Republican Eric Greitens, a candidate for Missouri’s open U.S. Senate seat, shocked viewers with a new online political ad in June 2022 that encouraged his supporters to go “RINO hunting.”
Appearing with a shotgun and a smirk, Greitens leads the hunt for RINOs, shorthand for the derisive “Republicans In Name Only.” Along with armed soldiers, Greitens is storming a house under the cover of a smoke grenade.
“Join the MAGA crew,” Greitens says in the video. “Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”
The ad comes from from a candidate who has repeatedly found himself in controversy, having resigned as Missouri’s governor amid accusations of sexual assault and allegations of improper campaign financing that sparked an 18-month investigation that eventually cleared him of any legal wrongdoing.
The ad continues to circulate on YouTube via various news sources.
Greitens’s call to political arms is hardly new.
In his 2016 gubernatorial ads, Greitens appeared firing a Gatling-style machine gun into the air and using an M4 rifle to create an explosion in a field to demonstrate his resistance to the Obama administration.
What Greitens’ ad represents, in our view, is the evolution of the use of guns in political ads as a coded appeal for white voters.
While they might have been a bit more ambiguous in the past, candidates are increasingly making these appeals appear more militant in their culture war against ideas and politicians they oppose.
We have also examined the ways that racial appeals to white voters have evolved under the GOP’s Southern strategy, the long game that conservatives have played since the 1960s to weaken the Democratic Party in the South by exploiting racial animus.
In some of our latest work, we have examined the ways that guns have been used in campaign ads to represent white identity politics, or what political scientist Ashley Jardina has explained as the way that white racial solidarity and fears of marginalization have manifested in a political movement.
Symbolically, guns in the U.S. have historically been linked to defending the interests of white people.
As a result, the right to bear arms was never imagined by the founders to be an individual liberty held by Indigenous people and people of color.
As illustrated in Richard Slotkin’s book “Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America,” the popular film and literary genre of the Western glamorized white, hypermasculine cowboys and gunslingers “civilizing” the wild frontier to make it safe for white homesteaders.
Drawing from this lore, contemporary gun culture romanticizes the “good guy with a gun” as the patriotic protector of the peace and a bulwark against government overreach.
Contemporary gun laws reflect a historic racial disparity concerning who is authorized and under what circumstances individuals are allowed to use lethal force.
Gun control advocates Everytown for Gun Safety have found that homicides resulting from white shooters killing Black victims are “deemed justifiable five times more frequently than when the shooter is Black and the victim is white.”
Militant white identity politics
Featuring a gun in a political ad has become an easy way to get attention, but our research has found that its meaning has shifted in recent years.
In a 2010 race for Alabama agriculture commissioner, Dale Peterson was featured in an ad holding a gun, wearing a cowboy hat and talking in a deep Southern drawl about the need to challenge the “thugs and criminals” in government.
His style proved entertaining.
In this 2010 political ad, Dale Peterson of Alabama appeared with a rifle on his shoulder. Dale Peterson
Though Peterson placed third in his race, political analysts like Time magazine’s Dan Fletcher raved that he created one of the best campaign ads ever.
She took the use of guns in political ads even further by appearing at a backyard range and firing a machine gun, pistol, AR-15 and a revolver in the same ad.
Though she gained attention for her provocative tactics, Gorman eventually lost to Ben Quayle, son of former Vice President Dan Quayle, in a 10-candidate primary.
Aside from the shock value, guns in ads became a symbol of opposition to the Obama administration.
In this 2014 political ad, Alabama congressional candidate Will Brooke used a high-powered rifle to shoot holes in Obamacare legislation. Will Brooke
For instance, in 2014, U.S. congressional candidate Will Brooke of Alabama ran an online ad in a Republican primary showing him loading a copy of the Obamacare legislation into a truck, driving it into the woods and shooting it with a handgun, rifle and assault rifle.
Not done, the remains of the copy were then thrown into a wood chipper. Although Brooke lost the seven-way primary, his ad received national attention.
The call to defend a conservative way of life got increasingly bizarre – and became a common tactic for GOP candidates.
Well before Greitens, U.S. congressional candidate Kay Daly from North Carolina fired a shotgun at the end of an ad during her unsuccessful campaign in 2015 asking supporters to join her in hunting RINOs.
The ad attacked her primary opponent, incumbent Rep. Renee Elmers, a Republican from North Carolina, for funding Obamacare, “Planned Butcherhood” and protecting rights of “illegal alien child molesters.”
Before he drew the ire of Trump, Brian Kemp climbed the polls in Georgia’s race for governor in 2018 with an ad titled “Jake” in which he interviewed his daughter’s boyfriend.
Holding a shotgun in his lap as he sat in a chair, Kemp portrayed himself as a conservative outsider ready to take a “chainsaw to government regulations” and demanding respect as his family’s patriarch.
The ads of the most recent cycle build on this development of the gun as a symbol of white resistance.
In this 2022 political ad, Marjorie Taylor Greene is wearing dark sunglasses and carrying a high-powered rifle. Marjorie Taylor Greene
Conservative GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, ran an ad for a gun giveaway in 2021 that she made in response to what she claimed was Biden’s arming of Islamic terrorists as well as Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s allegedly sneaking the Green New Deal and other liberal legislation into a budget proposal.
Firing a weapon from a truck, she announced she would “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda.”
The culture wars continue
Surrounding himself with soldiers, Greitens goes further than those before him in this latest iteration of the Republican use of guns.
But his strategy is not out of the ordinary for a party that has increasingly relied on provocative images of violent resistance to speak to white voters.
Despite the violence of Jan. 6, conservatives are still digging their own trenches.
WINNIPEG – The federal New Democrats have kept a longtime stronghold in the Elmwood-Transcona riding in Winnipeg.
The NDP’s Leila Dance won a close battle over Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds, and says the community has spoken in favour of priorities such as health care and the cost of living.
Elmwood-Transcona has elected a New Democrat in every election except one since the riding was formed in 1988.
The seat became open after three-term member of Parliament Daniel Blaikie resigned in March to take a job with the Manitoba government.
A political analyst the NDP is likely relieved to have kept the seat in what has been one of their strongest urban areas.
Christopher Adams, an adjunct professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba, says NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh worked hard to keep the seat in a tight race.
“He made a number of visits to Winnipeg, so if they had lost this riding it would have been disastrous for the NDP,” Adams said.
The strong Conservative showing should put wind in that party’s sails, Adams added, as their percentage of the popular vote in Elmwood-Transcona jumped sharply from the 2021 election.
“Even though the Conservatives lost this (byelection), they should walk away from it feeling pretty good.”
Dance told reporters Monday night she wants to focus on issues such as the cost of living while working in Ottawa.
“We used to be able to buy a cart of groceries for a hundred dollars and now it’s two small bags. That is something that will affect everyone in this riding,” Dance said.
Liberal candidate Ian MacIntyre placed a distant third,
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say the Liberals have “all sorts of reflections” to make after losing a second stronghold in a byelection in Montreal Monday night.
His comments come as the Liberal cabinet gathers for its first regularly scheduled meeting of the fall sitting of Parliament, which began Monday.
Trudeau’s Liberals were hopeful they could retain the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, but those hopes were dashed after the Bloc Québécois won it in an extremely tight three-way race with the NDP.
Louis-Philippe Sauvé, an administrator at the Institute for Research in Contemporary Economics, beat Liberal candidate Laura Palestini by less than 250 votes. The NDP finished about 600 votes back of the winner.
It is the second time in three months that Trudeau’s party lost a stronghold in a byelection. In June, the Conservatives defeated the Liberals narrowly in Toronto-St. Paul’s.
The Liberals won every seat in Toronto and almost every seat on the Island of Montreal in the last election, and losing a seat in both places has laid bare just how low the party has fallen in the polls.
“Obviously, it would have been nicer to be able to win and hold (the Montreal riding), but there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it,” Trudeau told reporters ahead of this morning’s cabinet meeting.
When asked what went wrong for his party, Trudeau responded “I think there’s all sorts of reflections to take on that.”
In French, he would not say if this result puts his leadership in question, instead saying his team has lots of work to do.
Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet will hold a press conference this morning, but has already said the results are significant for his party.
“The victory is historic and all of Quebec will speak with a stronger voice in Ottawa,” Blanchet wrote on X, shortly after the winner was declared.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and his party had hoped to ride to a win in Montreal on the popularity of their candidate, city councillor Craig Sauvé, and use it to further their goal of replacing the Liberals as the chief alternative to the Conservatives.
The NDP did hold on to a seat in Winnipeg in a tight race with the Conservatives, but the results in Elmwood-Transcona Monday were far tighter than in the last several elections. NDP candidate Leila Dance defeated Conservative Colin Reynolds by about 1,200 votes.
Singh called it a “big victory.”
“Our movement is growing — and we’re going to keep working for Canadians and building that movement to stop Conservative cuts before they start,” he said on social media.
“Big corporations have had their governments. It’s the people’s time.”
New Democrats recently pulled out of their political pact with the government in a bid to distance themselves from the Liberals, making the prospects of a snap election far more likely.
Trudeau attempted to calm his caucus at their fall retreat in Nanaimo, B.C, last week, and brought former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney on as an economic adviser in a bid to shore up some credibility with voters.
The latest byelection loss will put more pressure on him as leader, with many polls suggesting voter anger is more directed at Trudeau himself than at Liberal policies.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.
The New Democrats have declared a federal byelection victory in their Winnipeg stronghold riding of Elmwood—Transcona.
The NDP candidate Leila Dance told supporters in a tearful speech that even though the final results weren’t in, she expected she would see them in Ottawa.
With several polls still to be counted, Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds conceded defeat and told his volunteers that they should be proud of what the Conservatives accomplished in the campaign.
Political watchers had a keen eye on the results to see if the Tories could sway traditionally NDP voters on issues related to labour and affordability.
Meanwhile in the byelection race in the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun the NDP, Liberals and Bloc Québécois remained locked in an extremely tight three-way race as the results trickled in slowly.
The Liberal stronghold riding had a record 91 names on the ballot, and the results aren’t expected until the early hours of the morning.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
