State Lines, not Party Lines, Shape Gun Law Stances

In Washington, conventional wisdom holds that Democrats are now in headlong retreat on the gun issue. “Democrats back off on firearms,” screamed a USA Today headline last week.

So in the New Jersey gubernatorial race this fall, why is it the Republican nominee, Bret Schundler, who’s backing off on guns? Earlier this month, Schundler abruptly renounced his earlier indications that he would sign a bill allowing anyone in the state to make like Tony Soprano and carry a concealed weapon.

OK, so maybe it’s really the Republicans who are in retreat on guns.

Well, then, why is Mark Warner, the Democratic nominee in this fall’s Virginia governor’s race, angering many of his supporters by courting the National Rifle Assn.--to the point of echoing the group’s insistence that the state would be better off enforcing existing gun laws than passing new ones?

The answer is that the politics of guns aren’t moving in a straight line. Instead the debate is advancing in opposite directions, carving out two distinct zones of influence.

In the heavily rural plains, Mountain West and southern states, guns are accepted (even revered) as a tool, and excessive enthusiasm for gun control ranks right up with atheism as a career-ending political choice. In the populous suburban states along the coasts, guns are seen largely as a menace, and opposing gun control can still be the political equivalent of holding a loaded gun to your head. The most unsettled ground, as usual, is the Midwest, where some states (such as Michigan) tip slightly toward gun rights advocates, and others (such as Illinois) lean slightly toward gun controllers, based on their precise population balance between anti-gun suburban voters and rural hunters.

Does this map sound familiar? The balance of power on guns is following the now-celebrated partition of America between the red states George W. Bush won last year and the blue states that backed Al Gore. Guns, in fact, proved one of the most powerful forces in creating that stark geographic division. More than three-fifths of voters who owned guns backed Bush; nearly three-fifths who didn’t backed Gore.

That doesn’t mean large numbers of voters, in either the blue or red states, are choosing their candidates solely because of their view on guns. But voters appear to blend a candidate’s attitudes toward guns with issues such as abortion and the environment to produce a composite assessment of cultural compatibility. And at a time when economic concerns have been muted, that sense of cultural comfort has proved enormously powerful in deciding elections.

The real message of the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races is that the country is continuing to sort out along that cultural axis, with gun issues a leading indicator of the division. Over the last decade, virtually every Republican who has won a governorship in Gore’s blue states has supported gun control--from California’s Pete Wilson to New York’s George Pataki. Conversely, the new wave of Democratic governors in the red-state South take positions on gun control that range between cool to openly hostile. “In many cases,” said James J. Baker, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, “it’s more geographical than party at this point.”

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for candidates to successfully buck the dominant attitude toward guns in their region. Opposition to gun control helped doom Republican Dan Lungren in the 1998 California governor’s race--and support for it helped sink Democrat Mary Sue Terry in the Virginia gubernatorial race a year earlier.

All of this explains why Warner is reaching out to gun owners in Virginia and Schundler to gun critics in New Jersey. A big turnout of gun owners, and anti-abortion activists, helped drive the upset GOP primary victory by Schundler, a conservative wunderkind who’s been mayor of Jersey City, over moderate Bob Franks. But in a general election, New Jersey is a state where praising guns can be as dangerous as pointing them.

In one survey this summer, New Jersey voters, by 3 to 1 , said it was more important to control gun ownership than to protect gun rights. Not surprisingly, in his first ad, Democratic nominee James E. McGreevey pounced on Schundler’s primary-campaign suggestions that he would sign a concealed carry law (as well as on Schundler’s opposition to abortion). The latest polls give McGreevey nearly a 20-point lead in the race, and unless Schundler’s change of heart on concealed weapons changes the dynamic, he’ll stand next to Lungren as proof that there’s no quicker way to sink in the big coastal states than to tilt right on guns and abortion.

Warner, a former Democratic state party chairman narrowly leading his race, shows the pull toward the NRA in a red state. Warner has stressed his resistance to new gun laws; at one point, his campaign manager even hinted he’d consider repealing the state’s law limiting handgun purchases to one a month. But pressure from his base forced Warner to quickly renounce that idea, and also to promise he’d sign some new restrictions on concealed-carry permit holders. Warner’s uncertainty has provided Mark L. Earley, his Republican rival, an opening to widen the distinctions again with radio ads in rural parts of the state promising to “defend the 2nd Amendment rights of hunters.”

Earley’s difficulty in drawing a bright line on guns has become a surprisingly common problem. Because attitudes toward guns follow such a clear geographic pattern, fewer state-level races can even generate gun arguments anymore: the contending candidates so often either both support gun control (in the blue states) or oppose it (in the red). Gun control advocates could find hardly any House races to jump into last year because so few featured disagreements about guns.

Yet this regional convergence is feeding a national divergence. Politicians in the blue and red states are converging around views on guns that utterly diverge from each other. That’s making it impossible to reach consensus at the national level. By moving toward the opposite party, Schundler and Warner are looking to narrow the differences over guns with their local rivals. But in the process, they’re demonstrating why the distance on guns is widening between their two states--and all the blue and red battlegrounds they represent.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at:

https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.