The National Rifle Association’s Political Victory Fund raised $2.4 million in donations in March, setting a 21st-century fundraising record for the group in the month after a gunman killed 17 students and educators at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
The unprecedented fundraising haul came as gun control advocates, led by student survivors of the shooting, saw legislative victories in a number of states and marched on the U.S. Capitol to demand change at the federal level. The data from the Federal Election Commission show that $1.9 million of the $2.4 million total, about 80 percent of it, came from small donations of $200 or less, in line with the small-dollar share of previous months’ fundraising totals.
A Chicago Tribune investigation found that the NRA aggressively stepped up its digital advertising in the wake of the Parkland shooting after survivors made opposition to the gun rights group a centerpiece of their advocacy. The NRA also has launched a campaign to add 100,000 new members in 100 days, saying “the threat to our Second Amendment has never been greater.” While the organization doesn’t make membership data public, it currently claims about 5 million members.
The NRA’s Political Victory Fund is a political action committee that issues the group’s influential legislative scorecards and spends money on behalf of candidates and campaigns during elections. But it represents just a small part of the NRA’s total lobbying, fundraising and political spending efforts. In 2016, for instance, the Political Victory Fund raised more than $11 million, but the NRA overall spent tens of millions of dollars on federal and state-level elections. Much of that spending came from the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, its lobbying shop.
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