A crumbling economy and porous border, or the scary project 2025 and loss of “reproductive rights”; those are the messages both parties are inundating Americans with as election day rapidly approaches.
But if Republicans hope to reach the estimated 10 million gun owners not registered to vote, hunting and pro-gun organizations alike know traditional messaging won’t do it. A coalition of pro-gun organizations believe those non-voters could swing the election, and are using hunting and firearm influencers, social media and messaging catered specifically towards gun owners to engage them.
“Bill Clinton acknowledged, as did Clinton’s campaign, the White House spokesman Joel Lockhart admitted, that the gun vote cost Al Gore the White House. It cost John Kerry the White House. It cost the Democrats control of Congress in 1994 after they passed the Clinton gun ban, and we believe it can be a determinative factor in this election in places where there’s high gun ownership, in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Montana, Arizona, Nevada,” Larry Keane, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told the Daily Caller.
“We believe [gun owners] will be a determinant factor, particularly when the contrast is so stark. You have a candidate on the Democrat side who was coronated and wants to literally, wants to send the police to your home to see how you store your guns, and wants to confiscate firearms,” Keane added.
Former President Donald Trump himself believes gun owners can sway the election. Speaking at a recent rally, he said that the National Rifle Association had shown him numbers about how infrequently gun owners vote. “If you would vote, nobody would beat us,” Trump said.
According to Vote4America, more than 10 million gun owners across the country are not registered to vote. 515,277 are in Pennsylvania and about 370,000 each are in Michigan and North Carolina, according to data obtained by the New York Post. In Georgia, Wisconsin, Missouri and Virginia, more than half a million gun owners are not registered to vote, and another 133,000 are not registered in Arizona.
For Republicans, these figures can be perplexing, but gun owners explained to the Caller that there is skepticism towards voting and politics as a whole in the community. Some believe that because they don’t want the government in their business, then they shouldn’t get involved by voting.
“I think that we as conservatives and gun owners rest on our laurels because we feel like we have the Constitution and we have the truth on our side, and that we don’t really see the threat for what it is. If you even peek behind the curtain of the gun control lobby, you’ll see that it’s starting to expose itself now that they are willing to usurp or destroy the Constitution in order to get their New World way. So I just think it’s a little bit of ignorance and a little bit of apathy that they don’t think that it’s going to happen here,” Dianna Muller, founder of Women for Gun Rights, told the Caller.
Muller explained that she believes many gun owners don’t trust the integrity of the election process, which also may drive some away from voting.
To combat this skepticism, pro-gun organizations have recognized that their messaging can’t mirror traditional political ads. At Hunter Nation, Keith Mark, a self-described traditional Democrat, told the Caller that it starts with identifying gun owners that have the “traditional, conservative values of God, family, country, the Constitution and the hunting lifestyle” and focusing on them ahead of the election. But the secret, he said, are the platforms the organization uses to carry its message to those voters.
“It’s not only the message, it’s how we deliver it and who delivers it, and so we rely very heavily on hunting influencers and hunting celebrities,” Mark told the Caller.
“Instead of selling a product, we’re selling freedom. We’re selling their lifestyle. We’re selling the ability to be independent and not hassled by your government, because these people that hunt when we poll them, it’s just like, ‘hey, I don’t want the government in my business, and so I’m not going to go get in their business.’ Well, we figured out how to message them and let them know that, ‘hey, listen, they’re going to come into your business. They’re going to take over your business if you don’t go vote once a year.’”
“So it’s like, basically, guys, you need to get off your tree stands and out of the duck marshes, and out of the deer woods and pheasant fields and go vote,” Mark said, adding that the group never pushes the demographic to vote for a specific candidate.
To carry its message, Hunter Nation, alongside the NRA, has partnered with celebrities such as Ted Nugent, Donald Trump Jr. (a prominent hunting enthusiast) and the Duck Dynasty organization, Mark told the Caller. Similarly, Vote4America has teamed up with pro-gun personalities like Brooke Ence, Shawn Ryan, Andy Stumpf, Andy Frisella, Dan Hollaway, Shermichael Singleton, and Jason Alden to encourage gun owners to vote, senior adviser Baker Leavitt told the Caller.
Mark expects these types of partnerships to pay off in a big way.
In Wisconsin, according to Hunter Nation’s data, 416,085 gun owners are low-propensity, at risk or newly-registered voters. Of that total, the organization expects to turn out 54,196, Mark said. Biden won the state in 2020 by 20,600 votes.
In Michigan, the number of those potential voters is 452,471. The organization is estimating that it will turn out 70,142 in the 2024 election. Biden won the state in 2020 by 154,000 votes.
The organization also expects to have a big impact in Georgia, where Biden won by about 11,000 votes in 2020. Hunter Nation hopes to turn out 122,913 of the state’s more than 825,000 low-propensity or newly-registered gun owners, Mark said.
In perhaps the election’s most critical state, Pennsylvania, which Biden previously won by about 80,000 votes, the hunting group says their campaign projects to turn out at least 58,000 low-propensity gun owners.
“What people miss about firearm ownership, and gun owners specifically, is they’re not super partisan, and they’re not necessarily overly political. I think we have a tendency in the political space, as pundits or as operatives to think of this being like a really polarizing, divisive issue, and the reality is it just isn’t for a majority of gun owners. They own firearms. They have them in their house. They grow up with them. They hunt with them. They have them for self-defense, and it’s just a part in a way of life,” Katie Pointer Baney, the executive director for the United States Concealed Carry Association for Saving Lives Action Fund told the Caller of their GOTV efforts. She added that as a part of the group’s messaging they are telling gun owners to keep exercising their freedoms, they need to be involved in the political process.
Hunter Nation is not alone in its work in Pennsylvania. Scott Presler and his organization Early Vote Action are barnstorming gun shows and ranges across the state to register gun owners to vote. (RELATED: Hunters, Truckers And The Amish: Inside Republicans’ ‘Aggressive’ New Ballot-Chasing Plan For November)
“This year, I can tell you, we went to the great American Outdoor Show, and then that week, we registered 319 voters just at that show alone. We’ve also been to the Monroeville gun show several times. We’ve been to the Philly Expo Center several times, and I can confidently say that we have registered thousands of second amendment-supporting folks at these gun shows just this year alone,” Presler told the Caller. Presler previously told the Caller that his organization is in communication with the Republican National Committee and Trump campaign regarding their get-out-the-vote efforts in the state.
While some organizations are hitting gun shows and utilizing hunting personalities, others are banking on their large membership and resources to help mobilize more pro-gun voters.
“We are working to reach unregistered gun owners in the battleground states that will decide the outcome of the election, and we have reached eight figures, let’s say, in unregistered voters with messages urging them to get registered to vote, helping to provide them with information to our gunvote.org website, to find out where they can get registered, how they get registered, where their polling place is, and then we try to communicate information to those individuals and others,” Keane told the Caller.
And while most groups are barred from working with the campaign because of nonprofit laws, a senior Trump campaign official told the Caller that they have been doing outreach with Gun Owners of America. Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owner of America, told the Caller that they have a network of nearly two million gun owners who they are targeting ahead of the election through newsletters and their national convention.
On its own, the senior Trump official told the Caller that the campaign is focusing on using mail and text campaigns to target gun owners through state parties to help “highlight what a gun-grabber Harris has been throughout her entire career.” In May, the Trump team launched a “Gun Owners for Trump” coalition that is led by over 50 Olympic athletes, firearm industry leaders and public advocates.
The groups’ efforts could all come down to one thing: whether gun owners trust the election process.
Almost all the gun organizations the Caller spoke to said that the gun owning demographic’s low propensity to vote can, in part, be attributed to their lack of trust in the voting process. It’s a problem the Trump campaign is directly trying to address with its election integrity efforts.
A senior Trump campaign official explained to the Caller that the GOP has heavily focused on election integrity in the 2024 cycle, filing more than 100 lawsuits, securing many legal wins in swing states and hiring a coalition of tens of thousands of poll watchers to help be a “giant human intelligence operation” that will identify any issues and notify the party of such. The party was previously under a consent decree for nearly 40 years, until 2018, that prohibited them from truly launching an election integrity effort.
“The voter roles are much cleaner broadly, and we just have a much bigger, organizational effort that knows what to look for and is prepared. There’s many less drop boxes. There’s cameras on drop boxes, things that didn’t exist four years ago,” the official told the Caller.
“All of that should give people a great degree of confidence that what happened last time is not going to happen this time. And there’s the whole eyes of the world on it this time as well,” they added.
Reagan Reese | The Daily Caller
