Independent Voters Needed, Thompson Warns Republican Party
Posted on November 14, 2007 - Filed Under Elections, Third Party
Actor and former Senator Fred Thompson had a warning for his party yesterday:
Ignore the independent voter at your peril.
Thompson, a Republican 2008 Presidential nomination candidate whose candidacy started amid great hope but some experts think has fizzled versus sizzled, made comments that deserve to be looked at a bit more closely. They’re not comments Republicans like to hear, but they are underscored by the reality of the 2006 election results plus several books that have come out since then:
Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson said Sunday “the political pendulum is swinging” against his party, and Republicans needs to work harder to win over independent voters.
“Everybody knows what’s at stake next year, but I wonder if we’ve come to terms with the difficulty we’ve got as Republicans, and the fact that we’re going to have to do a lot of things very well to prevail,” the former Tennessee senator said.
What the Republican Party needs, Thompson said, is to nominate a candidate like himself who can “go before the American people and ask for the vote of a cross-section of Americans.”
He warned that there are a growing number of independents who are in danger of being swept up by the Democratic Party, and urged his party to “take our commonsense conservative principles and make them applicable to today’s circumstances.”
Polls have traditionally shown a split among independents. But now more than ever, polls show independent voters breaking towards the Democratic Party. Karl Rove’s past strategy was to conduct “mobilization elections” where the goal was to mobilize your supporters and get every single one of them out to the polls, and not worry about independent or centrist voters.
“For a lot of reasons, (independents) don’t like the ways things are going … but they also don’t particularly like the other side, but they are willing to give us a chance, willing to listen to us,” he said.
Thompson noted that only once in the past 50 years has a party been able to elect a president of its party three terms in a row.
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.