Suburban voters pressure Republicans on guns
GILBERT, Ariz .— Following the news has grown stressful for Angel at et sch n er, a 39-year-old nurse raising four children in this sprawling Phoenix suburb of tile roofs, desert yards, young families and voters who are increasingly up for grabs.
“Sometimes I do think about the school shootings ,” said Tetschner, who doesn't pay much attention to politics but has been disappointed in President Donald Trump, days after sending her 5- year- old boy to kindergarten. She'd like to see Congress tighten gun laws, but her expectations for action are low.
“You can't not put your kid in school,” she said. “I just hope and pray that nothing happens.”
Tet sch ne r' s worries are weighing heavy on Republicans in Arizona and elsewhere in the wake of recent mass shootings. The party has seen oncereliable suburbs turn competitive as women worry about their children's safety and bristle at Trump's harsh rhetoric on race and immigration, and they embraced
Democratic alternatives in last year's midterm elections.
GOP candidates looking ahead at tough races i ncreasingly are eyeing new ways to address anxieties about gun violence, and to do that without crossing the party's base, which sees gun restrictions as an infringement on the constitutional right to bear arms.
“Republicans' backs are already against the wall among suburban voters, particularly college-educated women,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican consultant. “And the inability of our political system to pass what most Americans see as common sense reforms related to gun violence only makes the matter worse.”
Republican Sen. Martha McSally's challenge is to navigate that divide. The freshman senator is facing a difficult reelection fight, probably against Democrat Mark Kelly, a former astronaut who became a prominent gun-control advocate after his wife, then-U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head in an attempted assassination in Tucson in 2011.