🚨 An update on Ukraine: “The European Commission on Friday issued an opinion recommending that Ukraine should be granted candidate status for European Union membership — a first step that will add significant momentum to the country’s campaign to join the bloc,” our colleagues Amy Cheng, Adela Suliman, Jaclyn Peiser and Emily Rauhala write.
A Republican pollster’s advice on how to talk about the gun bill
Seven questions for … Neil Newhouse: In the Senate Republican lunch on Tuesday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) cited recent polling conducted for a nonprofit run by a former Cornyn aide to make the case for the gun package he’s currently negotiating. We chatted with Neil Newhouse, one of the Republican pollsters who conducted the survey, about how voters feel about guns, why some popular gun policies don’t have more Republican support and his advice for how Republicans should talk about the bill.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
The Early: You asked voters in gun-owning households whether they would support legislation that “makes background checks mandatory for all gun purchases, with the exception of between family members, allows gun dealers more time to complete background checks for those people under 21 trying to buy a gun, and increases funding for school resource officers and mental health counselors.” Eighty-four percent of respondents said they backed such a proposal, while 13 percent opposed it. Did those results surprise you?
Newhouse: Yeah, they did. We were contracted by [the conservative nonprofit] Common Sense Leadership Fund. There’s a lot of noise on this issue. We did this project to try to cut through what people really thought about guns — and specifically gun owners. We went into this with really no agenda. We simply wanted to test different alternatives, and specifically try to test what was coming out of the Senate negotiations.
These results were pretty surprising. I’m a campaign guy. And in campaigns, [if] you have a 60, 65 percent issue — that’s kind of like the gold standard in political campaigns. It’s a pretty good issue to use. And we found that most if not all the policies we tested ended up in the 70s and 80s — and that, again, is with gun owners. It’s clear from the data that Republican primary voters, at the very least, are not going to punish Republican members for voting for this.
The Early: A Fox News poll released on Wednesday found that 77 percent of gun owners favored letting “police to temporarily take guns away from people who have been shown to be a danger to themselves or others.” You’ve seen a backlash from some Republican senators against including red flag laws in this legislation. Does that surprise you at all given the public support for them?
Newhouse: Legislators who are most attuned to this issue on the pro-gun side I think take a lot of this polling with a grain of salt. They’re listening to their constituents in their home states rather than national surveys — I think that’s probably the case. They are generally reluctant to make significant changes in gun safety legislation. They’re concerned about their base, they’re concerned about how voters back home feel about it. I’ve got to respect where they are in terms of being in tune with their own voters in their own states.
The Early: The Fox poll found that an even higher number of gun owners — 81 percent — support “raising the minimum legal age to buy assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons to 21.” Some Senate Republicans have said they support such a proposal, but it’s not included in the bill being negotiated now. Did you poll support for such a proposal?
Newhouse: Yeah, we did. The numbers were reflective of where Fox showed it.
The Early: A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll found 69 percent of gun owners said they would definitely vote for a congressional candidate who wanted “to require background checks for gun purchases at gun shows or other private sales”; 61 percent said they would definitely vote for a candidate who supported a national red flag law. But the same poll found only 37 percent would vote for a candidate who wanted “stricter gun control laws.” How much do the results depend on how you phrase the question?
Newhouse: How you word the question, how you talk about gun safety legislation, can impact the results of a survey. There’s no question about it. If you’re talking about gun control — it’s a four-letter word for gun owners across the country. Gun control means, for many gun owners, that the government is gonna take my guns away from me. Gun safety is different.
The Early: The Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini tweeted the day after the Uvalde shooting that while polls show bipartisan majorities support some gun measures, these policies “usually get quickly defined as trojan horses for broader gun control. These provisions usually underperform their polling in state ballot referenda.” Do you think that’s right?
Newhouse: Yeah, I do. They’re portrayed as the camel’s nose under the tent. Gun reform becomes the first step toward gun control.
The Early: How can Republican lawmakers who support this package convince voters that it doesn’t constitute stricter gun control laws?
Newhouse: It’s important how you talk about the issue for the Republicans. It’s important to talk about the issue as gun safety — we’re doing what we can to keep semiautomatic weapons out of the hands of 18-year-olds, expanding background checks and mental health checks, etc. The data we have indicates [that] by 49 to 13, Republican primary voters said they’d be more likely rather than less likely to vote for a candidate who supported these things.
The Early: As the New York Times’ Nate Cohn has pointed out, ballot referendums on background checks in Washington state in 2014 and in California, Maine and Nevada in 2016 dramatically underperformed the level of support you would expect based on national polling. The one in Maine failed. Do you think polls exaggerate support?
Newhouse: No, I don’t. Doing a poll on attitudes toward gun reform issues is one thing. Running a campaign where there’s messaging back and forth and a lot of money spent is a different matter altogether. An initial poll on an issue like this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna win or lose the ballot box.
The final sticking point on gun talks
The bipartisan negotiators had hoped to have legislative text on gun reform by Thursday. But senators left Washington on Thursday with key elements still in dispute on a delicate bipartisan deal that could significantly expand federal gun laws for the first time in three decades, Mike DeBonis and Leigh Ann write.
The issue that could derail negotiations is the so-called “boyfriend loophole.” Current law prevents the purchase of a gun if a person has been convicted of domestic violence, but it applies to couples with legal ties, such as spouses or having a child together.
Negotiators said they would work through the evening, but one source familiar with negotiations said Republicans are willing to play hardball as they push to wrap up negotiations.
“Either the Democrats accept what the Republicans are asking for on boyfriend loophole or it will be dropped entirely,” the source said.
But Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) were more optimistic as they left the Capitol Thursday evening. “It comes with a lot of emotions, it comes with political risk to both sides,” Murphy said. “But we’re close enough that we should be able to get there.”
Mike and Leigh Ann on the hang up:
- Republicans are wary of writing too general a definition out of concern that it could be used broadly to deny people their constitutional right to bear arms. “This has got to be something other than, you know, one date,” Cornyn said.
- GOP negotiators also have pressed for a court process that would allow people who have been denied a firearm under the domestic violence provision to petition a judge to restore their right to own a gun. But Democrats are resisting attempts to water down the language, which has been a priority of gun-control and women’s advocates for years.
- “Everyone who’s convicted of a crime has an ability to get that expunged or set aside in state court,” Murphy said. “But you know, I just — I’m of the view that if you beat the hell out of your dating partner, and you end up getting convicted for that crime, there should be consequences.”
Tillis said they are looking at how some states define dating partners. Of the 31 states that prohibit convicted domestic abusers from having guns, 19 include dating partners, according to Everytown for Gun Safety.
The “boyfriend loophole” is an issue that has long been a priority for Democrats in Congress. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) first introduced a bill on the issue in 2013. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who is one of the four main negotiators, prioritized the measure in these negotiations.
Judge Michael Luttig on Jan. 6: Former federal appellate court judge J. Michael Luttig’s prepared statement before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was a “clear-and-present-danger document, describing the fraught state of American democracy, the war that rages internally and the role Trump and his followers have played to bring us to this moment,” our colleague Dan Balz writes. “Jan. 6, Luttig said, was a war within a broader war over the future of the country.”
- “If Americans fail to learn the lessons that are there to be learned from the attacks of Jan. 6, he warned, ‘we will consign ourselves to another Jan. 6 in the not-too-distant future, and another after that, and another after that.’”
More from our colleagues:
- Jan. 6 committee reveals new details about Pence’s terrifying day. By Rosalind S. Helderman and Josh Dawsey.
- Ginni Thomas’s emails with Trump lawyer add to tumult at Supreme Court. By Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow.
Will markets keep falling? The S&P 500 dropped more than 3 percent on Thursday following the Federal Reserve’s move this week to raise interest rates more aggressively than it has in nearly three decades. The index is down 23 percent since the start of the years, raising fears of a recession ahead of the midterms.
President Biden told the Associated Press in an interview on Thursday that a recession is “not inevitable,” and the White House is continuing to tout Biden’s economic record. National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, Domestic Policy Adviser Susan Rice, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh and White House senior advisers Mitch Landrieu and Gene Sperling will hold an event today rolling out a new initiative to train diverse candidates for jobs in fields such as battery manufacturing and building electric vehicle charging stations.
A day in the life: Next week marks Juneteenth’s second year as a federal holiday. Here are four meaningful ways to observe, per our colleague Janay Kingsberry.
- Visit a local or national museum. Tobi toured the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit at the National Gallery of Art last month and loved it. Be sure to check out “Amnesia” before the exhibition ends on July 17.
- Explore selected readings and documentaries.
- Attend a celebration or festival.
- Get involved in the community.
Weekend reeeads 🐣 🌴
Thanks for reading. You can also follow us on Twitter: @theodoricmeyer and @LACaldwellDC.