GOP strategist Karl Rove says the GOP could lose the Senate majority unless the party’s base of supporters volunteer more time and cash to the establishment’s preferred candidates.
The GOP will win a Senate majority “only… if Republicans open their wallets to candidates whom they may have never met, and… clear their calendars to volunteer to identify and get out the vote,” Rove wrote in Wall Street Journal op-ed.
The GOP needs the base’s support even though the public is rejecting Democratic politicians, said Rove, who was nicknamed “the architect” when he helped President George W. Bush win the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
“The president’s job approval numbers are lousy, no Democrat in a competitive Senate race polls regularly above 50%… independents are trending Republican [and] the midterm environment is terrible for Democrats,” he wrote. “Yet each passing day provides evidence [that] a GOP Senate majority is still in doubt,” because Democrats have more cash than Republicans.
“It is unfortunate that the ‘architect’ fails to see that the thing holding back the GOP is not money, but its failure to connect with the working class even as the Democrats destroy it” with poverty-boosting policies, responded one caustic Hill aide.
“There’s a disconnect between the Republican establishment and actual Republican voters, independents and Reagan Democrats,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
The disconnect is most obvious over immigration, where the establishment’s push for more low-wage immigrants was blocked by unyielding public opposition, said Krikorian, who has long been critical of the high-immigration policies pushed by Rove and the GOP’s business wing.
“Now it is election time, the pro-amnesty Republican establishment wants to make nice with the voters, at lest until the election is over,” said Krikorian.
Rove’s op-ed outlined the GOP’s funding shortfall, which exists despite extensive Democratic criticism of wealthy business executives’ competence and character. “Between Sept. 1 and election day, Democratic Senate candidates, party committees and outside groups have run or placed $109 million in television advertising, while Republican candidates, party committees and groups have $85 million in television time,” he wrote.
“Republicans do not need to outspend Democrats to prevail… But Republicans must reach a certain sufficiency of advertising in the next six weeks,” said Rove.
The apparent lack of donations comes after Rove’s business allies spent two years — and likely, hundreds of millions of dollars –pushing Congress to pass a very unpopular bill that would have amnestied at least 11 million illegals, and doubled the current annual inflow of 1 million low-wage immigrants and 700,000 guest-workers.
That bill was blocked in the House when the GOP’s base — plus lopsided margins of American middle-class and working-class voters — refused to be stampeded by the massive PR campaign jointly run by the Democrat Party, the media and Rove’s business allies.
The funding shortage also follows a bruising primary season in which Rove’s corporate allies spent tens of millions of dollars hammering tea party candidates. That money defeated tea party-backed candidates in Mississippi, Kansas, New York, Illinois, Alabama and elsewhere.
Rove and his corporate-funded allies are also blamed by many people within the GOP base for the 2012 defeat. Rove’s network is “the root of all evil” in the Republican Party, wrote Eric Erickson just after the November 2012 defeat. Erickson’s article in RedState.com was titled “The Incestuous Bleeding of the Republican Party.”
However, said Krikorian, the GOP’s legislators are getting slightly better on immigration, if only because of pressure from their voters.
“Even [Sen. John] McCain is saying there has to be border security now before legalization — I don’t believe the guy, but he has to say the right thing,” Krikorian said.
Also, “none of the Republican candidates who have a good change of taking a Democratic seat is terrible on immigration,” he said. Some, including Rep. Tom Cotton in Arkansas and Scott Brown in New Hampshire, are using the issue to boost their support, he said.
Even Rove is quietly adjusting his policies. He helped create the Crossroads network of political groups, some of whose executives are now running an anti-amnesty TV ad in Kentucky aimed at the Democrat now running against GOP leader Sen. Mitch McConnell.
The ad attacks the Democratic candidate for her support for the Senate’s amnesty bill that Rove supported throughout 2013 and early 2014.
Rove did not respond to an email from The Daily Caller.
