As I blogged Monday night, MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews gave Virginia Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe a platform to urge liberal viewers at home who live in the Old Dominion to vote pro-gun control by voting for Democrats the following day. Of course, that didn't pan out like either hoped. Republicans retained control of the both houses of the state legislature, while Democrats had hoped to flip the Senate over to their control.
Well, today Robert McCartney of the Washington Post devoted his Metro-section front-pager "Gun issue may have stoked GOP turnout" to exploring how liberal gun-control advocates flooding the airwaves with advertising may have energized pro-gun rights GOP voters, ensuring a GOP hold on the upper chamber:
When Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and his fellow Democrats study what went wrong for them in Tuesday’s crucial legislative elections, one possible mistake stands out: Their aggressive advocacy of gun control in a pivotal Senate race in the Richmond area may have backfired by producing a pro-Republican backlash.
In a race that proved decisive in enabling Republicans to retain control of the Senate, Republican Glen H. Sturtevant won the 10th District seat after benefiting from a huge turnout in conservative Powhatan County, which analysts attributed in part to the gun issue.
Sturtevant beat Democrat Daniel A. Gecker after GOP supporters ran ads blasting Gecker for trying to win the seat with $700,000 of outside help from pro-gun-control TV advertisements paid for by a group linked to former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.
McAuliffe had backed Gecker as far back as the Democratic primary and has broken with typical past Democratic practice in Virginia by openly opposing the National Rifle Association. That approach sparked some second-guessing in the wake of Gecker’s loss.
“The gun thing — I would have done it differently,” Sen. J. Chapman “Chap” Petersen (D-Fairfax) said. “It’s speculation at this point, but I feel the Gecker seat was one we thought we were going to win. . . . [The gun issue] was one variable that was thrown in at the last minute.”
A Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial said Gecker “made a massive mistake” by accepting the ads from Bloomberg. “A campaign focused on guns redounded to Gecker’s despair,” it said.
Despite the voters' rebuke of McAuliffe and the Democrats and evidence pointing to the gun-control issue backfiring for them, MSNBC host Chris Matthews failed to address the issue on tonight's program.
Yesterday, you may recall, I noted how Matthews similarly failed to explore how President Obama has been political poison for state and local Democratic officeholders during his tenure in the Oval Office.
