The News
A gun safety group founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., is launching a $10 million ad blitz against Republicans in three crucial races, with plans to expand the campaign in the coming weeks, according to details first shared with Semafor.
The group, Giffords, is spending $1 million against former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers in the Senate race in Michigan, $850,000 in an initial buy against Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., and $350,000 against Tom Kean Jr., R-N.J. The group is planning to run ads in four additional House races.
The ads knock the GOP candidates as soft on gun crime and warm to the gun industry. The Rogers ad shows headlines of a mass shooting in Michigan and says “Rogers took over $100,000 from the gun lobby and sided with them over our safety.” The Kiggans spot features a retired police officer who says Kiggans “claims to back the blue and then votes against tougher gun laws,” and tags Kean as “putting our police in danger.”
The ads aim to blunt a GOP advantage on public safety that the group found in polling this year.
“We think that they’ll be impactful. And broadly we intend to use this $10 million that we’ve set aside to define Republicans across the map who have been really weak on this issue, as well as support Democrats who have been strong on it,” Emma Brown, the group’s executive director, told Semafor in an interview.
The politics of guns has changed significantly in the past five years, with Congress passing a bipartisan gun safety law and the National Rifle Association’s influence in decline.
Still, the group took a “Moneyball” approach to spending its finite money. Giffords relied on national polling from the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group to determine where it could have the biggest impact, asking voters how concerned they are about public safety and how much they support stronger gun laws.
Brown said she still expects pro-gun rights groups to outspend them, but they are “punching above our weight by being smarter with our investments and looking for the places where these races can be swung by voters who are concerned about public safety and keeping guns away from dangerous people.”
It’s welcome assistance for Democrats who are trying to flip both chambers of Congress. In Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed needs as much support as he can get against Rogers, and most paths to a House majority will require Democrats to beat incumbents like Kiggans and Kean.
Gabby Giffords herself is another key part of the campaign strategy. She’s already helped more than 20 candidates this cycle. She’s campaigning for former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper this week in North Carolina’s Senate race and she has appeared with battleground candidates from Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., to Gov. Katie Hobbs, D-Ariz., as well as Democratic House candidates in Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and New York.
Giffords was shot during an assassination attempt in 2011 but has stayed active in politics since leaving Congress. Brown said “people respond to somebody who went through something very dark, overcame it, and also is offering a message that is beyond partisanship.”
In this article:
Know More
Republicans hold a sizable advantage on public safety in House and Senate battlegrounds, according to new polling commissioned by Giffords this year shared with Semafor. Republicans edge out Democrats on keeping people safe, crime prevention, and reducing and stopping violent crime.
It could be one of Republicans’ closing messages, and Brown said Democrats have work to do.
She knows from experience, running Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-Ariz.) successful campaign in 2022 against Blake Masters, a pro-gun rights candidate.
“Despite a very strong environment for Democrats, and despite historic levels of dissatisfaction with the government and the folks in charge right now, we still face a persistent problem in our brand on public safety and crime,” Brown said in the interview. “We’re seen as weak and unreliable – and worst of all, unconcerned about crime.”
The group has tested how to combat that yawning gap. According to the polling, Democrats can erode the GOP’s advantage on crime issues by tying Republicans’ votes against gun safety legislation to their backing from the firearms industry.
The polling memo says when “voters hear about how Republicans are cutting support for law enforcement and making it easier for dangerous people to get guns, and proof points that Democrats are taking the issue of crime and public safety seriously, the Democratic trust deficit on this issue evaporates.” Brown said Democrats don’t need to “out-tough” Republicans on crime, either.
“Democrats don’t need to become Republicans on this issue to win on it. They just need to acknowledge that crime and public safety are a problem, and then talk about what they actually will do to address it. And that brings us most of the way there,” she said.
Despite the bipartisan breakthrough of the 2022 gun safety law and falling crime rates in many large metro areas of late, the issue of gun crime is still salient among voters. Among Senate battleground voters, 77% said they are concerned about mass shootings, for example, by far the highest crime concern among voters.
Room for Disagreement
Many Republicans see Giffords as a partisan group. But that’s not exactly the case, in part because Giffords herself is a former Blue Dog House Democrat.
The group will stay neutral in the Maine Senate race where Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, supported the gun safety bill. And it endorsed Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., which Brown said has been “controversial among some of our allies.”
“We will stand with the people who have stood up for this issue and for public safety across the map, and we’re not in the habit of spending against, for example, Republicans who voted for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act,” she said. “We’re not a purely partisan organization, and we’re gonna be with the people who have been strong on our issue.”