Analysis: Why Were Guns Were an Afterthought in 2024? [Member Exclusive]

Gun voters are more likely to profit as a brand new Republican trifecta takes maintain of the federal authorities within the wake of the 2024 election. But gun coverage didn’t appear to have a lot to do with the end result of the vote.

Not one of the main exit polls from election evening talked about the problem, both as a result of pollsters believed it wasn’t price asking about or as a result of voters didn’t broach the topic.

Solely the Fox Information Voter Evaluation survey, which differs from a conventional exit ballot, featured any indication of how gun coverage performed a job in folks’s votes. It discovered simply 4 % of the voters rated it as their most vital problem, tied for eighth among the many 9 points provided.

These outcomes align with survey knowledge within the months main as much as the election. Fox’s polling in February, August, September, and October constantly discovered gun coverage as a bottom-tier problem cited by 3-4 % of voters. Two separate September YouGov polls discovered the identical.

So, why is that?

The primary clues level to pocketbook or different social issues drowning out gun coverage. Pre-election problem polling continued to determine points just like the financial system, inflation, international coverage, and abortion on the prime of voters’ minds, and the election outcomes appear to have borne that out. Submit-election exit polls have pointed to the financial system and immigration dominating amongst Trump voters, whereas abortion and democracy dominated amongst Harris voters.

Moreover, the top-of-the-ticket candidates themselves have been imperfect vessels for carrying a gun coverage message. Kamala Harris launched her marketing campaign with an aggressive gun-control platform however shortly had that muddled by her have to assuage voters over her extra draconian previous positions. Her closing gun message down the house stretch ended up being way more about her private Glock possession and willingness to shoot dwelling intruders to attraction to moderates than coverage guarantees.

Donald Trump ran as a defender of gun rights whereas being legally barred from proudly owning a gun himself because of his felony convictions. He drew contrasts between himself and Harris on weapons however didn’t emphasize the problem prominently down the stretch or make any new public coverage guarantees. As an alternative, Trump primarily hectored gun house owners for his or her, in his view, unreliability in turning out to vote. And that was after he helped steer Republicans into eradicating gun-rights coverage guarantees from their 2024 platform.

Broader societal shifts additionally aligned in a approach that lowered the salience of weapons as a political problem. Primarily based on preliminary knowledge, homicide and different violent crimes seem to have continued their historic decline this yr after historic spikes in 2020 and 2021.

2024 additionally noticed an enormous drop within the variety of high-profile mass shootings that are likely to convey gun coverage to the forefront of America’s political consciousness.

In accordance with The Violence Mission—which tracks incidents through which 4 or extra individuals are shot and killed, excluding the shooter, in a public location, with no connection to underlying prison exercise, resembling gangs or medication—there have solely been three such incidents this yr. That’s the fewest since 2020 and the second-lowest complete since 2002.

Past mass shootings, essentially the most high-profile capturing incident of any type was the primary assassination try on Donald Trump, through which an AR-15-wielding gunman wounded him at a Pennsylvania rally. Nonetheless, Trump shortly rejected any try to make use of the capturing as a push for brand new gun legal guidelines, and the story promptly dissipated from this yr’s quickly shifting information cycle.

None of that is to say that gun coverage couldn’t have made a distinction within the final result of the race. In any case, Trump received with elevated assist from working-class, non-college-educated voters, a demographic that tends to personal weapons at a higher-than-average charge and oppose stricter gun legal guidelines. Key to his victory was the end result of seven swing states—Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Every of these states has a robust searching and gun tradition. They have been all determined by low single-digit share factors, which means even a small variety of motivated gun voters might have plausibly helped to make the distinction.

Additionally it is to not say that weapons received’t matter as a coverage precedence post-election. The incoming Trump administration will seemingly appoint “pro-gun” judges and claw again a few of the Biden administration’s regulatory gun-control measures. It might additionally pursue legislative reforms relying on the last word make-up and ambition of the incoming Congress, although that’s much less seemingly.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that a number of circumstances mixed to make weapons a lower-level problem within the race.