Boston Globe’s Atkins Stohr: Dems Trying for ‘Big Tent’ Including Issues of Woke 1.0

August 15, 2026
2:52 pm

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The Boston Globe’s Kimberly Atkins Stohr is right that Democrats are trying to stitch together a “big tent,” but the fabric they’re using is still the same threadbare cloth of “woke 1.0” policies that alienated working-class voters in the first place. When Stohr says the party must “focus on all of the” issues that matter to everyday Americans, she’s tacitly admitting that cultural flashpoints—defund-the-police rhetoric, race-based hiring quotas, and reflexive hostility to individual self-defense—have crowded out kitchen-table concerns like inflation and crime. For the 2A community, that matters because every one of those flashpoints has historically been used to justify new restrictions on lawful gun ownership, from red-flag laws aimed at “domestic extremism” to magazine bans sold as “public-health” measures. What Stohr frames as a pragmatic reset is really an attempt to rebrand the same agenda without surrendering its core assumptions. Democrats still poll poorly on crime after cities that embraced progressive prosecutors saw homicide spikes; they still poll poorly on the economy after spending bills that coincided with the fastest inflation in forty years. Adding a few centrist talking points about “public safety” won’t erase the legislative record—Biden’s ATF rules on pistol braces, the push for universal background checks without due-process protections, or Harris’s explicit support for mandatory buy-backs. Gun owners have learned to listen less to rhetoric and more to the 50-state map of permitless-carry expansions and constitutional-carry laws that followed the 2020 crime wave. The real test of this “big tent” will come when swing-district Democrats have to vote on the next funding bill for the ATF or the next Supreme Court nominee. If the party’s strategy is simply to talk like moderates while governing like progressives, 2A households in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada will again treat Election Day as a direct referendum on whether their fundamental right survives the next two or four years. Stohr’s column may signal that some Democrats sense political danger, but the 2A community’s takeaway is unchanged: policy follows power, and the only reliable safeguard is keeping that power out of the hands of people who still view the Second Amendment as an obstacle rather than a cornerstone.

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What Stohr frames as a pragmatic reset is really an attempt to rebrand the same agenda without surrendering its core assumptions. Democrats still poll poorly on crime after cities that embraced progressive prosecutors saw homicide spikes; they still poll poorly on the economy after spending bills that coincided with the fastest inflation in forty years. Adding a few centrist talking points about “public safety” won’t erase the legislative record—Biden’s ATF rules on pistol braces, the push for universal background checks without due-process protections, or Harris’s explicit support for mandatory buy-backs. Gun owners have learned to listen less to rhetoric and more to the 50-state map of permitless-carry expansions and constitutional-carry laws that followed the 2020 crime wave.

The real test of this “big tent” will come when swing-district Democrats have to vote on the next funding bill for the ATF or the next Supreme Court nominee. If the party’s strategy is simply to talk like moderates while governing like progressives, 2A households in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Nevada will again treat Election Day as a direct referendum on whether their fundamental right survives the next two or four years. Stohr’s column may signal that some Democrats sense political danger, but the 2A community’s takeaway is unchanged: policy follows power, and the only reliable safeguard is keeping that power out of the hands of people who still view the Second Amendment as an obstacle rather than a cornerstone.

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