THE SPECTACULAR failure of Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign has been one of the surprises of the Democratic primary. The skateboarding former congressman from Texas was once considered to be one of the strongest candidates in the Democratic primary. His powerful liberal rhetoric—so apparent in his losing Senate campaign against Ted Cruz—seemed destined to fire up Democratic primary voters. His simultaneous vagueness about policy details hinted at well-disguised moderation, just right for a general election audience. That, as many commentators noted, was Barack Obama’s secret electoral sauce. Yet Mr O’Rourke is now polling at around 2%, according to The Economist’s poll aggregator, with little prospect of recovery.

He might still have a big impact on the Democrats’ hopes of dislodging Donald Trump, however. That is because of his aggressive recent rhetoric on gun control—and the much-needed shot in the arm it appears to have given the pro-gun lobby, whose members are among Mr Trump’s staunchest supporters.

Mr O’Rourke’s heightened focus on guns was prompted by a mass shooting in his hometown of El Paso in August, in which 22 people were killed. Mr O’Rourke declared that as president he would force all owners of AR-47s and similar semi-automatic firearms to sell them to the government or face a fine. That is way beyond the sorts of measures—including universal background checks on gun-buyers—Democrats are generally in favour of. In pushing the envelope, Mr O’Rourke has failed to revive his fading campaign; but he may have given the Democrats a big problem.

“For years liberals have said we’re not coming to take your guns and now Beto O’Rourke has said we’re coming to take your guns,” says Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of “Gunfight: the battle over the right to bear arms in America”. Long after Mr O’Rourke has dropped out of the race, he says, the main pro-gun lobbyist, the National Rifle Association (NRA), will continue to elide Mr O’Rourke’s confiscation plan with the more moderate gun-control proposals of other Democratic candidates. That is liable to boost turnout for pro-gun candidates—including Mr Trump—in 2020.

Democrats have tended to tread carefully on gun-control in order to avoid that prospect. Until recently, they avoided talking about it much in the run-up to elections. Many in the party believed campaigning for gun-control cost them control of the House in 1994 and the presidency in 2000. But even before Mr O’Rourke’s intervention Democrats had been more outspoken on the issue. All the party’s candidates for the presidential nomination say they want to make background checks universal, make it easier to remove guns from people who appear to be unstable, and ban the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

But most believe that forcing Americans to give up their weapons would be a big mistake. Mandatory buybacks in other countries, including Australia, have drastically cut the number of gun deaths. In America, the scale of gun ownership makes such a law near impossible to implement. There are thought to be up to 20m assault weapons in circulation in the country, but with no central registry of guns or gun owners, no one really knows how many there are or who has them.

A bigger problem for Democrats is that such a proposal is disastrous politically. George Mocsary, a law professor at the University of Wyoming and an expert on the Second Amendment, says gun owners in America feel so strongly about the idea of having their guns confiscated that NRA need not work particularly hard to generate concern over Mr O’Rourke’s plan. Of Democratic candidates touting more moderate gun-law plans, “gun owners will be thinking, we just don’t believe you, we don’t believe that you don’t want to confiscate our guns,” he says.

Nonetheless, the NRA has been busy spelling it out. A recent article published by its lobbying wing said, “Gun confiscation is the goal. Gun confiscation has always been the goal. Thanks to a recent outburst by a 2020 Democratic candidate…potentially millions more Americans are now aware of this fact”. It also crowned Mr O’Rourke “AK-47 seller of the month” (and perhaps the year).

For the NRA, Mr O’Rourke’s injudicious gun-control plan could not have come at a better time. The organisation has had a terrible year. It has seen a bungled effort to topple Wayne LaPierre, its boss. It is under investigation by the attorney-general of New York for financial malpractice. It appears to be deep in debt. In last November’s mid-terms gun-control groups outspent the NRA for the first time.

Indeed, one of the reasons the NRA is in trouble is that the anti-gun lobby is more energised than it has ever been. A student-led movement for gun law reform, started by the survivors of a school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, last year, has encouraged Democratic candidates to campaign more overtly on gun control. In at least 12 races in last year’s mid-terms, Democrats given an “F” rating by the NRA usurped “A”-rated Republicans. And public support is moving in the same direction. According to a survey by Pew Research in September, the share of Americans who say gun laws in America should be made stricter has increased from 52% in 2017 to 60% this year.

But the movement has not yet achieved anything in the way of meaningful gun-control laws, and Mr O’Rourke may have reduced its chances of doing so.

Last week, Mr Trump ripped into the low-polling candidate at a rally in Texas. Mimicking Mr O’Rourke, Mr Trump said, “Excuse me, we’re going to take your guns away,” to cheers and jeers from the crowd.