As the Boeing Dreamliner that is the Democratic 2024 presidential campaign disintegrates in mid-air, many of the Republican camps I speak to as a political consultant are on standby, munching on what might be called popcorn, waiting for the dust to settle.
But Republicans won key Senate and House elections. Consistently poor performance Candidate Trump. Anyone looking to win these seats must not miss this opportunity. now This is because we use factors we can control, and that doesn’t include how Trump and Vance will influence each state and district, or whether Kamala Harris has the support of leading Democrats.
The only thing Republicans can do to ensure victory in close races is to go on the offensive with persuadable voters, and most of the campaigns I speak to are not doing this effectively.
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That’s because across the country, most of America’s new swing voters are working class and outside of the current Republican base. Non-white Voters are fleeing Democrats in droves without any formal outreach from Republican campaigns, and Republicans don’t know how to talk to these voters, and few are doing it right.
The country club Republicanism of the 1990s and 2000s (white, upper class, suburban) collapsed as the Republican Party became more working class, more populist, and more diverse. And ironically, just when the Democrats were throwing their weight behind racial “equality” and identity politics, historic numbers of Hispanic, Asian and black voters woke up and left the party.
They are responding to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift, both culturally and economically. study This year’s one hundred percent of Hispanic respondents said rising prices have caused them financial hardship.
The double-digit shift in support of working-class non-white voters to the Republican Party over the past decade Well documented Democratic analyst Rui Teixeira points this out in his book “The Liberal Patriot,” and Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini points this out in his 2023 book “The People’s Party.” But the GOP hasn’t stepped on the gas and done anything to win over more voters.
A first priority for Republican campaigns is reaching out to Hispanic voters, the fastest-growing demographic in America. More Hispanic voters are online every election cycle. According to Univision data, Hispanic voters are nearly 100% online. 2 in 3 chance In this election, they are more likely to be crossover voters than non-Hispanics.
And they are not scattered just While many Republicans are certainly competing for these voters in the Southwest and border states, Hispanic voters are widespread throughout the Northeast and Midwest, from big cities to small towns, rural areas and suburbs. Consider that in close House battleground districts such as Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Oregon, Hispanic voters make up nearly 20% of the electorate.
When I speak on the campaign trail about the need to reach and convert these voters, I often say that in these districts, it would take another 5% of voters to switch from Democrat to Republican. Four% This change in the Republican vote total on Election Day would be enough to flip dozens of additional U.S. House seats across the country, and based on the campaigning my company, BlueStateRed, has done in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Colorado, it is entirely achievable.
But when it comes to the basics of reaching these voters, like translating campaign pamphlets into Spanish or giving interviews to Hispanic-focused media outlets, few campaigns are even doing the bare minimum.
This isn’t about cost: There is no cheaper, more effective channel for increasing Republican turnout than Spanish-language radio, which millions of working voters listen to every day.
Feel free to contact Spanish language publications and propose interviews. Rather, it’s a lack of imagination on the part of both sides and their consultants, and a lack of care in expanding our big tent.
Candidates who want to win “absolutely need to capture Hispanic voters’ attention,” but “candidates are investing very little in reaching those voters,” said Michelle Day, an executive at Televisa Univision, the largest Hispanic media group in the U.S. The numbers are even lower on the Republican side, with just 1% of the GOP media budget allocated to Spanish-language media in 2020, a third of what Democrats spent reaching those voters.
Day stressed that to appeal to and persuade Hispanic voters, “we need to hear culturally appropriate and linguistically appropriate messaging consistently.”
And Republican outreach efforts must include effective messaging in Spanish and English, as well as outreach to Black, Asian, Jewish and LGBT voters, all of whom are moving to the right, and unless the party does more to welcome them into its ranks, it will plateau and lose winnable elections.
There is no doubt that the Republican Party will continue to transform into a working-class, multiracial political movement.
If you step on the gas, you can do this much faster and expand the map considerably.
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The Trump campaign seems to understand this, incorporating rising stars like Reps. Byron Donald and John James into the Republican National Convention rotation and a series of An evening of “parliament, cognac and cigars” Across battleground states like Georgia and Wisconsin.
So is Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, whose upset victory in 2021 was fueled in large part by historic support from both parties. Hispanic and and Asian Virginians.Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said. Won in 2018 By reaching out to black “school choice moms.”
And in New York City and its suburbs, a microcosm of these shifts in diverse electorates, Republicans are poised to win a heavily Hispanic Bronx City Council seat for the first time in 40 years in 2023, and in 2022 flipped and retained seats from Queens to Long Island due to major shifts in the electorate. Minority and immigrant voters Across the board.
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The open question for 2024 is whether senate candidates like Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, Eric Hovde of Wisconsin and Sam Brown of Nevada (all currently trailing far behind Trump) want to join the winners or losers. They need to step up this outreach immediately if they want to win. The task of reaching out to the current swing vote is right in front of them.
The vote is there for us to win. It takes a little vision and a little effort, but not a lot of money, to win. Republicans who miss this opportunity will have themselves to blame if they don’t get results in November.
Albert Eisenberg is a political strategist based in Charleston, SC and Washington, D.C., who runs the messaging company BlueStateRed and has been featured in RealClearPolitics, Fox, Newsweek, and more.
