Rep. Chris Jacobs (R) announced Friday that he is withdrawing from his reelection bid after his recent comments in favor of gun reform made him a pariah to his party.
Such courage.
The cult can brook no apostates.
If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.
I ain’t buying it. June 3rd is ridiculously late for a viable primary challenger to start a campaign. I’ll bet his post-redistricting polling numbers are shit.
He added that he will serve out the rest of his current term representing the 27th district; he would have run in the 23rd after redistricting.
I took the liberty of checking Wiki and NY-23 and it’s 52.44% rural, 47.56% urban. In the '20 election, Rump took the area decidedly. Jacobs probably saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to bail while he could.
So, he cannot say “I fought the good fight?”
So since he’s bailing he can talk like a sane person about gun control, knowing he’ll be an outcast, an infidel, and taking a certain pleasure in the freedom to taste the forbidden fruit. This is a very weird country lately.
Previous pvi for the 23rd was R+9.
He is saying, in effect, “No mas.”
That means he was up against a Trumper.
Man tossed out of the Party of No for saying maybe.
But he can hook up with Madcaw to found the involuntary one-termer club.
Qui Bono? What can he do with his campaign funds?
He was unopposed in the primary until this went down. But I’m guessing the money spigot turned off, and if he quits now he still has a campaign fund unspent.
I had just read the article.
…
His decision to go against his party on gun control drew an immediate and vitriolic response: Local gun rights groups posted his office and cellphone numbers on the internet, and local party leaders began pulling their support, one by one.
The episode, which played out as President Biden pleaded with lawmakers in Washington to pass a raft of new laws to address gun violence, may be a portent for proponents of gun control, who had welcomed Mr. Jacobs’s evolution on the issue as a sign that the nation’s latest mass tragedies might break a decades-old logjam in Washington.
It also serves as a crisp encapsulation of just how little deviation on gun policy Republican Party officials and activists are willing to tolerate from their lawmakers, despite broad support for gun safety measures by Americans.
Just last week, Mr. Jacobs, who is the scion of one of Buffalo’s richest families and was endorsed by the National Rifle Association in 2020, had been an easy favorite to win re-election, even after a court-appointed mapmaker redrew his Western New York district to include some of the state’s reddest rural counties, areas he does not currently represent.
Breath-taking Stalinist GOP response to Jacobs. How dare he display evidence of humanity.
He also said this:
Citing the thousands of gun permits he had issued as Erie County clerk, Mr. Jacobs stressed that he was a supporter of the Second Amendment and wanted to avoid a brutal intraparty fight that would have been inevitable had he stayed in the race.
But he warned Republicans that their “absolute position on this” would hurt the party in the long run.
“Look, if you’re not going to take a stand on something like this, I don’t know what you’re going to take a stand on,” Mr. Jacobs added.
The power of the gun lobby has got to be cut off at the knees.