NRA Goes on Downgrade Spree in the Wake of GOP Defections [View all]

[JHan]

The NRA doesn’t want its “enemies” to see its candidate ratings in one place. We scraped the data, and found a surge in Republicans docked for breaking ranks.

"Every election season, the NRA assigns letter grades to thousands of candidates in state and federal races nationwide. This grading system has become a notorious indicator of a politician’s fealty — or opposition — to the influential group. The grades can make or break campaigns.

Earlier this month, the NRA published its grades for the upcoming midterms, but they’re not easy to access: The NRA website requires users to provide a street address before returning the names and grades of every candidate in the corresponding district. It’s not possible to search by a candidate’s name, or to look up every candidate in a state. In order to see every House and Senate candidate, you’d have to plug in a full street address for each of the country’s 435 congressional districts. So that’s what we did.

We’re releasing an archive of the NRA grades for every House and Senate candidate, as well as candidates for statewide races like governor and attorney general. (Although the NRA also grades candidates for state legislative bodies, we haven’t scraped those.)

Of the 15 downgraded Republicans, more than half were docked two full grades or more. In contrast, the NRA downgraded just six Republicans in 2016, and only one of those involved a swing of more than one letter grade. The 2014 and 2012 election cycles saw eight and seven GOP candidates downgraded, respectively — only three of whom involved swings of more than one grade.

The spike in downgrades is partly due to a revolt of sorts among Florida politicians in the wake of the Parkland school shooting earlier this year. Governor Rick Scott, whose intimate association with the NRA had earned him an A and a speaking slot at the group’s 2017 leadership forum, was dropped to a C this year for signing a bill that raised the minimum age for purchasing a long gun to 21.

Brian Mast, a Republican congressman and Afghanistan war veteran from Palm Beach who was elected in 2016 with the help of an A rating — and $30,000 in campaign support — from the NRA, proposed banning AR-15 rifles and universal background checks after Parkland. He was rewarded with an F rating, and marked as a “true enemy of gun owners’ rights.” His fellow Florida Republican, Representative Carlos Curbelo of Miami, was also downgraded to an F from a B+ for endorsing a slew of gun control measures after Parkland. Curbelo has taken $7,450 from the NRA since 2014. (Mast, Curbelo, and Scott did not respond to requests for comment.)

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As in each of the past four general elections, the vast majority of Republican candidates — about 93 percent — received grades of A- or higher. But the share receiving an F has begun to grow, from virtually none in 2012 to 2.2 percent this year."



Interesting read. The NRA is losing ground.