RNC Chair Reince Priebus and his team reached out to more than 50,000 Americans to find out why they lost the last election. The big takeaway from the resulting report? It’s time to rebrand and remarket. They plan to spend $10 million this year alone to reach minority voters.
“It’s not necessarily what you say, it’s how you say it,” Priebus said on Friday’s Morning Joe. “If you go around saying biologically stupid things, and you poison the well, and you create a caricature, or at least you allow a caricature to become reality, I think it hurts your ability to win an election.”
He believes the 219 recommendations in the report–that range from passing comprehensive immigration reform to agreeing to fewer presidential debates–will “break a few pieces of china in order to get things straight” and help the party move forward.
Priebus strongly highlighted the mechanical shortcomings of the campaign, highlighting the success of Obama’s ground game, and vowing that the RNC plans to amp up its off-season campaigning efforts. “We’re in a permanent campaign, but we’ve been running 5 month campaigns,” he said.
Morning Joe host Scarborough asked if the party planned to rework its policies to match the bargaining, but Priebus asserted that the party needs to simply tell its story to win.
Minority outreach was also identified as a must-do for the party and Priebus seemed optimistic at the party’s future amongst minorities. “We’re going to go to historically black campuses, and we’re going to talk about our party and the things we believe in,” he said.
Guest Sam Stein of Huffington Post questioned how the GOP would reach a gay voter given that the party’s platform is a stated opposition to gay marriage.
“We might not agree on every single issue, but for the most part, if you look where we’re at in our economy, where we’re at with schools, our positions on the military, we agree on nearly everything,” Priebus said. “We disagree on one or two issues, I don’t see why that’s not a reasonable position to take.”
Priebus and Morning Joe pal Michael Steele got into it earlier this week over reconciling policy with minority outreach, so Scarborough joked that the two settle their differences with a network-hosted “cage fight.”
“If you all wear the right super hero uniforms, I think it could be entertaining,” he said.
Jane Timm