Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Ted Cruz's 2016 Strategy Is Turning Out White Voters Who Didn't Participate in 2012

Ted Cruz speaks to media in Weare, N.H. 
Photo: Elise Amendola, AP
Ted Cruz has mapped out a path to the White House that all but ignores the explosion of minority voters in America.
The Texas senator's general election strategy depends almost wholly upon maximizing turnout among millions of conservative white voters — mostly evangelical Christians and the white working class — who didn't participate in the last presidential contest.
At the same time, Cruz's team is banking on a sharp decline in black and Hispanic support for the 2016 Democratic nominee, whoever it is, returning to voter trends before Barack Obama shook up the electorate as the nation's first black president and won an overwhelming share of support from non-white voters.
It is a strategy that defies the conventional wisdom in the GOP that says the party can win the White House again only if it appeals to political moderates and non-white voters who are becoming a greater share of the voting-age population as each day passes.
Cruz and longtime aide Jason Johnson
"I'm an outlier," said longtime Cruz aide Jason Johnson, the chief architect of the Cruz playbook, which he concedes is not in line with modern-day Republican thinking.
Yet with overwhelming confidence born from a year of studying voter trends, Johnson insists the first-term Texas senator can win the general election by motivating a coalition of his party's most reliable supporters.
"It is absolutely the case that in 2012, there were a little over 2 million fewer white non-Hispanics that voted compared to 2008," Johnson said this week in an interview with The Associated Press. "They sat it out."
Read the rest of the story HERE.

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1 comment:

cimbri said...

A Trump/Cruz ticket would probably be unbeatable. Both candidates bring in gobs of new voters.