To win in November, Republicans must translate their message for the new GOP coalition
As the Boeing Dreamliner that is the Democrats’ 2024 presidential campaign falls apart in midair, many of the GOP campaigns I speak to as a political consultant are in a holding pattern, eating their proverbial popcorn and waiting for the dust to settle.
But Republicans in key Senate and House races are consistently underperforming the Donald Trump ticket. Those who want to go for the win in these seats must take the opportunity now to leverage the factors that are within our control, which do not include how the new Trump-Vance ticket will play in their states and districts, or the latest roll call of Kamala Harris’ support from prominent Democrats.
Republicans in toss-up districts can do one thing to ensure victory, and that is to go on the offense with persuadable voters. And nearly none of the campaigns I talk to are doing this effectively.
That’s because, across our country, America’s newest swing voters are nearly all from outside the current GOP base: working non-white voters who are fleeing the Democrats in droves, even without formal outreach from Republican campaigns. Republicans don’t know how to talk to these voters, and nearly nobody is doing it right.
The country club Republican Party of the 1990s and 2000s — white, upper-class, suburban — has been demolished as the GOP has grown more working-class, more populist and more diverse. And ironically, just as the Democratic Party has gone all-in on racial “equity” and identity politics, a historic number of Hispanic, Asian and black voters have taken note and jumped ship.
They are responding to the leftward tilt of the Democratic Party both culturally and economically; in a Federal Reserve study conducted this year, 100 percent of Hispanic respondents said price hikes have left them worse off financially.
The double-digit shift of working-class, non-white voters toward Republicans over the decade has been well-documented by Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira in his publication the Liberal Patriot, as well as GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini in his 2023 book “Party of the People.” But what is missing is Republicans putting our feet on the gas pedal with outreach that welcomes even more of these voters to our side.
First and foremost for Republican campaigns should be outreach to Hispanic voters, America’s fastest-growing voter demographic. More are coming online every cycle. Univision data suggest they are nearly two-thirds more likely to be crossover voters this election than non-Hispanics.
And they are interspersed not just in America’s Southwest and border states — where many Republicans are indeed competing for these voters — but across the Northeast and Midwest, in cities large and small, rural areas and suburbs. Consider that Hispanic voters represent nearly 20% of eligible voters in key toss-up House districts in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Oregon and elsewhere.
When I talk to campaigns about the need to reach and flip these voters, I mention that in seats like this, moving an additional 5% of these voters from Democrat to Republican would add 4% to the Republican vote total on Election Day. This shift would be enough to flip dozens more US House seats nationally, and is very achievable based on campaigns my firm BlueStateRed has run in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Colorado.
But when it comes to the basics of reaching these voters, such as translating campaign literature into Spanish and doing interviews with Hispanic-focused media, nearly no campaign is doing even the minimum.
This is not a cost issue; you can find no cheaper and more effective Republican voter turnout channel than Spanish radio, listened to by millions of working voters day in and day out.
It is free to reach out to a Spanish-language publication and suggest an interview. Rather, it is a failure of imagination on the part of both campaigns and their consultants, and a failure to care to expand our big tent.
Michele Day, an executive at TelevisaUnivision, the largest Hispanic media group in the United States, tells me that candidates who want to win “absolutely need to engage Hispanic voters,” but that “candidate investment in winning these voters is extremely low” — even more so on the Republican side, where just 1% of GOP media budgets were allocated to Spanish-language media in 2020, a third of what Democrats have spent to reach these voters.
Day emphasizes that Hispanic voters “need to consistently hear culturally relevant and linguistically appropriate messages” to reach and persuade them.
And GOP outreach should include not just effective messages in Spanish and English, but campaigns to reach black, Asian, Jewish and LGBT voters as well; all of these groups are moving right, but Republicans will hit a ceiling and lose winnable races if we don’t do more to welcome them into the fold.
There is no doubt that the GOP will continue its transformation into a working-class, multiracial political movement.
We can do this much faster, and expand our map significantly, if we put our foot on the gas.
The Trump campaign seems to understand this, helping place rising stars like Reps. Byron Donalds and John James into the RNC rotation, and conducting a series of “Congress, Cognac, and Cigar” nights across swing states like Georgia and Wisconsin.
So, too, do Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, whose upset victory in 2021 was largely aided by historic support from both Hispanic and Asian Virginians, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who prevailed in 2018 due to outreach to black “School Choice Moms.”
And in New York City and its suburbs, a microcosm of these diverse voter shifts, Republicans claimed a Hispanic-heavy Bronx city council seat in 2023 for the first time in 40 years, and flipped and held seats from Queens to Long Island in 2022 thanks to massive shifts among minority and immigrant voters across the board.
The open question in 2024 is whether Senate candidates like Dave McCormick in Pennsylvania, Eric Hovde in Wisconsin and Sam Brown in Nevada — all currently polling significantly behind Trump — want to join the ranks of winners or also-rans. If they want to win, they’ll need to ramp up this outreach, and soon. The work to reach their current swing voters is right in front of them.
The votes are out there for our taking. It takes a little vision, and a little effort, but not much extra money to get to the win. Republican campaigns that fail to take the opportunity will only have themselves to blame if they come up short in November.
Albert Eisenberg is a political strategist who runs the messaging firm BlueStateRed. Based between Charleston, SC, and Washington, he has been featured on RealClearPolitics, Fox, Newsweek and elsewhere.
Reprinted with permission from RealClearPennsylvania.
