Memo
to GOP: Here's how to attract women
Top CEO schools party on engaging female
voters with conservative ideas
Conservatives have facts and logic on their side
but will not get anywhere with female voters until those principles are combined
with empathy and an explanation of how their ideas would help the lives of
individual people, according to former Hewlett-Packard CEO and former U.S.
Senate candidate Carly Fiorina.
Fiorina is the founder and head of the Unlocking
Potential Project, a group dedicated to grassroots engagement of women on core
issues.
Her comments come in the wake of a new poll
commissioned by right-leaning interest groups Crossroads GPS and American
Action Network. The survey showed female voters still are not receptive to the
messaging from the Republican Party.
Respondents characterized the GOP as
“intolerant,” “lacking in compassion” and “stuck in the past.” A narrow
plurality of married women does side with Republicans, but single women of all
ages prefer Democrats by roughly a 40-point margin.
Fiorina said conservative women need to engage
their friends because the case against continuing down the liberal road should
be pretty simple.
“We need to stick with facts and data. The facts
are on our side, and this why Democrats continue to hurl what I call shameless,
baseless propaganda, because they don’t have the facts,” said Fiorina, noting
that the record of the Obama presidency has been anything but beneficial to
women.
“More women are living in poverty than ever before,”
she said. “Women are bearing the brunt of the results of Obamacare. Women are
not losing access to birth control as the Democrats claim, but they are losing
access to their doctors. They’re losing access to their hospitals. They’re
losing access to procedures that their doctors may be recommending.”
She said, “It is women and children who are
being slaughtered by terrorists. It is women and children who are suffering in
addition to soldiers of war. On the question of education, which women care
deeply about, it is the teachers unions who are fighting against pay for
performance. It is women as parents who lack choices in how to educate their
children.”
Fiorina added, “I don’t think this is rocket
science.”
Why is the Republican Party having such a difficult
time connecting with women? Fiorina sees
two key reasons. “I think the Democrats
have very successfully used the ‘War on Women’ rhetoric to play up on women’s
fears,” she said. “They’re doing it again this election cycle. They used it
very effectively in 2012. Unfortunately, in 2012, we never pushed back. We
allowed Democrats to categorize women as single-issue voters, to categorize
women as caring only about reproductive rights.”
She said the other problem is how the right
presents its messaging.
“Women don’t respond well to judgmental kinds of
commentary,” Fiorina said. “Women like to be persuaded by other women they
know. I think our tone has to be empathetic. I think it has to be
non-judgmental. I think we have to engage women in a grassroots effort.”
The Unlocking Potential Project is focused on
getting conservative women to intentionally engage their friends, co-workers
and fellow church members in thoughtful discussions of the issues. Fiorina said
the 2012 campaign showed that connecting on a personal level is the key to
victory.
“In 2012, Mitt Romney won on every issue the
exit polling data shows,” she said. “But he lost by 62 points on the question
of ‘cares about someone like me.’ Had he lost that question by 30 points he’d
be president.”
Fiorina said one good place to start chipping
away at that chasm is to engage women on all the issues they care about.
“We’re not an interest group,” she said. “We’re
a majority of the country. Women care about every issue. They care about job
creation. They care about health care. They care about terrorism. They care
about security. They care about education, etc. One of the things we need to do
is stop talking at high-level policy and start talking in a way that connects
to a personal life.”
She then used the example of taxation and
regulation, suggesting an abstract discussion would do little good but for a
woman interested in starting her own business, those issues could be intensely
personal.
“In some states, it’ll take you 472 days to get
through all the regulations and the permits. You might give up. That’s more
than a year,” Fiorina said. “If you make it through that process, you’re going
to confront a tax code that’s extremely complex, thousands of pages. You might
give up again because you can’t afford an accountant and a lawyer. That’s the
impact at a personal level of over-taxation and over-regulation. That’s the way
we have to speak to women, in a way that connects to their lives and their
issues.”
Fiorina said the perceived lack of personal empathy
and the actual lack of an effective ground game are the two biggest impediments
for the right in engaging women with conservative ideas. She asserted that the
only way for conservatives and Republicans to narrow the gender gap is to
change minds one at a time. She said doing the same thing cycle after cycle and
hoping for different results is never going to work.
“If our party talks way up in the air, if our
party comes across as judgmental, as lacking in empathy, as lacking in
understanding of people’s real issues and problems,” she said, “then we’re
going to lose.”
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/09/memo-to-gop-heres-how-to-attract-women/#672AYk2dO87pTqUR.99
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