Women are the key to winning

Frank Luntz spoke in Tucson for the Goldwater Institute this week. He is considered one of the top political researchers in America. In fact President Obama said following a PBS presidential debate “when Frank Luntz asks you to talk to his focus group you talk to his focus group”. Frank was very erudite and worked the room like a ring master. You would think that his interactions with the crowd were staged because of how well orchestrated they seemed. When a middle aged ladies cell phone rang he quipped “that is the worse ring I have ever heard” and snatched her phone and gave it to a teenage boy in the audience. Frank told the kid “I will give you $100 for your favorite charity if you will program the ring to “play that funky music white boy”. The kid accomplished the task and received his $100 gift. At one point he asked how many Jewish people were in the crowd. One woman raised her hand and he said “raising your hand when someone asks if you’re Jewish has not worked out so well for us in the past”. This caused the audience to gasp. But, Frank is not shy. Neither was he reticent to let us know that Republicans have a huge public relations problem. He played many campaign ads complete with focus group graphs (republicans in red, democrats in blue) assessing their positive or negative responses during the ads. One ad that cost the Republicans a seat in Pennsylvania featured an enormous grotesque puppet of Nancy Pelosi hovering over America menacingly mouthing that she was going to take over the country. This played particularly poorly with women. They may not like Nancy, but they took offense to the caricature of her and the portrayal of her as a monster. Another ad that cost the democrats the Massachusetts senate race featured the scary voice announcer that you hear promoting movies talking negatively about Scott Brown. Women were turned off. Brown countered the negative scary ad with him in his kitchen in short sleeves with his kids pictures on the fridge saying “my opponent has been running negative ads about me; let me tell you who Scott Brown is”. It won the women and the election. The language that we use presenting the ideas is critical to winning elections. Capitalism is out, free enterprise is in. Republican sounds too much like repugnant, but most people like "independent thinkers". And it is also important that we select candidates that have the "happy warrior" characteristics of Ronald Reagan. Reagan was hard not to like, even if you didn’t like his ideas. Luntz talked about the Republican leadership and quipped that when Mitch McConnell had heart surgery it took 10 hours, 8 of which the doctors were trying to find his heart! If Republicans are going to win elections they will need to win women and independents. We not only need to bring the right ideas to the table, we need to have the right table cloth and settings.