Democrats could face quandary on gun control

FOLLOWING the Florida school shooting, gun control was supposed to become a winning issue for Democrats while opposition to gun control would be an electoral problem for Republicans. That didn’t prove true in last week’s special congressional election in Pennsylvania.

Democratic candidate Conor Lamb won a surprise victory in Pennsylvania’s 18th District, which has long been held by Republicans and which President Trump won by 20 percentage points. While there were several factors that contributed to Lamb’s win, support for gun control was notably not among them — because he made a point of opposing gun control, just like his Republican opponent.

Lamb’s first campaign touted his background as a Marine, and included a photo of him firing an AR-15 as the narrator bragged that Lamb “still loves to shoot.”

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that Lamb echoed many conservatives who advocate for enforcement of existing gun laws rather than enactment of new laws, such as banning specific weapons.

“I believe we have a pretty good law on the books and it says on paper that there are a lot of people who should never get guns in their hands,” Lamb said at a campaign event. At that same event, he voiced opposition to banning high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Lamb’s victory, while razor thin, is seen as an indicator that Democrats have a strong chance to win control of the House in November’s elections. Many districts now held by Republicans are more competitive than Pennsylvania’s 18th District, at least on paper.

Yet the kind of Democratic candidate who can win many of those districts is more likely to resemble Lamb than Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi. This means even if Democrats win control of the House, they may have to largely jettison parts of their agenda that generate activist enthusiasm.

This hasn’t escaped notice on the political left. A recent article at the liberal Vox noted, “As Democrats try to win back the House in 2018, they’re going to need candidates like Lamb in the mix,” but added this would put “the party in a tricky position amid a fresh wave of anti-gun activism.”

The far-left Rolling Stone declared Lamb is “a Trump Democrat — a flashback to the ‘Republican Lite’ candidacies the Democrats specialized in during the Clinton ’90s and ‘00s.” The magazine did not intend that as a compliment, and the article worried that Democratic officials would promote more candidates like Lamb in order to win congressional control.

Rolling Stone declared Democrats “will still almost certainly take back the House in November. The question is whether they’ll win it back in a way that points the party forward. The America of the future looks absolutely nothing like the 18th District in Pennsylvania. And the future of the Democratic Party looks nothing like Conor Lamb.”

The vehemence of some on the left means Democrats will be pressured to run candidates who are much less competitive in swing districts than Lamb. And should party officials reasonably resist the demands of their most fervent base voters when it comes to the type of candidates it recruits, another possibility becomes more likely: After November, the House could have a Democratic majority but still not a pro-gun control majority.