Why the GOP Might Finally Pay a Price for Its Pro-NRA Extremism

By Eric Levitz, the Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/the-gop-might-finally-pay-a-price-for-its-pro-nra-extremism.html

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A Southern GOP governor is warning his party that Republicans are on the wrong side of the gun issue. This is what it sounds like when the tectonic plates beneath American politics shift.

Over the past two weeks, polls have registered a significant, leftward swing in public opinion on gun control — one that has almost certainly been engineered by the Parkland students’ activism. But the concern among (some) Republican candidates and operatives isn’t exclusively a reaction to the shift in public opinion — universal background checks have boasted upwards of 90 percent support for years, and the GOP has blithely opposed them nonetheless.

The other critical factor, as Haslam suggests, is the centrality of the suburbs to the 2018 midterms. Once a reliable bastion of Republican politics, suburban areas have been moving leftward for decades — and the Trump-Clinton race accelerated that long-term trend. Now, the Democratic Party’s path back to a House majority runs through historically Republican suburban districts that split their tickets in 2016.

What’s more, as Laura Putnam and Theda Skocpol demonstrate in Democracy Journal, suburban women in middle America have been the core of the Democratic resistance to Trump — they have made up the bulk of the organizers who are revitalizing state parties and winning special elections from coast to coast.

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