Nationwide A March For Our Lives

[Angrboda]

Are you sure?

The NRA Quadrupled Its Digital Ad Budget After Parkland Killings, Flooding Facebook and YouTube

Is 34k a day an insurmountable amount of money? 6.5 billion dollars was spent on the 2016 elections. NRA was 50 million. Can they really control the entire government with less than 1% of donations?

Do you think Facebook ad buys is too much to be countered by 24 hour coverage on MSNBC and CNN and Print and Huffpost and etc...?

You have millions of people marching, major networks favorably reporting, plenty of social media support, but it's all for naught over 34k a day? Shouldn't it be harder to defeat the gun control crowd than buying youtube ads?

There's a disconnect, right? I say this as a person who doesn't care what happens in the gun control debate.

In North Carolina, the NRA spent $6.2 million on the incumbent Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the most it has ever invested in a down-ballot race. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

The National Rifle Association took a historic gamble in 2016, and it paid off in a huge way.

The gun rights group placed multimillion-dollar bets on Donald Trump and six Republican Senate candidates locked in highly competitive races. It poured $50.2 million, or 96 percent of its total outside spending, into these races, and lost only one — an open seat in Nevada, vacated by the Democratic Minority Leader, Harry Reid. That race cost the NRA roughly $2.5 million.

The NRA’s big night came as a tidal wave of white voters without college degrees voted overwhelmingly for Trump, leading to one of the biggest election-night upsets in memory. The reasons why this demographic turned out in such high numbers for the GOP nominee will be parsed for years, and it is not at all clear how much of a factor his embrace of the NRA’s hardline position on gun rights played into the outcome.

But the NRA’s investment, which was more than any other outside group, paid for a slew of ads that directly targeted the same voters who propelled Trump to victory. The organization’s radio and television spots sought to cast Hillary Clinton and the Democratic rivals of its preferred Senate candidates as an existential threat to the Second Amendment, and national security. It is a message that resonates in the gun belt, a swath of primarily Southern and Midwestern states where Trump achieved some of his most consequential victories.

The NRA Placed Big Bets on the 2016 Election, and Won Almost All of Them