Last month Ed Morrissey from our sister site Hot airreleased Transition to red, which provides a template for Republicans to win future national elections if they take the issue seriously in seven key counties in the country: Brown County, Wisconsin; Hillsborough County, New Hampshire; Wake County, North Carolina; Hamilton County, Ohio; Jefferson County, Colorado; Prince William County, Virginia; and Hillsborough County, Florida.
Like Philadelphia’s collar counties, Illinois’ Cook County and the so-called doughnut counties around Indianapolis, these are the areas that decide the state’s fate. And in a presidential year, that can mean sedate dividends in the Electoral College. The problem is that Republicans seem to have lost their way. George Will once said that the venerable GOP playbook was to win the South, the Midwest, parts of the West, and spend the GDP of Brazil on Ohio and win the presidency. That’s gone.
Morrissey met with NBC’s Chuck Todd in April, who said the GOP needs to consider reaching out to the black community in Wake County, North Carolina, and the various Hispanic communities that dot the I-4 corridor in Florida (Hillsborough County), areas that have been neglected for nearly a decade in the Republican national campaign.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQk3allCBxU
The irony is that Republicans are doing well at the state level in these areas. In fact, Republicans are doing quite well at the state and local level nationwide. They hold two-thirds of the governorships, 66/99 state legislatures (the most in history), and have the most elected state legislators in office since 1920. Any progressive presidential administration will run its ship aground. It is no secret that Democrats cannot really implement a radical left agenda when the rest of the country is Republican. Attorneys general will file lawsuits, as they did against Obama’s executive actions on immigration. State legislatures can make things very challenging. But is this a midterm effect?
Ed says part of it is a midterm effect. Back then, Senator Barack Obama was able to throw out the venerable playbook on voter turnout models and go “hyperlocal” in the areas he discusses in the book. And he went out of his way to understand and address the concerns of each community. Republicans didn’t. Todd agreed, saying Obama addressed the Caribbean and Haitian voices and was versatile with Latinos. What Colombians want to hear is very different from what Cubans want to hear at a rally. It paid off in 2008 and 2012.
Morrissey also emphasizes that this book is nomination-neutral, adding (at the time) that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has a robust field game that includes local communities. The problem is that it clearly wasn’t effective, since he withdrew and Trump is now the presumptive nominee. Trump seems to be courting those on the other side of the aisle, especially union members. We’ll see if he can do what needs to be done in these key counties.
But what’s a little frustrating is that the GOP knew about the problem as early as 2004. Todd remembers how Bush’s then-campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, who became RNC chairman, recognized the growing demographic challenge his party would face after Bush was in office. He put in some work, because he managed to convince 14 percent of the African-American vote in Ohio to vote for Bush. That’s solid for a Republican.
Morrissey added that there is this perception that the United States is a center-right country and that all the Republicans have to do is show voters who that person is at the polls. That is partly true. The United States does lean right, but voters don’t think that way—we think pragmatically. The sorrowful thing about this book is that Ed has talked to people who have served in those areas successfully, and activists who are in those areas, and they tell him that nobody in the national office is talking to them…about people they already know. There is a reservoir of intelligence that is waiting to be tapped in 2016. The question is whether Donald Trump understands that the path to improving his poll numbers is right in front of him.
