What would it take to turn Texas, a Republican stronghold, into a blue state? According to data from com. SurveyMonkeyJust remove all the gun owners from the Lone Star State, and you’ll go to Hillary Clinton in 2016. You can do the same thing in liberal California. Remove all the unarmed owners and the state would have voted for Donald Trump.
That’s how divisive the issue of gun control is in American politics.
SurveyMonkey found that no other demographic group — neither race, religion, nor gender — is quite so divided among voters. In the 2016 elections, 47 percent Trump supporters said gun control was an important enough issue to influence their vote. This compares to only 27 percent of voters who supported Hillary Clinton.
But what does this division mean? How does it impact gun control policy, and how might this issue change in light of recent mass shootings like Las Vegas, Orlando, and Newtown? To discuss the data, PBS NewsHour hosted a Twitter conversation at 1 p.m. EST on Thursday with data journalist Dante Cheney (@dtchiniDon Haider Markel, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas@dhmarkel), and Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump (@pbump).
Check the conversation summary –