Failing grade

Mayor Mike is going to start grading politicians:

“… Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the nonprofit group financed by Bloomberg (I), will unveil a scoring system Tuesday to award lawmakers grades of A through F, much like the National Rifle Association, which has derived much of its power by deploying letter rankings against politicians at election time … “For decades, the NRA has done an admirable job of tracking to minute detail how members of Congress stand on gun bills.  We’ve simply decided to do the same,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns … Glaze outlined a sophisticated algorithm that would weigh lawmakers’ votes on gun bills as well as their public statements and other actions to issue overall letter grades.   “Not every member can vote for every bill, but if not, there are other things they can and should be doing, and we will have our eye out for those as well,” Glaze said … “The appetite for information about where members are is very high,” Glaze said. Of the scorecard, he added: “We don’t intend that this will be a tree falling in the forest.  We intend for people to have all the information they need to make sound voting and political-contribution decisions.” …”

This is going to fail for one simple reason: NRA has an actual voting constituency which cares about the issue.  That is why their grades mean something to politicians.  MAIG is just astroturf funded almost entirely by one person: Bloomberg himself.

Plus, antis who agree with Bloomberg can already use NRA’s grades to make choices.  That hasn’t worked because even people who don’t like guns or who don’t like the NRA do not care enough about the issue to vote based on it.  There is a reason that groups like the Brady Campaign and New Yorkers Against Gun Violence have largely given up trying to influence elections: they can’t.