By: José Niño
While America reels from the coronavirus pandemic, a gun control group connected to anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg is targeting young voters.
Due to the pandemic’s disruption, many political campaigns have had to radically retool their strategies and shift their programs online.
Bloomberg and company have taken note and are now planning to spend $1.5 million on virtual organizing programs through their latest venture: Students Demand Action.
Students Demand Action unveiled their plan before CNN, highlighting how they are no longer doing in-person voter registration programs, but are instead now using online intensive tools to focus on 13 battleground states to get youngsters to the polls.
Young voters of Generation Z, the age group born in the late 90s and early 2000s, are expected to make up 10 percent of this year’s electorate, according to findings from the Pew Research Center.
Students Demand Action counts 400 chapters and 200,000 members within its ranks.
The 13 states targeted by the group — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — will be key to determining which party controls the White House and the U.S. Senate after November’s elections.
Students Demand Action is part of a broader network of gun control groups Bloomberg is bankrolling. Other groups in this network are Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Moms Demand Action boasts 6 million members nationwide, and its parent organization, Everytown plans on spending $60 million on federal and state races this year. In Texas, for example, Everytown has already spent $8 million in 2020. Gun controllers smell blood in the water and look to carry momentum from the 2018 “Beto mania” into the current election cycle.
Bloomberg and his anti-gun consortium mean business, and they won’t be deterred during a pandemic. Gun rights organizations will have multi-pronged battles to fend off during the 2020 election cycle and beyond. The main priority for the time being is to make sure that Gun Control Inc. does not get a trifecta at the federal level.
José Niño is a Venezuelan American freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. Sign up for his mailing list here. Contact him via Facebook, Twitter, or email him at [email protected]. Get his e-book, The 10 Myths of Gun Control, here.