On a (right) wing and a prayer
‘Too old and too white’? Prospective Republican candidates and the voters they’re trying to lure
WASHINGTON— Hours after another white Republican grandfather lost another presidential election to a younger black man, the chair of the American Conservative Union issued a blunt warning.
“Our party needs to realize that it’s too old and too white and too male and it needs to figure out how to catch up with the demographics of the country before it’s too late,” Al Cardenas told Politico.com in 2012.
Three years after Mitt Romney’s defeat to Barack Obama, presidential candidates Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina are making conspicuous efforts to broaden the party’s appeal. Ted Cruz, conversely, has turned his sights inward. In his view, what ails the Republicans is not a failure to attract new supporters but a failure to energize its natural supporters.
A look at who the five prospective nominees are targeting — and why they might not succeed.
> TED CRUZ EVANGELICALS
“Today, roughly half of born-again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home,” Cruz, the Texas senator, said in the announcement speech he unsubtly held at evangelical Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. “Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.” Even a minor bump in evangelical turnout will be hard to achieve. Conservative evangelicals have always been courted intensely, and Cruz’s math is off. Closer to a third of white evangelicals stayed home in 2012. “Is there somebody out there he knows about that we don’t know about? We don’t know that yet,” says Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political science
professor.
>RAND PAUL YOUNG PEOPLE, BLACK PEOPLE
The Kentucky senator’s pitch to the young hones in on their supposed privacy concerns about high-tech government surveillance. His pitch to black voters is centred on proposals to reform drug laws, return voting rights to felons and reduce some criminal sentences. Blacks and the young make up a small fraction of Republicans, and they won’t carry anyone to victory in the primary. But Paul’s willingness to take novel stances and do unorthodox bridge-building might make him more appealing to other voters, says Stephen Voss, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky.
>MARCO RUBIO AND JEB BUSH HISPANICS
On paper, both are suited to the role of wooing the Hispanic vote. Rubio, a Florida senator, is the son of Cuban immigrants. Bush, former Florida governor, is the Spanish-speaking husband of a Mexican woman — and he wants to offer a path to “legal status” for illegal immigrants. Neither Rubio nor Bush, though, is actually popular with Hispanics at the moment. Rubio enjoyed a popularity boomlet in 2013, when he pushed for an immigration bill that included a path to citizenship. But he took a harder line after the bill failed, and his approval rating dropped sharply.
>CARLY FIORINA WOMEN
Fiorina became the first woman to run a Fortune 50 company when she took over Hewlett-Packard in 1999. She says she could neutralize Hillary Clinton’s “gender card” simply by existing as the Republican nominee. Fiorina leads a conservative group aimed at female voters, but she says she won’t talk specifically about women’s issues: “Every issue is a women’s issue,” she said Thursday. Rather, she will emphasize her conservative message and her track record. That record is mixed: Fiorina was forced out at HP in 2005. She fared poorly with women when she ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010.