According to former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, established Republican leaders are out of step with the party, which has increasingly shifted to a party for working-class voters.
"The Republican Party has changed," the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania said on CNN,
The Hill reports. "A lot of the people in this party, in leadership, don't recognize that, they refuse to accept it. And most of them are the funders. They have refused to accept that the Republican Party is no longer the white, suburban, corporate — you know, folks that go to the club.
"That's not the Republican Party anymore, the Republican Party is a party that is increasingly blue-collar."
Santorum pointed out that Republicans have lost support in middle-class suburbs, once a party bastion. He said that the Democrats have historically been the party for workers, but called their presumptive nominee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, "a Wall Street globalist." By contrast, the GOP nominee, billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump, is a "blue-collar guy."
House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, is committed to expanding support for the GOP, according to
The New York Times, while predicting that the upcoming election would begin "a fight for the soul of our party."
"Our job is not to preach to a shrinking choir; it's to win converts," Ryan said.
At a recent speech in Bangor, Maine,
The Washington Times reports Trump attacked the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for supporting the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement which he said would be a "disaster" for America.
"The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is totally controlled by the special interests groups, folks, just so you understand," Trump said in the largely blue-collar city. "And they are a special interest that want to have the deals they want to have. They want to have TPP."
"It will be the worst deal since NAFTA. It will drain the rest of your business out of Maine, believe me," Trump said.
Republican Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake has criticized Trump for his rhetoric, which has raised the former reality television star's profile among lower-income whites, but Flake worries it will alienate minority groups.
"We'll conclude we have to have a bigger tent and got to be more inclusive, particularly with Hispanics and other growing demographic groups," Flake told the Times, predicting what will happen after November. "And then maybe some populist will rise up again and we'll go through the whole same process again."