- GOP establishment looking for love in all the wrong
placesways - GOP establishment fails to play to GOP core strengths, (undermines them instead)
- A game plan of pandering rather than proselytizing won’t win Hispanics, will lose core support
- Polling regarding Trump’s impact substantiates establishment’s bone-headedness
The above bullet points are our takeaways from the key segment of Rush Limbaugh’s Wednesday program. Below we have set forth about a third of the segment’s transcript. The entire segment should be bookmarked and read for its clarity and political perceptiveness. Bold face our emphasis.
Trump Taps Into a Voter Bloc the GOP Needs to Win (Hint: It’s Not Latinos)
July 29, 2015
RUSH: No, no, no. I’ve not forgotten where I was in the Trump story about the Trump campaign. And a mistake that the Republican Party is making is thinking they need to improve their standing with Latinos and Hispanic voters to win. Now, there’s nothing wrong if they do that, but that’s not the road to victory. That’s not what they have to do. Romney’s already proven it. And when you hear me run the numbers, report the numbers that already had been run on what it would have taken…
I’ll cut to the chase. For Romney to have won, given everything else that happened in 2012, he would have needed 70% of the Latino vote. Not gonna happen, right? However, given everything else that happened, if Romney had just secured an additional 4% of the white vote, he would have won in 2012. Now, which of those two is more attainable, more doable? Romney nor any Republican is going to get 70% of the Latino vote. . . .
But Romney wasn’t gonna do it, and the Republican establishment is not gonna do it the way they’re going about it. They’re not gonna get a significant increase in the Latino vote by being Democrat Party Light. They’re not gonna get it by being for amnesty. They’re not gonna get it by not criticizing Obama. They’re not gonna get it by reaching out to Hispanics on the basis of liberal-type issues.
Even if they did — if they knew exactly how to do it — they’re still not gonna get 70% of the Latino vote, which is what Romney would have needed if everything else was the same. But achieving 4% additional white vote? Well, that’s much more doable than getting enough of the Hispanic vote to win. What does it also tell you? It tells you why Romney lost. Now, we all know the reasons why Romney lost. There was a lot of the Republican base that stayed home, and many of them happened to be white.
Now, see, here’s the thing. You’re hearing all this talk that whites are a minority, or soon to be a minority, “People of color are becoming the majority, and the days of white-dominated America are history and forget about ’em ’cause it’s never gonna happen again. It’s about time you came to peace with that, because your people’s day has come and gone, and your day of running this country is over.” Well, it’s wishful thinking on the part of the leftist identity politics experts.
The fact of the matter is if Romney had just achieved 4% more support of white voters, he would have won. And 71% of the country to this day are still white, 73% still Christian. So these people on the left, they’re relying on getting away with intimidation and lies and dispiriting attacks on things that people hold dear. They’re succeeding. The Republican Party’s helping, by the way. They’re succeeding in getting voters to stay home. But I’ll give you the details of all this — how you get there — in mere moments.
. . .
We’re not making mincemeat of anybody. But that’s what Trump’s doing. Trump is starting to make mincemeat out of people, and the people he’s made mincemeat out of are leftists. So people are shoving aside the news when they hear it, “Hey, you know what? You’re being fooled. This guy’s not one of you. This guy’s a liberal Democrat! He’s running the biggest scam you’ve ever seen yet. You’re gonna end up paying the price.” People are willing to look past it at this stage. Still early, and there are a lot of other factors that make this fun for people.
But when you start talking about the actual winning of elections and then doing something with the victories… Republicans are winning elections, but that’s where it stops, as far as their voters are concerned. So, if you go back to the 2012 presidential race, and you listen to what the Republican establishment today is saying they need to do, their candidate needs to do to win the White House, you find out how off track they are and how greatly they are misjudging what they have to do to win.
The headline for Byron York’s piece back in 2003 is: “Winning Hispanic Vote Would Not Be Enough for GOP, But Winning the White Vote Would Be Everything — After six months…” This is just six months after the election here. “After six months of mulling over November’s election results, many Republicans remain convinced that the party’s only path to future victory is to improve the party’s appeal to Hispanic voters. But how many Hispanic voters do Republicans need to attract before the party can again win the White House?”
Well, they need a lot. They need more than they’re ever going to get. They cannot win the White House pursuing the Hispanic vote, and yet this is the singular belief establishment has. They can’t win unless they get the Hispanic vote. The truth is, they’re never gonna get enough of it to win, because they are losing the support of other demographic groups in the process. And that base that they need to win is exactly what Donald Trump two years later is tapping into, and this is what has them so under…
Folks, at the Republican establishment level, you know as well as I do that if they could throw away the Christian right, the conservative base, the Tea Party, they would do it. Even if it meant being in the wilderness of defeat for a couple cycles, they would do it. For whatever reasons that they don’t like conservatives, whatever reason they don’t like Christian voter, whatever it is, they would do it. But Trump is their worst nightmare.
Trump is tapping into the exact group of voters — and the group of voters made up of different demographic groups of people. But Trump is tapping into that universe of voters the Republican Party can win with, and he is demonstrating to them how they can win. They don’t like it. It’s like a kid being shown… If you had a magic formula to show your kid eating spinach would make him live to a hundred, he’d still reject it ’cause he doesn’t want to do it because you’re saying so. This is what we’re dealing with here.
. . .
RUSH: Very simply, cutting to the chase, Donald Trump — love him or hate him, worried about him or not — there’s something that’s happening. You can see it. All you have to do is admit it, and the Republican establishment doesn’t want to. Trump is showing their theory to win the White House is not gonna work. They want to stick to the theory no matter what, because they actually do want to win with it, but they won’t. The formulas don’t work. It’s this simple.
This article in 2013 provides all the data from Byron York. Romney needed 70% more Hispanic votes than he got to win the presidency. If they’re focused on one demographic, and the Republican establishment is right now, Hispanics are it. That’s why immigration is it. That’s why amnesty is it. Romney already won a majority of the independents. Years ago they told us that’s what you had to do to win the White House: The independents.
“He who wins the independents wins the election,” right? Well, somehow that went out the window, because we’re now winning independents but we’re not winning the elections. So, what happened? Well, fooled again. Next up: “Win the Hispanics! Gotta get the Hispanic vote. If you don’t get the Hispanic votes, you’re history.” Romney would have needed 70% additional Hispanic vote, which wasnever gonna happen. But he needed only 4% more white votes to win. If he would have just gotten 4% more of the white vote.
Now, the Democrats don’t want to hear this ’cause the Democrats are in the midst of trying to break down the old order, which they think is a white, patriarchal power structure discriminating against everybody. It’s the root of all evil. From the days of the founding of this country, the while male majority is the root of all evil, and everything the left is doing is bent on destroying the power of that particular block. They’re doing it with guilt. They’re doing it with the law. They’re doing it by upending the culture.
They’re doing everything they can, as a minority, bullying their way in to blow up, and Trump is reviving it, folks. It’s no more complicated than that, and that’s why there’s so much… It’s not a racial thing. It’s a numbers thing. It’s coalescing groups to win elections. The Republican Party has chosen the impossible route: 70% more Hispanic votes than Romney got. But 4% additional white vote would have won. Why? The white vote is so large. The white population is so large that getting 4% more of it.
Going from 60 to 64% of whites who vote would have won the race for Romney. So, they gotta ask themselves, “Why didn’t they vote for Romney? Who’d they vote for him? Did they vote? But it’s a lot easier to get 4% of 65-70% of the country, than to go get 70% of 18% of the country or 25%, whatever it is.” And yet who are the Republicans angering? The Republican Party joining the Democrat Party in angering white voters, and there’s Trump tapping right into ’em. Blue-collar white voter Democrats, you name it. That’s why everybody is out of sorts in the establishment.
. . .
RUSH: Folks, and just one more thing here about the Trumpster. It just so happens, just so happens to dovetail nicely with that point that I was just making, which I’ve been a number of profundities that I have uttered and offered today, and this one is well, and it is that Trump is actually lighting up — he is coalescing, he is exciting — a cadre of voters, the exact voters Republicans need to win. The ironic… Republicans are… I mean, it’s hard to say, but these are the people the Republican Party don’t seem to be interested in be.
Maybe it is they just take them for granted, assume that those voters are always going to be there while they openly make tracks to the Hispanic community, They try and secure more of those people and alienate people in the process. But from Public Policy Polling. And I know it’s a left-wing bunch, so we take that into account, but here is the latest number for Public Policy Polling. Trump’s favorable with Hispanics versus Jeb Bush favorables with Hispanics. Who do you think is in the lead in this category?
. . .
Well, as we speak, Donald Trump’s favorables with Hispanics are at 34%; Jeb Bush’s are at 31%. That number of Trump’s leads the Republican field. “Media Research/TV.org blog,” this is a Public Policy Polling poll, “Trump leads the Republican field among Hispanics 34% favorability. Jeb Bush is next at 31%.” Now, I know it’s early, and any and all of this could change, but the thing to keep in mind is that this Trump candidacy has gone in stages here, folks. . . .
Read the transcript of the entire segment of Rush’s program here. His analysis of how liberals politic is compelling as well.
