By MANU RAJU
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a blunt warning to Republicans Thursday: Their party must regain lost supporters plus blacks, Hispanics and voters on both coasts — or risk becoming a permanent minority party with a limited power base.
“We’re all concerned about the fact that the very wealthy and the very poor, the most and least educated, and a majority of minority voters, seem to have more or less stopped paying attention to us,” McConnell said in a speech at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting. “And we should be concerned that, as a result of all this, the Republican Party seems to be slipping into a position of being more of a regional party than a national one.”
In stark terms, the Kentucky Republican added: “In politics, there’s a name for a regional party: It’s called a minority party. ... As Republicans, we know that common-sense conservative principles aren’t regional. But I think we have to admit that our sales job has been.
“And in my view, that needs to change,” he said.
McConnell said that, when he was first elected in 1984, there were GOP governors on both coasts, nearly every state had a Republican senator and Ronald Reagan won 49 of 50 states.
“A lot has changed since then,” he said, pointing to “worrisome signs,” including that every member of the House from New England is a Democrat, and that “you can walk from Canada to Mexico and from Maine to Arizona without ever leaving a state with a Democratic governor.”
As he did in a speech at the National Press Club last week, McConnell placed part of the blame on President Bush. In that speech, he outlined his path to a “post-partisan” era and said both sides should reject their party’s extremes and govern from the middle. That talk was designed to some extent to recast his party as eager to solve the country’s problems rather to obstruct the Democrats’ agenda.
But his speech on Thursday injected fresh views into the ongoing debate within the GOP over how to move forward after two disastrous elections. McConnell sought to instill a sense of urgency into his party, but said the situation is “far from irreversible.”
McConnell said Republicans need to sell their core principles to voters who’ve left the party by better explaining their ideas and the “practical benefits they promise for people of every class or race in every corner of the country.” He said the party needs to attract black voters after Democrats pulled in 96 percent of that voting bloc in November, and he called on the GOP to aggressively court Hispanics, who will constitute one-fifth of all voters by 2020.
“The future of campaigns and elections depends, for both parties, on the ability to attract voters from the Hispanic community,” McConnell said. “This is particularly true for us, since Hispanic growth is even more dramatic in regions where we do best.” He said that nearly 80 percent of Hispanic voters oppose abortion, in line with a bedrock GOP position.
McConnell called on the GOP to push back against labels that have hurt the party in the past — anti-immigrant, anti-union and anti-environment — and to regain taxpayers’ trust that they support limited government spending.
“Too often we’ve let others define us,” McConnell said. “And the image they’ve painted isn’t very pretty.”
He also said that “blaming the media isn’t a strategy for success,” likening it to blaming a referee for losing a game. But he said that the party should push back aggressively when “Democrat ideas fall short.”
“We’ll point it out when Democrats attempt to undermine or reverse successful terror-fighting policies that have kept us safe since 9/11,” he said. “We’ll point it out when they try to tax and spend our way to prosperity. We’ll point it out every time they do the bidding of the trial lawyers and Big Labor bosses. And we’ll point it out every time they claim to solve a problem they’ve really only put off — as they did just last week on Guantanamo Bay.”
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