NRA’s influence built on mobilization
WASHINGTON — Few places have seen the National Rifle Association wield its might more effectively than Florida, where it has advanced a sweeping agenda that has made it easier to carry concealed weapons, given gun owners greater leeway to shoot in self-defense and even briefly barred doctors from asking patients about their firearms.
To many of its opponents, that decades-long string of victories is proof the NRA has bought its political support. But the numbers tell a more complicated story: The organization’s political action committee during the past decade has not made a single direct contribution to any current member of the Florida House or Senate, according to campaign finance records.
In Florida and other states across the country, as well as on Capitol Hill, the NRA derives its political influence instead from a muscular electioneering machine, fueled by tens of millions of dollars’ worth of campaign ads and voterguide mailings, that scrutinizes candidates for their views on guns and propels members to the polls.
“It’s really not the contributions,” said Cleta Mitchell, a former NRA board member. “It’s the ability of the NRA to tell its members: Here’s who’s good on the Second Amendment.”
Far more than any check the NRA could write, it is this mobilization operation that has made the organization such a challenging adversary for Democrats and gun control advocates — one that, after the massacre at a school in Parkland, Fla., is struggling to confront an emotional student-led push for new restrictions.
The NRA’s effect comes, in large part, from the simplicity of the incentives it presents to political candidates: letter grades, based on their record on the Second Amendment, that guide the NRA’s involvement in elections. Lawmakers who earn an “A” rating can count on the group not to oppose them w–hen they run for re-election or higher office.
For candidates who earn lower grades, the group deploys a range of bluntforce methods against them. The NRA mails the voter guides to its 5 million members, displaying images of favored candidates on the front, and some state chapters bombard supporters with emails about coming elections.
The organization’s calculation is that its money is better spent on maintaining a motivated base of gun rights supporters than on bankrolling candidates directly.
“Everyone wants a simplistic answer, which is they buy votes,” said Harry L. Wilson, a political scientist at Roanoke College and the author of “Guns, Gun Control, and Elections.” “But it is largely incorrect. The NRA’s power is more complex than people think.”
Compared with the towering sums of money donated to House and Senate candidates in the last cycle — $1.7 billion — the NRA’s direct contributions were almost a rounding error.
The NRA directly donated a total of just $1.1 million to candidates for federal office in 2016, with 99 percent of that money going to Republicans, while giving a total of only $309,000 in direct contributions to state legislative candidates in 2016 and 2017, according to tallies by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks federal donations, and the National Institute on Money in State Politics, which tracks state-level donations.
While the NRA cuts relatively few checks to individual lawmakers — a fact that has been noted by The Tampa Bay Times, among others — it does devote tens of millions of dollars to ads backing its preferred candidates or criticizing its opponents, often with vividly alarmist messages about crime and self-defense.
The NRA spent $20 million in the 2016 election cycle on ads and other campaign tactics intended to persuade voters to reject Hillary Clinton and another $11 million to support Donald Trump — money that is not marked down as a direct contribution to Trump, because the NRA spent the cash on its own.
At the state level, the NRA also spends much more on these independent expenditures than on direct contributions to candidates.
Expenditures like those are the area of real growth for the NRA: At the federal and state levels, overall independent spending by the group jumped from $9.3 million in the 2009 election cycle to at least $55 million in 2016, according to an analysis by the National Institute on Money in State Politics published Friday.
“Its most precious resource is perhaps the passion and political engagement of its members and its fans,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics.
This type of spending also comes with risks, particularly when the group ventures into “purpler” parts of the country, where the two parties have similar levels of support. The NRA’s presence can draw in an increasingly well-funded collection of groups that support gun control, and can sometimes unnerve moderate voters.
The organization has focused heavily in recent years on high-profile Senate elections in conservative-leaning states that are key to the balance of power in Congress, amassing an imposing record of victories, including that of Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Tom Cotton of Arkansas.
But it has had major losses, too, including in the Senate special election in Alabama late in 2017, in which it spent money to try to defeat Doug Jones, a Democrat who challenged Roy S. Moore.
Overall, the success rate of the NRA ebbs and flows with political trends. With Trump on the ballot, candidates it supported directly at the federal level in 2016 won 73 percent of the time, while its preferred candidates won only 44 percent of the time in 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected president.