Republicans are riding high with white voters, but need to win over American minorities if they expect to recapture the White House in next year's presidential election, influential GOP consultant and policy adviser Karl Rove tells
Newsmax TV.
"It's not just Latinos. Republicans have to do better among African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans because we're tapped out — we're taking six out of every 10 white voters," Rove said Wednesday on "Newsmax Prime" with J.D. Hayworth.
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"That's what Ronald Reagan got in 1984, George W. Bush got in 2004 and Mitt Romney got in 2012 and we're not going to be able to do much better than that.
"We're at the upper limit and we can and should get the votes of African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans, and also the votes of young people."
Rove, a senior adviser and deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush and author of the new book
"The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters" — cited voting patterns in Florida and Texas.
"We have a Florida governor [Rick Scott] who got 20 percent of the African-American vote in running for re-election. We lost that state in 2012 by seven-tenth of 1 percent and we got roughly 5 percent of the African-American vote. If we got the 12 percent that George W. Bush got in 2004, we would've won Florida in 2012," he said.
"Texas is about as conservative a state as you can get and we have a Republican governor [Greg Abbott] who's a strong conservative and he got elected in 2014... and he got 50 percent of the Latino vote. Now, it helped that he's married to a Hispanic and he featured his mother-in-law in a television ad.
"It's always good to have your mother-in-law say nice things about you, says a great deal about your character, but he won on a conservative message among Latinos and we see this everywhere."
Rove called on the Republican Party to have confidence that its conservative principles "can be received and accepted by a growing number of Americans, no matter if they think they're conservatives or voted conservative before."
"We ought to have confidence in our ideas and carry them into their communities and neighborhoods," Rove told Hayworth.
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