There are still a few congressional races to be decided with absentee and provisional votes being counted, but the broader results are in and it's an opportunity to take stock of how animal advocates fared on the ballot. And one of the markers of our progress is to compare how our endorsed candidates did with those of other political adversaries. Even though the election results from November 2010 were starkly different for the two major political parties compared with the results from two years earlier, the Humane Society Legislative Fund again had the advantage over one of our main political adversaries—the National Rifle Association.
The most direct head-to-head contest was an issue election, not a candidate race: The NRA and its allies in the Arizona legislature placed a constitutional amendment on the ballot, Proposition 109, which would have made hunting a constitutional right and the preferred method of wildlife management in the state. Other states have passed right-to-hunt measures which simply affirm the status quo, but the NRA-drafted measure in Arizona would have gone much further. Prop 109 sought to give the legislature “exclusive” authority over wildlife policy issues, weakening the Arizona Game and Fish Commission and replacing scientific wildlife management with partisan politics. And it would have blocked voters from advancing citizen initiatives on these subjects in the future.
This was a top priority for the NRA, which spent more than $200,000 advocating for Prop 109, and enlisted the backing of Gov. Jan Brewer and Sen. John McCain. The group didn’t like the fact that voters in Arizona had used the ballot initiative process to restrict steel-jawed leghold traps and poisons on public lands, to ban cockfighting, and to phase out inhumane factory farming practices. They wanted to insulate inhumane and unsporting hunting practices from the voters, and possibly even overturn the 1994 trapping restrictions, because they knew the politicians in Phoenix would do their bidding. Arizona voters saw through this power grab, and said “no” to the NRA and their special interest agenda. Prop 109 went down in flames by a vote of 43.5 to 56.5 percent.
In federal races, HSLF and NRA each endorsed about 300 candidates for U.S. Congress. While a few races are still undetermined, of those that have been decided, HSLF came out slightly on top. HSLF endorsed 249 federal candidates who won and 47 who lost, for a win rate of 84.1 percent. The NRA backed 244 winners and 59 losers, for a win rate of 80.5 percent. There is some overlap as both groups tend to endorse large numbers of incumbents, and not all the races were competitive, even in a year with a large anti-incumbent wave. But in the seven contested Senate races where HSLF and NRA endorsed opposing candidates, HSLF won four (Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, and Washington) and the NRA three (Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), for an HSLF win rate of 57.1 percent.
In a year when Republicans picked up dozens of seats and took the majority of the House of Representatives, one might think that the political environment was better for the NRA as a whole. The fact that the overall results for HSLF and NRA were close in this unique electoral climate—and that HSLF even came out on top—indicates that the NRA’s political influence is not only overstated, but waning. Some conservative Democrats particularly pander to the NRA in an effort to prove their Second Amendment bona fides, but of the 65 Democrats endorsed by the NRA, 32 of them lost, and most of the winners were in very safe, uncontested districts.
The NRA continues to oppose common-sense policies on inhumane and unsporting practices, such as canned hunts, bear baiting, aerial gunning of wolves, and even poaching. The group puts its loyalists in a political box, and it seems that lawmakers who demonstrate their fealty to the NRA rarely even benefit in the end. This election cycle is one more example of the NRA’s message having limited appeal to core ideologues, while HSLF’s message of protecting animals from cruelty and abuse has a universal reach with mainstream constituencies, including swing voters who will be critical to both parties in tough races.
