While individual politicians have been great for us, the party wouldn’t have us when times were good, so it can’t pull us down when it craters. We didn’t hitch our wagon to the GOP – we focused on issues, and as a result made some slight pickups in key places, even if not at top of the ticket.
MPFO’s aggressive, independent efforts to micro-target pro-gun voters in key districts worked. Fourteen senators won contested races with MPFO’s involvement; two lost, John Giannetti and Herb McMillan. In the House, MPFO ran outreach efforts in the races of two dozen winning Delegates, also with two losses. These represent key races where there was an opportunity to make a difference in building a pro-gun team in Annapolis, and in many cases the win came by a margin far under what MPFO delivered.
Not all races were contested, of course, and there were far too many races in which we had no dog in the fight. Most of the time this represented bad news for us. John Kane led the GOP to run fewer candidates than in past years, and the party’s willingness to accept Maryland as a one-party state largely protects more anti-gunners than pro-gunners.
Add the above tally to our primary wins and here is how it sizes up: Depending on the question, we can anticipate having a receptive ear of 19 to 24 Senators to make our case. That’s not a majority of the 47 member body, but we truly believe far fewer senators consider grabbing guns to be a priority. For the rest in the middle, guns are just one of the thousand issues for which they might give or withhold support in barter for a pet issue of their own.
In the House, MPFO’s record expenditure of resources brought us back up to the count of pro-gunners we had at the start of last term, before the administration drew it down for executive appointments. We can only speculate about where we’d be if only we could have invested resources into advancing, rather than holding the line. Numbers? Using the NRA rating as a guide (which is optimistic) we’ll have 50 B-or better Delegates, 60 C-or-worse Delegates and 31 unknowns. Most unknowns will likely lean against us, but we’ll know soon enough, and need not bait them to posture the wrong way prematurely. The goal is to recruit them, not drive them to the other side.