By Steve Sailer
11/11/2016
Here’s my blog post from May 6, 2016 responding to a May 2, 2016 Associated Press article that ran in the Washington Post under the title “Clinton’s top priorities: Gun control and immigration reform. Could she deliver on either?”
As I mentioned recently, the Washington Post ran a trial balloon claiming that Hillary intended to run in the fall on immigration expansion and gun control.Looking at the 2012 electoral college map, that looks even more suicidal than it originally sounded. The Democrats prospered in 2012 by carrying almost all of the heavily wooded Rust Belt Great Lakes states where deer hunting is a big part of the culture, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.
(Granted, this scene from “The Deer Hunter” wasn’t actually filmed in Pennsylvania where it was nominally set. There are no glaciers in Pennsylvania, so Michael Cimino filmed it in the spectacular North Cascades National Park in the state of Washington. Because too much is never enough for Cimino.)And Obama carried a higher share of white male votes in these states than he did elsewhere.
If Hillary were running against Ted Cruz from Texas, she could probably count on carrying the Great Lakes states out of culturally incompatibility. But Donald Trump has upset the old map and nobody is too sure what the new map is going to look like.
It could be that gun control for Hillary was just a feint. Gun control was one area in the primaries where Hillary could get to the left of Bernie Sanders, who comes from a hunting state.
Or it could be that Hillary is thinking of gun control as a potential women’s issue that’s not lesbian-feminist, that’s more of a mother’s issue that will appeal to the women-with-sons slice of the electorate. She campaigns with various black mothers of boys shot by cops so maybe she even figures she could buy off BLM with gun control without alienating pro-law-and-order white moderates. Cops kind of like gun control, right?
The problem for the Democrats that they always run into when they get excited about gun control is that:
- They want to take handguns away from dangerous urban minorities.
- They will never ever admit that’s what they want to do.
So whenever the Democrats start talking about gun control, they end up going on and on about how the real threat is all those evil redneck white males with their scary rifles.
They just can’t help themselves.
And then they lose the election.
Here’s the 2016 map, with Michigan not yet quite certain for Trump and New Hampshire not yet quite certain for Clinton:
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