String of gun deaths reshapes Democratic primary

The back-to-back mass shootings in Texas and Ohio over the weekend shook up the Democratic presidential primary, elevating the profile of lower-tier candidates, reorienting the focus of the contest and fusing the divisive issues of immigration, racism and gun control for the first time on the campaign trail.

The tragedies have the potential to change the dynamics in the broader campaign for the White House, as President Donald Trump and his supporters reeled from comparisons of their rhetoric about immigrants with that of a manifesto suspected of being from the shooter in El Paso, a border city with a mostly Latino population.

The immediate aftershocks of the shootings were felt by the three candidates whose home states were affected: Tim Ryan in Ohio, and Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro in Texas. Struggling in the polls and unable to command significant coverage, all found themselves over the weekend the subject of intense media interest as they abandoned the campaign trail, canceled events and headed home amid a crush of national and local interest.

The shootings also heightened the stakes for an upcoming gun violence forum for the Democratic candidates, all of whom blanketed television, radio and social media over the weekend to highlight their gun control plans, to call on the Republican-led Senate to come back from summer break to pass gun safety legislation, and to attack President Trump’s rhetoric on immigration.

O’Rourke, the former congressman from El Paso who is polling nationally at about 3 percent, suddenly found himself in the spotlight and the focus of five national TV interviews on Sunday, telling CNN from his hometown that be believed Trump is a white nationalist.

“The things that he has said, both as a candidate and then as the president of the United States — this cannot be open for debate,” O’Rourke said, prompting the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, to reply on Twitter that “a tragedy like this is not an opportunity to reboot your failing presidential campaign.”

Ryan, a congressman from Youngstown, Ohio, made similar remarks in interviews with POLITICO and CNN.

“White nationalists believe Trump’s a white nationalist,” Ryan said, pointing out that the president held a rally in Florida’s Panhandle in May during which someone from the audience yelled “shoot them!” when the president asked how to stop the flood of illegal immigrants. Trump didn’t issue a rebuke, and instead joked that “that’s only in the Panhandle [where] you can get away with that statement.” The crowd laughed.

Just last month, in another crowd controversy, Trump did little to stop a “send her back” chant aimed at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali refugee, who was the subject of criticism from Trump that a majority of Americans say are racist.

Immediately after the violence in El Paso on Saturday, activist groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens squarely placed blame on Trump for what it said was “deliberately feeding into the anti-immigrant frenzy and white supremacist violence.”

The candidates are expected to raise the issue of gun violence and immigration Monday at a San Diego conference hosted by the Latino outreach group UnidosUS. Before the conference, immigration and healthcare were going to dominate the discussion. But the shooting and the anti-Hispanic racism of the El Paso shooter made it impossible to ignore.

The campaigns’ presence at the UnidosUS conference speaks to the party’s intense focus on Latino voters, from whom Democrats need a big turnout in states like Arizona and Florida — which also has a proposed assault weapons ban that voters might consider in 2020 — in the hopes of flipping them from red to blue next year. Latinos are also set to play a large role early in the Democratic race in Nevada — which has the third-in-the-nation primary and where the candidates just campaigned over the weekend — and in California, which moved up its massive primary by three months, to March 3.

The issue of gun violence in the primary and beyond isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, in great part because mass shootings happen with such frequency in the U.S. In just the span of a week, three separate gunmen — all of them white — went on unrelated rampages that left a total of 33 people dead and dozens more wounded in Dayton, Ohio, on Sunday, El Paso on Saturday and Gilroy, Calif., on the Sunday before.

Before the killings in those three cities, the Democratic candidates had already made gun control a top issue on the campaign trail. Democratic voters rank it as one of their most important issues, and gun control groups believe polls — including a recent survey from the gun control group Giffords — that showed it was a winning issue in the 2018 elections and would be again in 2020.

“This is a sea change in American politics, the fact that every single candidate is competing to be the best on this issue,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the advocacy group Moms Demand Action. “Gun safety used to be a third rail of American politics for so long, and we’ve really retired that myth.”

Watts also pointed out that the National Rifle Association is in turmoil, giving gun control advocates another possible advantage this election season.

While praising the Democratic candidates across the board, Watts earlier this year criticized Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont for failing to mention guns in his campaign-launch video and said on Twitter that he had “historically sided with lobbyists” — an issue that haunted Sanders on the presidential campaign trail in 2016 and could surface again.

Both Sanders and Ryan had voted for 2005 legislation shielding gunmakers from lawsuits. Both campaigns say their candidates have evolved on the issue, with Ryan’s specifically pointing to the 2011 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., which killed 26 people, including 20 young children.

After Sandy Hook, Watts founded her group, joined with Everytown for Gun Safety and worked with Giffords to increase grassroots outreach and lobbying for gun control. The 2018 killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., led to a groundbreaking political shift in Florida, where a Republican-led legislature and the Republican governor enacted gun control legislation for the first time.

The group March for Our Lives was born out of the Parkland massacre, and in an announcement with Giffords just two days before the El Paso gunman opened fire, the two announced that they would co-host the Democratic candidates at a gun violence forum in Las Vegas on Oct. 2 — a day after the two-year anniversary of the massacre of 58 people and the wounding of 422 others by a lone gunman, the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S.

“This weekend has changed the stakes,” said Robin Lloyd, Giffords’ managing director. “We can rattle off the statistics about the gun violence problem we have in this country. But when things like this happen, it really amplifies it in a way that it becomes impossible to ignore for the average American voter.”

The candidates couldn’t avoid the shocking news of the killing in El Paso on Saturday, which happened just as they convened at a union conference in Las Vegas.

Adjusting his speech with the news, Pete Buttigieg implored the nation to “confront white nationalist violence” and to enact “gun safety policies that most Americans think we ought to do.” For Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., the focus on gun violence and white supremacy comes as his campaign reels from depressed African American support after the shooting death of a black man in his home city by a white police officer.

Later Saturday in Nevada, former Vice President Joe Biden reminded a crowd at one of his events that he carried the 1994 crime bill, which included the now-expired assault weapons ban.

“The fact is, we can beat the NRA, we can beat the gun manufacturers. I did it,” Biden said. “We’ve beat them before, we can do that again, and it’s my intention to do just that.”

In an email to supporters on Sunday, Biden’s campaign linked the El Paso shooting to white supremacism and violence: “We continue to bear witness to acts of terror carried out with a common thread: hatred of ‘the other.’ We saw it in Charlottesville two years ago, at synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, and now in El Paso.”

Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California, the only black candidates in the primary, also accused the president of inciting hate.

While local police say the El Paso shooter had expressed anti-Hispanic rhetoric to them, there’s no suspected racial motive behind the rampage of the Dayton shooter, who reportedly shot and killed his sister along with seven others and wounded 27 before he was killed.

Gun rights advocates complained on social media that the gender and race of mass shooters were discussed only if they were white men and not black or transgender. Conservative websites and pundits focused on how the Dayton gunman was a Democrat or how the El Paso shooter believed in universal healthcare and universal basic income, progressive ideas.

While Democrats were moving to draw distinctions on gun policies, they were also advancing the issue as a collective against Trump. After Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tweeted to O’Rourke that “my staff and I are mourning with you for your friends and neighbors,” he responded: “Thank you, Senator Warren. Grateful for your kind words and all of the work you’re doing to end this epidemic.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misidentified Robin Lloyd, Giffords’ managing director.