Mobilizing apathetic hunters and gun owners could be key to conservative victories in November
More than 10 million hunters and gun owners are not registered to vote in America, according to a new grassroots voter-registration group firing warning shots at the GOP.
Vote4America data show that if Republicans don’t address political apathy among their gun-owning base in key swing states, they’ll have far fewer voters in their arsenal to score victories this November.
A breakdown of the data reveals a major shortfall in voter registration among gun owners in the states that will decide the 2024 election: 515,277 in Pennsylvania and around 370,000 each in Michigan and North Carolina. Georgia, Wisconsin, Missouri and Virginia all have more than half a million hunters and gun owners unregistered, and Arizona has the smallest shortfall at 133,000.
Audiences have not always responded positively to Vote4America’s voter-registration efforts. Adviser to the group Baker Leavitt told District of Conservation podcast host Gabriella Hoffman in a recent appearance that the most common response in its outreach to gun owners is the sentiment “My vote doesn’t count, the system is rigged.”
Despite the pessimism, even marginal wins could pay big dividends come November. “If we could convert 2% of all licensed hunters and get them to vote, GOP would win in a landslide,” Leavitt told Hoffman.
Hoffman noted that “a lot of hunters and gun owners, they’re very animated in social media, they have a lot of opinions, but they don’t go out to vote. They talk a great deal, often about preserving your rights, doing this — hunting — but a lot of people don’t follow through with voting.”
Democratic politicians have leaned on influencers in recent years — and before that Hollywood celebrities — to push liberal messaging to their built-in audiences of loyal followers.
Vote4America is hoping to tap into that strategy on the conservative side by partnering with more niche influencers in the hunting, pro-Second Amendment, first-responder and veteran communities.
Stephen Aaron, another of the group’s advisers, he says when it comes to winning over disengaged gun owners, the mission is clear and simple.
“Our goal is to make sure these people know that voting matters. The issues people worry about — attacks on personal freedoms, our crime problem, skyrocketing inflation — are all impacted by the people we put in office. This is an effort to help voters connect the issues impacting their daily life to decisions made by elected officials so people understand their vote really does matter and they engage. It’s time to make America feel like home again.”
That’s why the No. 1 goal of Vote4America’s outreach is simple: register to vote.
Although traditional Second Amendment advocacy groups such as the National Rifle Association do not typically publish membership numbers, the NRA’s newly elected president. former Rep. Bob Barr, cited more than “four million dues-paying members” in a recent Daily Caller op-ed.
That number is a far cry from the 14.4 million hunters nationwide reported in a 2023 Delta Waterfowl report.
This is where groups like Vote4America and other collaborators such as Women for Gun Rights see a way to make a difference. Competitive shooting champion and Women for Gun Rights founder Dianna Muller says she’s noticed that “specifically, hunters, for whatever reason, are totally apathetic. They are not only apathetic but almost averse to having a voice in the conversation.”
Asked why she believes that’s the case, Muller told The Post: “It’s become such a politically charged issue, like religion and politics, you don’t talk about it at the dinner table. You can throw guns in there, too. Guns and religion are taboo.”
