Democrats are glaringly absent from the roster of speakers at the NRA annual meeting. The NRA's no-compromise strategy

HOUSTON — The National Rifle Association has become, more than ever, part and parcel of the Republican Party.

The officially nonpartisan group’s no-compromise strategy helped defeat the background check bill in the Senate last month and grow its membership ranks to 5 million.


But it has also repelled many old Democratic allies and raised the hackles of liberal activists, which will make it harder for moderates to work with the NRA in the future and pave the way for new gun control laws in blue states.

( PHOTOS: NRA annual meeting)

Fueling the shift is a Democratic Party that has become more liberal on guns. President Barack Obama, emboldened by his reelection, is less afraid to tackle the issue than a generation chastened by losing the House after the assault weapons ban in 1994. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending money against Democrats in primaries who oppose gun control. And the party has fewer members from southern states and rural districts.

The result is on display at this weekend’s NRA annual meeting here, where Democrats are glaringly absent from the roster of speakers.

It wasn’t always this way. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) received a standing ovation two years ago at the NRA convention in Pittsburgh. Former Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.) attended in 2010. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) spoke in 2009.

This year, a host of potential 2016 Republican candidates pledged their fealty to the NRA. The keynote speaker at a Saturday night rally is Glenn Beck.

( Also on POLITICO: 2016ers to NRA: We'll stand firm)

The trend began long before December’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Last cycle, the NRA spent $18.6 million on independent expenditures – $13.3 million against Democrats (including Obama) and $6.2 million for Republicans. Only $41,506 went to boosting friendly Democrats, according to a tally from the Center for Responsive Politics.

In the 2012 cycle, the NRA cut checks to 26 House Democrats – down from 63 in the 2010 cycle. Twenty years earlier, in 1992, the NRA gave money to 91 House Democrats.

One of the NRA’s 75 board members is former Democratic Rep. Dan Boren from Oklahoma. But the board slants strongly to the right, from musician Ted Nugent to anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and former Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho).

( Also on POLITICO: NRA leaders: Watch out for Obama, liberals)

Several former Democratic allies of the NRA complained that the group has marginalized itself.

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was endorsed by the NRA in each of his six statewide runs for governor of Vermont, something he touted when he ran for president in 2004. As a kid, he won NRA medals for marksmanship. But he said the group lurched right in search of money and members, even as national Republicans realized after their losses last November that they need to work with Obama.

“The NRA has essentially decided, whether consciously or not, to vacuum up the detritus left from the tendency of the Republican leadership to move to the middle,” he said. “It almost sort of completes a journey for them from being a mainstream organization to sort of being the equivalent of the John Birch Society.”

Former Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello is one of the Democrats who received an NRA endorsement in 2010.

“They used to represent gun owners. Now they represent gun makers. They used to represent sportsmen. Now they represent survivalists,” said the former Virginia congressman, who lost that fall in the tea party tidal wave and is now president and CEO of the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) said the NRA has changed since he worked with them as governor of a red state. He said that they used to be more supportive of finding ways to keep guns from the hands of criminals and the mentally ill.

“It’s just too bad the goal posts have been moved so far,” he said. “Their position is now in the end zone, not at the 40-yard line.”

NRA chief Wayne LaPierre rejects the notion that his group has taken a turn to the extreme. On Saturday, he described the NRA as “the middle of the river of America’s mainstream” and “at the heart of America’s heartland.”

The NRA is viewed favorably by a 34 percent plurality of Americans, down from 38 percent in January, according to a CBS/New York Times poll released Wednesday. Only 26 percent view the group unfavorably. The rest are undecided or don’t know enough to answer.

LaPierre pledged to continue supporting Democrats who support the group’s positions.

“To those senators and congressmen who have stood with the Second Amendment, we say thank you and ask you to keep defending our rights,” he told thousands of activists. “Let there be no doubt we stand firmly with you.”

There has been significant backlash from liberals against the four Democratic senators who opposed the background check measure last month, even though three are up for reelection next year in states carried by Mitt Romney. “Heidi Heitkamp betrayed me on gun control” was the headline of a Washington Post op-ed by former White House chief of staff Bill Daley.

Multiple NRA leaders blamed Obama for making the Democratic Party hostile to gun owners.

“He’s now threatening Democratic senators who are friends of NRA,” said incoming NRA President Jim Porter. “He will destroy them if he can. We must support friends who support our cause.”

There is an increasingly prevalent feeling among Democrats that the NRA doesn’t speak for the majority of gun owners on issues like background checks.

Bloomberg has promised to keep using his fortune to aggressively target Democrats in primaries with high ratings from the NRA. His super PAC spent $2.2 million to defeat former Rep. Debbie Halvorson this February in the Democratic primary to fill Jesse Jackson Jr.’s seat. She had earned an “A” rating from the NRA.

The objective is to make it toxic for any Democrat with national ambitions to cozy up to the NRA. A Democratic operative who has worked for a pro-gun member said a wedge must be driven between the NRA’s leadership and its members.

“The NRA leadership is radicalized and out-of-touch, but Democrats don’t want to alienate the rank-and-file,” said the operative. “Appearing to embrace the NRA leadership with gun politics changing is a mistake that no Democrat wants to make.”

Surveys released this week by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, showed that two red-state Senate Democrats who supported the Manchin-Toomey bill have benefitted from it. In Louisiana, 72 percent of voters say they favor background checks and 45 percent said they’re now more likely to support Landrieu for reelection next year because she voted for them. In North Carolina, 52 percent said they’re more inclined to reelect Sen. Kay Hagan next year because she voted for background checks.

Citing these polls, Perriello guessed that the NRA will have a harder time working with Democrats in the future.

“Right now it looks like they won the battle but lost the war,” he said. “Ironically I think it will end up hurting Second Amendment rights over time.”

A watershed moment in the relationship between Democratic politicians and the NRA came when the group announced last year that they would “score” the vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for his handling of the “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal in deciding whether to offer support.

The vote was seen as a purely political maneuver, and many Democrats felt that it would look craven and disrespect their president to go along. So NRA stalwarts defied them, including Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). The dean of the House was once a member of the NRA board of directors, but he resigned to vote for the 1994 assault-weapons ban. This January he co-wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for consideration of new gun control.

Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid almost received the NRA endorsement in 2010. He once took money from the group and has been called “a true champion of the Second Amendment” by LaPierre. But he became plainly exasperated with its maneuvering the last few months.

Third Way’s Matt Bennett, who has made a career of advising centrist Democrats, said it is one thing to not vote for sensible steps to reduce gun violence but it is another to be seen as a shill for the NRA.

“The reaction to Sandy Hook struck people as not strategic and principled but totally unhinged, and at that moment there was a view on the Hill that the NRA had lost their bearings entirely,” he said. “The NRA brand has become so toxic and so polarized that, while it is popular with a very tiny segment of the electorate, it is absolutely poisonous, it is kryptonite, for another segment of the electorate.”