Gun violence was always going to play a bigger role in 2016 than it has in any election in recent memory simply because of its sheer, in-your-face relevance: The nation can’t seem to go a week without a horrific shooting. But now that President Obama has taken action to bolster background checks and come out swinging against the National Rifle Association, joined by the leading Democratic presidential contenders, gun control has the potential to be the deciding issue of 2016. And it’s Democrats, for a change, who stand to benefit.

For two decades now, the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that any focus on gun control helps Republicans and hurts (if not dooms) Democrats, not just in presidential races but down the ballot in all but the bluest states. Fear of the wrath—and deep campaign coffers—of the NRA has led Democrats to make often-ridiculous displays of their love for hunting, and to avoid running on policy prescriptions for gun violence. This defensive stance first took hold after the 1994 midterms, when an assault-rifle ban pushed by President Bill Clinton was blamed for Republicans’ winning majorities in both houses of Congress. In 2000, Al Gore’s loss in his home state of Tennessee, which made Florida the pivotal state that cost him the presidency, was also attributed to his support for gun control. Noam Scheiber reported for the New Republic in 2001 that Gore’s team of advisers had worried that “gun control would hurt the vice president in the states he needed most,” particularly among rural voters in Pennsylvania, western Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. “After the election,” Scheiber wrote, “the Gore campaign’s hunch became Democratic gospel.”

President Obama treaded carefully on the issue in his first run for office in 2008, calling (with little detail or emphasis) for “common-sense reforms.” His position on guns, he often said on the campaign trail, was not “an excuse not to vote for me.” During his first term, the Democrats’ fear of the gun lobby still prevailed; after his first year, in fact, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence gave Obama seven out of seven F’s on a report card for repeatedly failing to stand up to the gun lobby.

After he won re-election in 2012—with no more campaigns to run—Obama began to change his tune, a process that culminated in last week’s executive actions to broaden background checks and expand enforcement of gun laws. At a CNN town hall on gun violence that followed later in the week, Obama went after the gun lobby directly, calling out the NRA for skipping the event: “Since this is a main reason they exist, you’d think that they’d be prepared to have a debate with the president,” he said, archly. Later, he called the group’s views on gun confiscation a “conspiracy.”

By making such a forceful push on gun control right at the beginning of the election year, Obama has opened up new political (and rhetorical) space for the Democrats who are running this year to find their voices on gun control.