The Secret Service, in the wake of the assassination attempt on ex-president Donald Trump, is making it abundantly clear that it will ramp up its efforts to protect presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
But what about what the security folks call the “soft targets” – the men and women running for seats in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House, and down the ticket in state and local races?
From 29 years of experience in covering those lower-level campaign events, aside from governors, who, at least in Virginia, have State Police escorts, the others are on their own, to a point that I don’t remember right off ever seeing a police or security presence at any of those events.
Simply put, there’s not enough man- and woman-power to have uniformed officers at every local, state and House and Senate campaign event, and campaigns, eternally strapped for cash to go to advertising and campaign staffing, aren’t equipped to be able to take on the costs of day-to-day event security on their own.
What this means is, we have literally thousands of these soft targets out and about literally every day at campaign events across the country – local fairs, community centers, churches, a favorite local eatery, you name the location, there’s a chance you can see a candidate shaking hands and kissing babies there.
A gangly 20-year-old dietary aide with no military training somehow got himself and an AR-15 onto a roof with a clear shot at a former president protected by the Secret Service and state and local police and was thisclose to starting World War III.
We don’t know his motivations, if they were even political or something else, but at this point, it doesn’t matter.
Just as with the wave of school shootings that started in the 1990s with one, there are bound to be copycats out there plotting the next one, and the smart ones are going to quickly realize, OK, maybe getting a shot off at a presidential candidate won’t be as easy as it was a few days ago with all the attention there, but if I can shoot up a campaign event with little or no security, and take out a sitting U.S. senator or House member, a high-profile challenger, I can get my point across, whatever that point is.
Now I’ll use an analogy from the world of sports, specifically, baseball, to suggest where I fear this may be headed.
Basically, they just threw at one of our hitters, so the baseball code says, we have to throw at one of their hitters.
There are only nine hitters in the lineup for the other team in a baseball game.
Just at the federal level, there are 435 U.S. House races and 34 U.S. Senate races.
What I’d be afraid of is, that’s 469 hitters for somebody who thinks like baseball people think about one of their guys getting beaned, and they don’t have to hit them all, just one of them, and by the nature of how things are done, they’re all sitting ducks.
I’ll be shocked if we don’t see another attempt on a prominent politician like we saw this past weekend, and the next time, we might not be so lucky.
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Chris Graham
