Adopt the Canadian Tories approach to winning over minorities:
1)Accept that Hispanics generally don't go for abortion/gay marriage social conservatism and adopt a "family first" approach. This would include lots of rhetoric about small business, hard working families, and insinuating that the Democrats are patronizing elitists.
2) Adopt big government conservatism with lots of targeted tax credits and allowances. Ex: Child care allowances. This meshes well with the rhetoric in #1.
3) Not sure how feasible this is in the American system, but adopt a much more disciplined communications strategy. Adopt a unified, disciplined message and stick to it. Try to avoid Akin moments.
1) Rhetoric about hard working families? What kind of rhetoric? Talking about your party's cutting funding from the public schools their children attend? Or about reducing general revenue contributions to state universities, resulting in high tuition that those families often cannot afford? Or about treating the "evil public sector union workers" like pinatas when the reality is that a lot of Hispanics - particularly Hispanic women - would not be middle class were it not for their county and municipal government jobs. (What other job opportunities do you think there are for Latinas in rural South/West Texas?)
2) The people who write checks to the GOP are not your kind of conservative, Al. They don't care about "strengthening families." Only the useful idiots in the heartland care about that. The GOP's donors care about one thing - ensuring they pay as little tax as humanly possible. And the only way to do that is to "broaden the base and lower/flatten the rates" which means fewer deductions (which they will call "loopholes") and not more. Mitt Romney's 47% comment more or less cemented the belief that Republicans hate and disdain people who do not pay net federal income tax, and your suggestion would only increase the number of people in this category.
3) Not sure what to do about that. Todd Akin was only saying what he really felt and that is the problem. You could stop nominating people like him, but the sort of people who vote in GOP primaries tend to feel the same way he does.
