic campaign for the Democrats. But it will be a campaign year when the GOP is on the wrong side of every motivating issue.

Look at it this way for a setup. According to recent polling, in the last three weeks the GOP has lost their advantage in law and order, inflation, and the economy. Gee, that just happens to be the three major issues the GOP tried to run on in 2022, when they lost a seat in the Senate, and barely scraped by with an ungovernable majority in the House. Funny what 107 days of feckless activity can do to your popularity, huh?

But there’s a paradigm at play here that the GOP seems to be blissfully unaware of, and are by their very nature completely incapable of stopping. Like that ship in The Perfect Storm, all they can do is to watch the giant wave close in, gun the engines, and desperately try to climb it.

Here’s what I’m talking about. As I have written previously, statistically in this country, every year 1.5/2 million teenagers reach the age of 18, and are eligible to vote. That means that in a two year election cycle, 3-4 million new voters pop up who were not eligible to vote in the last cycle. And since they’re from all over, they’re gerrymander proof.

And starting in 2018, the year of the Parkland high school shooting, fueled by incredible grassroots and social media activism, the 18-24 voting bloc has come out in record numbers. And they’re voting 73% Democratic. And as a result they’ve turfed out a record number of GOP A and A+ NRA members. And they’ve done it for three consecutive cycles now.

They’re young, they’re motivated, they’re social network savvy, and they’re royally pissed off. As every school shooting unfolds, more and more teens know a friend, classmate, or friend or classmate of a friend who were the victims of gun violence in a school. And they’re organizing. The March For Our Lives crowd is rapidly becoming a major national force for gun control. Politically motivated teens, even those that can’t vote, can influence their parents.

And it’s only going to get worse with 19 months to go until election day. Following the Nashville private school shooting, while the media was waiting for a briefing, a woman stepped up to the microphones and challenged the media Aren’t you tired of having to cover this? Aren’t you sick? My son and I survived the July 4th Highland Park shooting. And now we come down here on spring break to visit my sister, and we’re two blocks away from another mass shooting! Wake up! The next time it’s going to be your kid, or your kid, or your kid! The woman wasn’t just spouting off. After the Highland Park shooting she became an activist who had petitioned more than 100 members of congress in Washington.

A gun control guest on MSNBC tonight summed it up just as well. Look, I’m a gun man. My father owned guns. I learned to shoot before I was 10 years old. I’m a hunter and skeet shooter, and so are my sons. In fact the two oldest were in a skeet competition this weekend. And my 18 year old and 19 year old are pissed off. They grew up in a different culture than the NRA shoot-em-up culture, and they’re responsible. And they don’t want their passion smeared by idiots that want to hunt people.

Do the math. In 2016 Trump lost the popular vote by some 3 million votes. In 2018 there were about 2 million new teen voters, and the GOP lost the national popular vote by some 5 million votes. And in 2020 there were about another 2 million new voters, and Trump got stomped by 7 million votes. Am I the only one seeing a pattern here?

And these aren’t just blue state gains. In 2018, there were more than 30 A or A+ GOP incumbents that got booted, and some of them were in what were considered as safe GOP districts. These kids fly under the radar, and they weren’t considered when the GOP legislatures gerrymandered their districts. And these kids have the power to petition their parents with logic and compassion.

But as I said previously, the war of 2024 won’t be won on guns alone.
And again the mental midgets of the GOP are on the wrong side of history. Thanks to the GOP’s tireless devotion to a rapidly shrinking Evangelical loony base, they’re hell bent for leather to make abortion illegal nationwide. Which is a total loser.

Right now, 64% of Americans believe abortion should be safe and legal in most or all cases. And I have yet to meet a 19 year old dude, including me that wanted the next 22 years of their life or paycheck tied up with a kid just for getting lucky on a Saturday night. I fell into that trap at age 23. And I’ve never met a 19 year old college woman who wanted to devote the next 22 years of her life hawking tables, or slinging drinks at a bar to support and raise an unexpected and unwanted child. And that’s what the GOP wants them all to do.

Look, there are going to b e all kinds of issues that are at play in the 2024 el3ction. But the GOP has already lost lost their edge in crime, law and order, inflation and the economy. And thanks to GOP intransigence and stupidity, the Democrats are going to own the two hottest button topics of 2024, guns and abortion. And they’ll have 1.5-2 million new voters in their corner.