As the GOP boosts efforts to sway Millennials to side with the Republican Party, political pundit Ann Coulter is shunning such efforts, saying the GOP is “spinning your wheels” with tactics to reach Generation Y.
Coulter spoke about the Republican Party’s efforts to reach young voters in an interview with Red Alert Politics on Thursday at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind.
While youth outreach has been at the forefront of the GOP’s efforts to revamp the party since losing the 2012 presidential election, Coulter said such energy is better focused elsewhere.
“We may not be able to win the youth vote the same way we may not be able to win the immigrant vote,” she told Red Alert Politics. “I don’t think we should keep chasing the votes of people who are never going to vote Republican — at least they won’t vote Republican in the case of young people for another 10, 15 years once they’re paying taxes, raising children, worried about crime in their neighborhoods.”
Instead, Coulter said, the GOP should direct its attention toward satisfying and reaching its primary base: white, blue-collar men.
“If you could just increase the white vote, the white, male, blue-collar vote, that’s still a much bigger demographic than either young people or recent immigrants,” the conservative pundit said. “Increase the blue-collar, white, male vote, or just the white vote, say, but just 2 percentage points. That overwhelms the young people’s vote. That overwhelms the immigrants’ vote.”
After Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee and College Republican National Committee both conducted postmortems in an attempt to identify the party’s shortcomings.
While the RNC conceded the party needs to revamp its messaging, both agreed outreach to Millennials was crucial to winning future elections. And the party committee began to focus its efforts on such, even going so far as to hire a director specifically to oversee youth outreach.
But Coulter said the RNC’s push is “spinning your wheels.”
“I think the way you appeal to what your actual base is, which is the middle class, which is white, blue-collar workers, and apparently we’re growing with black males, is to have policies that appeal to them,” she said. “The Republican Party is the party of the middle class. It is the party of long-time Americans. The Democrats are the party of the very rich, of the welfare-receiving poor and of the foreigners.”
Coulter also noted Democrats, to the contrary, rarely make attempts to reach voters outside the party’s core base.
“You don’t see Democrats fixating on, ‘How do we get the gun rights people to vote for us?’ No, they figure out what their base is and try to run the table on those demographics. That’s what Republicans need to do,” she said.
After President Barack Obama won 66 and 67 percent of the youth vote in 2008 and 2012, respectively, the GOP has made outreach to Millennials a priority, especially with the upcoming 2016 election.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a likely 2016 contender, has led the charge in reaching Millennials and made the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs a pet issue — one that affects the tech-savvy Generation Y.
While others look to the economy and Obamacare as issues likely to sway Millennials to vote Republican, Coulter said immigration reform is one young people should be concerned with.
“The country is being changed and already has been changed,” she said. “Millennials can’t get jobs. This is a tough economy. But just looking out across the country, if this country had the same demographics as before Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act, Romney would’ve won a bigger landslide than Reagan did in 1980. That is a massive change to this country.”
