Why Democrats are excited about today’s votes on doomed gun control bills

Gun control votes can often send Democrats running scared and divided, but today they stand united in the face of a strategic — if not legislative — win.

Early this evening, the Senate will go on the record on a measure instituting universal background checks for gun buyers and another measure allowing the FBI to veto gun purchases by people under investigation for ties to terrorism.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy’s epic 15-hour filibuster last week represented a resounding tactical victory for Democrats who won the right to stage Senate floor votes on two gun control ideas the party had been pushing fruitlessly for months.

Nobody expects either amendment to obtain the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. And even if the unexpected happens and some version of one of these ideas gets enough GOP support to pass, it would be dead on arrival in the House of Representatives.

Beyond that, these measures are exceptionally modest as a policy matter — steps that even in a best case scenario would do barely anything to reduce gun violence in the United States. These modest ideas poll well but are unlikely to be big practical political winners because gun rights proponents are much more politically active on gun issues than are proponents of gun control, who generally favor more regulation but do so in a low-key way.

Nonetheless, the very fact that we are having a political standoff over gun regulation this week is a substantial strategic victory for the Democrats — taking the politically dangerous events of the Pulse massacre in Orlando and at worst neutralizing them.

The possibility that terrorist attacks might shift the electoral terrain in Donald Trump’s favor has been one of Democrats’ biggest worries since he emerged as the presumptive nominee.

In a dream world, of course, Democrats would like to think that focusing voters’ attention on the prospect of national peril would lead them to reject an inexperienced and unqualified nominee. But many GOP elites had just such dreams last winter, only to see them shattered when the San Bernardino shootings only boosted the appeal of Trump’s xenophobia.

More broadly, both experimental and real-world studies have tended to show that in the US and abroad, the major party with a more hawkish reputation usually benefits when international terror becomes a major concern.

For instance, Michael Koch, Laron Williams, and Jason Smith studied how quickly various parliamentary governments lost their majority coalitions after transnational terrorist attacks in a 2012 paper. What they found was that right-leaning governments had an easier time holding on to power than left-leaning governments did. It seems that the left gets more blame for terrorist attacks that occur under their watch.

Then there’s evidence from Israel that indicates that terror helps the right at the ballot box. Claude Berrebi and Esteban Klor found that a terror attack in an Israeli locality shortly before the election causes, on average, “an increase of 1.35 percentage points on that locality’s support for the right bloc of political parties.” And Anna Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzoff found that after rockets are fired into areas of Israel, even if there are no casualties, support for right-wing parties spikes in those areas by 2 to 6 percent.

In that context, focusing the political argument on gun regulation rather than Omar Mateen’s admiration for ISIS or questions around Muslim immigration to the United States is a strategic win. Democrats may not win many votes with thin gruel, poll-tested gun control proposals, but they aren’t going to lose any.

Last fall, by contrast, the American political system found itself gripped with vague fears about Syrian refugees that led to state-level refugee bans and congressional legislation that scared vulnerable Democrats as part of a larger cultural trend toward Islamophobia.

That’s perilous political terrain for Democrats, and the basic facts of the Mateen case suggested the possibility that the conversation would shift back into that mode.

A couple of popular-but-doomed and not-very-important gun control bills that the NRA and the Republican Party will filibuster to death, by contrast, is very safe ground for Democrats. Something they can talk about until the next thing comes up and the news cycle shifts.

Most of all, the gun bills represent common ground across the Democratic Party.

Obama supports them and so does everyone from Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Joe Manchin. Hillary Clinton is comfortable running on them, and so are Democratic Senate challengers in New Hampshire and Ohio.

Republicans, by contrast, are divided with ultra-vulnerable Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) defecting to the Democratic camp and the likes of Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) at least trying to demonstrate openness to compromise.

Trump himself, meanwhile, has thrown GOP messaging into chaos. He’s been trying to act like an orthodox NRA conservative on guns, but the debate has revealed that — surprise — he doesn’t really understand this issue. His instinct was to say that Orlando showed the country would have been better off if more Pulse clubgoers had been packing heat, a position so absurd that even the NRA — which does not condone gunplay under the influence of alcohol — condemned. Now Trump is back-tracking, trying to say that he didn’t say what he clearly did say about wishing random clubgoers had opened fire in a crowded room after knocking back a few drinks.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to fight with Republican congressional leaders over his proposed ban on Muslim immigration.

This more than the specifics of the bills is the big political win for Democrats. Casual observers of the political scene see the Democrats responding to tragedy with a clear agenda, while Republicans are responding with infighting driven by the erratic and unpopular character at the top of their ticket. It’s not bad for a few days’ work, especially on an issue that’s supposed to be the other party’s strength.