Rove: GOP Establishment Can’t Win Senate Alone
5:01 PM 09/18/2014
Neil Munro
The Daily Caller
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.
http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/18/ro...-senate-alone/