One of the country’s top gun-control groups has fallen far short of its 2020 goal to spend $60 million on the election.
Everytown for Gun Safety, a group founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has only spent $26 million of its $60 million goals, and only has $5 million cash-on-hand, the Washington Free Beacon’s Stephen Gutowski reported. Gutowski viewed Federal Election Commission records from the group, revealing it has spent less than half of its intended goal with just a few weeks to go before the election.
“The latest filing for Everytown’s super PAC, which has done nearly all of the group’s political spending in 2020, shows the group had just over $4.6 million remaining in the bank on Oct. 15. It brought in just over $1 million—with over 85 percent coming from large donors—in September. However, even if the group repeated its best 2020 performance when it brought in a $7 million donation from former Microsoft CEO and Clippers owner Steve Ballmer in April, it would still be tens of millions of dollars short of its pledge,” Gutowski reported.
Further, the group isn’t even spending its money on gun-control, instead focusing its advertising on health care or energy issues.
“The downturn in spending coupled with the messaging shift could signal that liberal donors and strategists believe gun control is not a winning 2020 issue—especially with recent record gun sales and a rush of new gun owners across the country,” Gutowski reported.
“I’m not surprised,” Joyce Malcolm, the Patrick Henry professor of constitutional law and the Second Amendment at George Mason University, told the Free Beacon. “With calls to defund the police and a record-setting 11 million applications for purchase of guns in the first six months of this year (40 percent of which are first-time gun purchasers), Americans are more concerned with their safety and that of their families from violent riots and mayhem than gun control.”
In January, Shannon Watts, who founded the Everytown subsidiary Moms Demand Action, said the “gun-safety movement has never been stronger or larger—and we’re going to meet this moment with our most aggressive, well resourced, and grassroots-powered electoral program ever.”
That same month, Everytown said it planned to spend twice what it spent in 2018 and surpass what the National Rifle Association spent – $50 million – to get President Donald Trump elected in 2016.
So far, the group has failed on both promises.
“Instead, Everytown is being outspent by the NRA. The NRA’s PAC—which raised two-thirds of its haul from small donors—brought in more cash than Everytown in September. When combined with the NRA’s super PAC, the gun-rights group had a roughly $3 million cash-on-hand advantage over Everytown as of October,” Gutowski reported.
As The Daily Wire previously reported, there are 820,000 more concealed carry permit holders today than there were in 2019, thanks in large part to women and minorities. A report from John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center showed that women and minorities were the main driver behind the 34% increase in concealed carry permits over the past four years.