Post Election Update

The elections are over. 

No doubt the MCRGO Board of Directors will put out an article claiming that this has been a successful election. They are already touting the number of endorsed candidates who were elected or re-elected and telling the members how great this was. 

And while it was great that many pro-gunners got elected or re-elected, its false for the MCRGO BOD to claim any part of the victory.  

Most legislative districts in the state are solidly Republican or Democrat. Everyone knows this and its a given that the preferred candidate of the party which holds a majority in any district will win, absent unusual circumstances. But now we have the MCRGO BOD claiming that because people like Sen. Valde Garcia won re-election, MCRGO deserves a kudo. Wake up. Sen. Garcia would have won without any help from MCRGO, and in fact he did, because they gave him none. Most people who ran for election or re-election weren't even running in close races because of the district make-up. Anyone could have picked the winners of 80% of the state races well before the election just by looking at the district make-up. And that's what MCRGO did when they endorsed many people they knew were going to win. And now they're using those victories to proclaim that MCRGO was successful this election. And that claim should not go unchallenged by the membership.  

The measure of the race is determined by looking at that handful of districts that could go either Republican or Democrat every year. There are less than two dozen in the state even if you count both Senate and House districts. We need to look at those and see how the pro-gun candidates fared and we also need to see what MCRGO actually did to help any of the ones who won. When we do this, we get a different picture than the Board of Directors is painting. 

The number of pro-gunners who went to defeat this election has already been discussed. Paul DeWeese, Jonathan Grant, Eileen DeHart, Mike Green, Steve Vear, Mickey Mortimer, Bob Gosselin, Don Vickers, Tom Kern and others could probably have won had they gotten the help they requested. And each of these legislators or candidates DID request help from MCRGO. And none of them got it. Yes, the Board will claim that they endorsed these people, but endorsements alone aren't worth much and MCRGO has always gone out and done things in the past to help worthy candidates. MCRGO members have traditionally been organized into volunteer teams to help candidates in their districts and offices, they've been solicited to put yard signs up and asked to come in and work phone banks. Fundraisers and public meetings have been put on for the best candidates, and postcards have been sent out to the members in districts with close races. 

This year, for the first time in MCRGO history, none of these things happened. The organization as a whole literally sat out the election because the BOD didn't go out and do any of these things that wave always done before. And the candidates listed above mostly veteran legislators who put their jobs on the line for gun owners expecting this sort of help did not get it no matter how many times they asked. 

This is shameful and this year needs to go down in MCRGO history as our worst election year ever. We have literally twice as many members as we had two years ago and we didn't do a tenth as much grassroots campaigning. And we let some of our best friends in the legislature go to their legislative career deaths without lifting a finger to help them. 

The BOD needs to account for this unpardonable inaction and its clear that much of it traces right back to their decision to gut MCRGO internally this past summer by removing the Founder and Executive Director Ross Dykman and either firing or driving off many of the veteran chapter chairs and activists that did so much to build MCRGO. They did this suddenly and without explanation and they did it right before the primary election. Then they brought Chuck Perricone in as a replacement or not as a replacement for Dykman, depending on who you ask, and he immediately started handing out endorsements to his old buddies from his legislative days even if his pals had anti-gun voting records. 

So now we have a new direction, to use Perricones own words. Wave apparently given up the grassroots activism that made this group so successful and traded it for one that does nothing while paying Perricone an awful lot of money. If that's the direction this BOD wants to go, they need to at least be open and honest about it. That means full disclosure of what's going on and it means a frank assessment of the elections and acceptance of some responsibility for the organizations non-performance.