Barack Obama called Hillary Clinton “Annie Oakley” in 2008 for what he portrayed as her diffidence about gun control. This year she has embraced it with vigor, and is now engaging the issue against Donald Trump, who just secured the NRA endorsement.
The voter breakdown: Hillary is now depending on a coalition of non-white voters and college educated white women who mostly back gun control. Trump is aiming for non-college and non-urban white voters who are passionately against gun control.
Going back to Al Gore 2000 and Bill Clinton’s disastrous first-term Midterm (following the ban on assault weapons) Democrats have not done well when tackling this issue. The Clinton-Trump match up is shaping up as a test for whether voters have shifted to the left on this one, enough to make Hillary’s stand the winning position.
The infamous Koch brothers reportedly hate Donald Trump, but instead of dropping a dime to stop him they long ago chose to opt out of this presidential campaign cycle. Word is they decided that joining the Never-Trump brigades would only boost his momentum. Sounds like they wimped out, and considering they are certainly not Hillary fans, two of the mightiest conservative donors in the country are on the sidelines.