Ignoring Gettable Voters

Washington Post (Right Turn)

By Jennifer Rubin 

June 9, 2015

Ignoring gettable voters

You sometimes get the sense the parties are vying for the distinction of leaving the most gettable voters to the other side. Hillary Clinton seems intent on recreating the Obama coalition — minus moderates, affluent voters and independents — while too many Republicans still think the election can be won by turning out more older, white voters. They are both missing the boat — and a lot of voters who will determine the election.

David Brooks points out that “no recent successful first-term presidential campaign” has relied on base mobilization. “The mobilization strategy over-reads the progressive shift in the electorate. It’s true that voters have drifted left on social issues. But they have not drifted left on economic and fiscal issues, as the continued unpopularity of Obamacare makes clear. If Clinton comes across as a stereotypical big-spending, big-government Democrat, she will pay a huge cost in the Upper Midwest and the Sun Belt.” Part of the reason for this is that Clinton isn’t all that popular with the base she is intent on mobilizing. Her innate caution (which goes along with much finger-in-the-wind positioning), greed and Wall Street ties suggest she will have an uphill climb to becoming a liberal icon. If she wanted to run as a left-winger she should not have given all those speeches to hedge funds and taken millions in speaking fees and for the Clinton Foundation from dubious characters. Her life has been off-message for the campaign she now seems to want to run.

In a post on his PAC’s website Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker makes the most of this contradiction. He writes, “Clinton took her experience there all the way to the bank, helping her become one of the Senate’s wealthiest members. Since leaving the Obama administration, Clinton has kept the money-machine rolling, raking in more than $11 million since 2014 in paid speeches, some at $300,000 apiece — more money than most Americans make in an entire year.” Turning the knife a bit more, he argues, “The fact that Clinton — with her massive earning potential and not one, but two multi-million dollar homes — could have ever considered herself ‘dead broke,’ calls into question her basic perception of reality. A year later, Clinton is still as out of touch as ever. She’s stuck in a carefully choreographed campaign cocoon, not taking questions or talking to real Americans about the problems they face.”

But Hillary Clinton is not the only one who is missing the boat. Some Republicans seem to be competing for the greatest number of voters they can offend. Rick Santorum wants to get rid of 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants, echoing Mitt Romney’s egregious “self-deportation” notion. Forget the Hispanic vote and those turned off by the GOP’s intolerant image. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee wants us to believe officials are free to ignore the Supreme Court. Forget moderates, professionals and most thinking Americans. Numerous candidates are enthralled by the flat tax that would hike taxes on working- and middle-class voters (everyone pays the same percentage!) and/or open the floodgates of red ink. Forget everyone who is not rich.

There is another way to go: Be welcoming and appealing to minorities and women voters while eschewing Hillary Clinton’s Big Business clientele. And wouldn’t you know, the top three GOP contenders are more or less doing that? They are pols who have won state-wide in purple states.

Both Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) favor immigration reform and are laying out agendas featuring upward mobility. Rubio’s tax plan has a healthy tax credit for less well-off families, precisely to address the middle-class squeeze. (Strict supply-siders are horrified he is “wasting” all that revenue by giving it to people of modest means.) While yet to put out a national tax plan, Walker has followed a similar path in his state, Henry Olsen tells us:

Walker has lowered Wisconsin’s rates on the personal incomes of all taxpayers, but he has done so more for those in the bottom tax bracket than for those in the top. On his watch, the marginal rate for families earning no more than $32,000 in gross income per year dropped from 4.6 percent to 4.0 percent. He cut the marginal tax rate for all income-tax brackets, but cut the rate for those in the top bracket (which for families starts at $320,000 in taxable yearly income) only a smidgen, from 7.75 percent to 7.65 percent. Moreover, Governor Walker approved two new deductions, one for contributions to health savings accounts and another for private K–12 tuition payments. These policies fly in the face of standard supply-side doctrine. . . . Walker’s tax policy helps address the GOP’s biggest weakness, the perception that it is the party of the rich and doesn’t “care about people like me.” Polls since 2012 have consistently shown that Americans think the economy is unfairly tilted toward the rich and that the Republicans are the party of the rich. A tax policy that essentially says America isn’t doing enough for rich people is unlikely to help the GOP nominee in 2016.

In short, if Hillary is going to leave large chunks of the electorate on the table, as it were, Republicans can position themselves to scoop up those voters. They, however, will not do this if they turn off a fleet of voters either by their rhetoric or policy preferences. Politicians who have had to win by reaching a diverse electorate seem to understand this. Others should take note.

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