CNN: After weaknesses in its ground game were badly exposed in 2012, the Republican National Committee is taking a page straight out of the Democratic playbook and launching an ambitious “50 state strategy” that will steer party resources and staffers to every corner of the country as it works to repair its voter contact effort before the next presidential election.The problem here is that, while the party plans to compete in every state, they don’t plan on competing for every vote. Relying on GOTV efforts shows that Republicans have given up on minority outreach and have embraced the "missing white voter" hypothesis. Conservatives like this hypothesis, because it’s become fashionable on that side of the aisle to be shockingly racist — which makes winning over anyone other than white voters a little bit of a challenge.
The party’s short-term vision with the project is to help the GOP win key races this November and in next year’s midterm elections.
But that’s only part of a larger and more important goal for Republicans: rebuilding a broken and outdated get-out-the-vote operation that seemed dominant during the George W. Bush era, but was overtaken in 2012 by a Democratic coalition that had spent years polishing its tactics in the fields of voter contact, persuasion, data collection and statistical modeling.
The good news for Democrats is that the missing white voter is fantasy. No matter how hard you scrape the bottom, there’s no more mayo in that jar. The Republican tendency to dismiss reality is finally coming to bite them in the rear, as it had to eventually, causing them to waste resources getting out voters who don’t actually exist.
[photo by Leo Reynolds]
