White working-class Democrats are moving to the Republican Party and could help in its revitalization after this month’s crippling GOP election losses, a veteran political strategist says.
“American whites … are still the single largest enchilada in the game and they will be for another twenty, thirty years,’’ John O’Sullivan, an editor-at-large for the National Review, tells Newsmax TV in an exclusive interview.
“Indeed, there is a swing vote that could come the Republicans’ way – and that’s the last of the Reagan Democrats. The white working class which used to be the solid backbone of the Democratic Party has been gradually coming over.’’
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Sullivan blames former Massachusetts Senator Mitt Romney’s troubled campaign for the swing not arriving more quickly.
“The reason that we didn’t get more of them this time – Republicans didn’t win more – is because, with all his virtues, Mitt Romney was the least good candidate to appeal to white-working class voters,’’ O’Sullivan said.
“He was Mr. Bain Capital, Mr. Vulture Capitalist. Those voters, out there to be won, and will be won, but they weren’t won this time.’’
O’Sullivan — a Senior Fellow at the National Review Institute and former senior policy writer under British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher — said the reports of the GOP’s death are premature , and inaccurate.
“Bob Novak, a very good journalist, after Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976, announced that the Republican Party was dead and finished,’’ he said.
“Of course, four years later Ronald Reagan began twelve years of Republican dominance and ended the Cold War and so on. Parties don’t die, they mutate, they are going to do some re-thinking and they’ll come back.’’
O’Sullivan, like many political pundits, believes that one major key to a GOP renaissance will be formulating a more cohesive appeal to Hispanic and Latino voters.
“The Republicans have done a very bad job of going into Hispanic areas and establishing themselves and demonstrating that they treat all voters the same,’’ he said.
“That’s the key in politics. Whatever you say, you should say the same thing to everybody. In the case of Latino voters, most of them are Americans like other Americans.
“They are middle class, they have jobs, they are concerned about the economy, and they wanted their children to get a good education.’’
O’Sullivan, like many Republicans, believes the Obama Administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack, in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed, has been shrouded in a Watergate-type cover-up.
But he said it is difficult to predict what closed-door congressional hearings about who knew what about the assault will ultimately reveal.
“It’s very hard to say because although the Republicans control the House, they don’t control the Senate and, of course, they don’t have strong voices in the media,’’ said O’Sullivan, author of the bestseller “The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister.’’
“Newsmax is an exception here but in the establishment media, I prefer that to the ‘mainstream’ media by the way, the establishment media doesn’t really want this case to become a strong embarrassment to the president.’’