The wingnut media machine can only persuade about 17%, by @DavidOAtkins

The wingnut media machine can only persuade about 17%

by David Atkins

Public Policy Polling took a look at the latest numbers on gun background checks, and it appears that support for them has fallen from around 90% to around 73%:

The finding, shared in advance with TPM, was that 73 percent of registered American voters support “requiring background checks for all gun sales, including gun shows and the internet,” while 21 percent oppose it.

“The 90 percent support we were seeing for background checks earlier in the year isn’t there anymore,” PPP director Tom Jensen told TPM by email.

The party-line split for background checks was 87-8 percent among Democrats, 63-30 among Republicans and 62-31 among independents.

“With the NRA and most Republican Senators opposing Manchin/Toomey that opposition has trickled down to some conservative voters as well,” Jensen said. “But we continue to see more than 70 percent support overall and 60 percent support from Republicans, and that’s still pretty remarkable for any controversial issue in this political climate.”

That's actually not a bad thing. If after major partisan and public litigation of an issue, the dial on such a universally supported issue only drops by a mere 17%, it shows that the power of the wingnut outrage machine to manufacture opinions out of whole cloth is not actually all that great.

Neither the NRA nor Fox News are as powerful as many politicians give them credit for. The biggest problems is money in politics, and a system of government (especially the filibuster) that prevents passage of commonsense laws. As far as media goes, the suffocating, plutocrat-friendly conventional wisdom in the more traditional press is a bigger problem than Fox News.

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