Karl Rove offered some advice to his fellow Republicans about what the party needs to do to prevent last Tuesday’s election from happening again on Sean Hannity’s radio show Monday. On the list: when it comes to engaging voters, be more like former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean.
“I hate to say it, but we need to copy what Howard Dean did,” he told Hannity. “And that is make our ground game in all 50 states.”
Rove said Republicans had a “reasonably good” ground game in Florida and Ohio, two major battlegrounds they ended up losing to President Obama. (Mitt Romney’s Florida adviser said in the days after the election that the state was “winnable” for Romney but that the organization there was lacking.)
Rove told Hannity that the lack of GOP ground game made a big difference in other states.
“We didn’t have a ground game in a lot of these states with Senate races and so we lost North Dakota by 3,300 votes,” he said. He added the lack of ground game also cost the GOP a chance at winning the Senate seat in Montana. “We need to have a better ground game in all 50 states,” Rove said.
Some more advice from Rove:
• Move the convention to June
“It made sense to have the convention in late August when you wanted to minimize the amount of time during which you could spend your general election public financing,” Rove told Hannity. “But nobody’s ever going to use public financing again, so we need to move the convention back to June or July so our nominee gets picked and then can begin raising money for the general election and doesn’t get outspent.”
• Get on social media
“I think it is absolutely vital that we recognize that the old saw in politics that if you’re responding you’re losing — in the hyperkinetic age that we live in with cable, Internet, you name it, Twitter you name it, we’ve got to have a different attitude in a presidential race,” Rove said. “Because if you’re not responding, sometimes you are losing.”
• Stop allowing the ‘liberal media’ moderate primary debates
“We need to do something about these primaries. Look we’re not going to change the structure, that’s organic, but we need to reduce the media’s power over the Republican primary,” Rove said. “The number of debates that we had was jaw-dropping. And most of the time we had some liberal media figure whose intention was to depict the GOP and conservatives as some nut fringe group. We had debates in which most of the questions were on abortion and contraception and very little on jobs, economy, deficit, debt, spending and health care.“
Rove called on future Republican presidential candidates to agree to a list of RNC-approved primary debates that would give the party a hand in selecting the moderator.
Here’s Rove talking about Dean:
The whole interview is here.
