The biggest gathering yet of Republican presidential hopefuls this past weekend sharpened divisions in the broad field of candidates over the path and identity the party should take to return the GOP to the White House.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, on one side are Jeb Bush and Sens. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham, who emphasized that the party’s nominee needs to reach beyond the GOP’s base of mostly white and older conservative voters, given how the general electorate is growing increasingly diverse.
On the other sits a handful of presidential contenders, including Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who say the party’s nominee needs to be a dedicated conservative who can mobilize the religious right to turn out in droves in 2016.
Republicans in recent years have wrested control of Congress from Democrats, decisively in the case of the House, and they control a plurality of state governments. But President Barack Obama’s two wins showed how a Democrat can win nationally through a diverse coalition of voters without relying on traditional Republican strongholds.
Party leaders say Republicans can’t afford to choose between the two approaches: The party’s nominee both must excite grassroots conservatives and tap into slices of the electorate that don’t lean traditionally Republican.
“Of course candidates have to appeal to the Republican base to win a primary,” says Glenn McCall, a South Carolina Republican party leader and a co-author of the party’s 2013 report that urged the GOP to embrace an overhaul of immigration law. “But you also have to talk about new ideas and issues that relate to these communities that we have to make better headway in, the Hispanic, African-American and Asian-American communities.”
The two-day conference organized by the New Hampshire Republican Party attracted 18 declared and potential candidates to the state that hosts the nation’s first primary. One by one, the contenders addressed some 600 Republican activists in a packed hotel ballroom, where they hoped to stand out in a competition viewed as the most wide open in decades.
Jindal, who once supported Common Core, drew applause Saturday when he talked about going to court to extricate his state from the grade-level benchmarks in math and English. He also called for the end of “hyphenated Americans,” saying his parents came from India to Baton Rouge to assimilate, not to hold on to their homeland.
