Looking at the 2012 electoral college map, that looks even more suicidal than it originally sounded. The Democrats prospered in 2012 by carrying almost all of the heavily wooded Rust Belt Great Lakes states where deer hunting is a big part of the culture, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.
(Granted, this scene from “The Deer Hunter” wasn’t actually filmed in Pennsylvania where it was nominally set. There are no glaciers in Pennsylvania, so Michael Cimino filmed it in the spectacular North Cascades National Park in the state of Washington. Because too much is never enough for Cimino.)
And Obama carried a higher share of white male votes in these states than he did elsewhere.
If Hillary were running against Ted Cruz from Texas, she could probably count on carrying the Great Lakes states out of culturally incompatibility. But Donald Trump has upset the old map and nobody is too sure what the new map is going to look like.
It could be that gun control for Hillary was just a feint. Gun control was one area in the primaries where Hillary could get to the left of Bernie Sanders, who comes from a hunting state.
Or it could be that Hillary is thinking of gun control as a potential women’s issue that’s not lesbian-feminist, that’s more of a mother’s issue that will appeal to the women-with-sons slice of the electorate. She campaigns with various black mothers of boys shot by cops so maybe she even figures she could buy off BLM with gun control without alienating pro-law-and-order white moderates. Cops kind of like gun control, right?
The problem for the Democrats that they always run into when they get excited about gun control is that:
They just can’t help themselves.
And then they lose the election. [Comment at Unz.com.]
