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What would it take to turn Texas, a Republican stronghold, into a blue state? According to data from SurveyMonkey, just remove all gun owners from the Lone Star State and it would have gone to Hillary Clinton in 2016. You can do the same thing in liberal California. Remove all non-gun owners and the state would have voted for Donald Trump.
That’s how divisive the issue of gun control is in American politics.
SurveyMonkey found that no other demographic — not race, religion or gender — divided voters so perfectly. In the 2016 election, 47 percent of Trump supporters say gun control was an important enough issue to influence their vote. That’s compared to just 27 percent of voters who supported Hillary Clinton.
But what does this division mean? How does it impact gun control policy, and how might this issue change in light of recent mass shootings like Las Vegas, Orlando, and Newtown? To discuss the data, the PBS NewsHour hosted a Twitter chat 1 pm EDT Thursday with data reporter Dante Chinni (@Dchinni), professor and chair of political science at the University of Kansas Don Haider-Markel (@dhmarkel), and Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump (@pbump).
Check out a summary of the conversation –
