The CNN debate featured peevish exchanges between Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. | AP Photos GOP fears rise on 2012 tone, message

MESA, Ariz. — In 2008, after Republicans were routed in the presidential and congressional elections, there was widespread consensus within elite GOP circles about the party’s structural problems: The Republican voter base was too old, too white, too male and too strident for the party to prosper long term in a country growing ever more diverse.

Four years later, many of the same GOP leaders are watching with rising dismay as the 2012 presidential campaign has featured excursions into social issues like contraception and a sprint by the candidates to strike the toughest stance against illegal immigration, issues they say are far removed from the workaday concerns of the independent voters Republicans need to evict Barack Obama from the White House.


To those Republicans, the probable result looks more and more like a general election fought on a much narrower band of turf than the GOP leaders assumed even a few months ago. As recently as 2010, when Republicans elected historic numbers of women and minorities to high office, a permanent expansion of the conservative coalition looked within the realm of possibility to party strategists.

The phenomenon of a party talking to itself — rather than reaching out to new voters — was on sharp display at a candidates debate here Wednesday night marked by nearly two hours of peevish and often confusing exchanges between Mitt Romney and his surging challenger, Rick Santorum.

Even before the debate, an array of prominent Republicans, in interviews with POLITICO, were pleading for the candidates to pay attention to the appearance of tone-deafness and do more to show they desire — and can deliver — a more inclusive and forward-looking party.

“We can still be a party that’s for border security and one that at the same time says, ‘Hey we’re not an anti-immigrant party,’” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, himself the son of Indian immigrants. “As a country and as a party, we’re not people who are going to turn people away from the emergency room. … We don’t need to change our ideology. We need to be more articulate in voicing the aspirational spirit of America.”

Jindal suggested that, on the state level, Republicans had been more successful promoting a positive agenda, rather than digging in with an all-negative message about the president’s failures,.

“The party has to offer compelling alternatives,” Jindal said. “Voters may dislike [Obama] on spending, the economy and ‘Obamacare,’ but they still think he’s a nice person. Demonizing the president is not gonna win the election.”

“It’s important that voters see a Republican Party that is inclusive and is not exclusive,” agreed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

Cantor said the right approach is not to avoid social issues or immigration but to recognize that, for many of the voters the GOP needs most, “jobs and the economy” are preoccupying concerns. “Independent voters,” he added, “will give you credit” when addressing divisive issues “by trying to find a way to bridge differences.”

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie warned in more dire terms that, among Hispanic voters in particular, the GOP had to move quickly to deliver a more compelling message — or else “2016, 2020 is when it becomes acute if we don’t move to fix it now.”

“If the Republican nominee in 2020 gets the same percentage of African-American, Hispanic and Asian-American votes that Sen. McCain got, the Democrat will win by 14 points,” Gillespie said, adding that without some comprehensive immigration reform deal, “it doesn’t mean we can’t grow our share of the Hispanic vote, but it does lower the ceiling of how much we can grow it.”

While the task of courting Hispanic voters is a long-range project for Republicans, the work has to start in 2012, strategists say, before the party is consigned to oblivion by a group that’s rapidly expanding its political influence.

Just 26 percent of Hispanic voters told NBC pollsters last month that they’d support Romney over Obama. In November, the respected Pew Hispanic Center found just 16 percent of Hispanics named the GOP as the party to which they felt closest.

For Romney — still viewed as the party’s most likely nominee — the goal of reaching Hispanics probably didn’t get any easier Wednesday night, after he praised some of Arizona’s stringent immigration policies as a “model” for the nation. Speaking in the state that triggered a national firestorm over immigration in 2010, Romney once again pledged to drop the Justice Department challenge to Arizona’s law giving new power to local authorities to crack down on illegals and highlighted several other measures that are off-putting to many Hispanics.

“I will drop those lawsuits on Day One. I’ll also complete the fence. I’ll make sure we have enough Border Patrol agents to secure the fence. And I will make sure we have an E-Verify system and require employers to check the documents of workers,” Romney said. “You do that, and just as Arizona is finding out, you can stop illegal immigration. It’s time we finally did it.”

As Romney heads into the general election, he’ll have to explain those comments to a much wider audience — including Latinos whose view of Romney has steadily worsened over the course of the campaign.

“The party as a whole needs to [court Latinos], but Romney will be the leader of the party. … I think he needs to work very hard, especially with the Hispanic community. Democrats try to use immigration as a disqualifying issue for Republican candidates, despite the fact that Obama has done nothing,” said veteran Republican presidential strategist Charlie Black. “You’ve got to get past that so the Democrats can’t use it to disqualify you on jobs issues.”

Black, who supports Romney, said the former Massachusetts governor is aware of the work he has to do with Latinos: “He’s got to focus on primary voters here for another few weeks, but I know he is sensitive to it.”

Karl Rove, who as President George W. Bush’s senior adviser focused on trying to grow the Republican share of the Hispanic vote, said that on immigration the primary debate has “not been as problematic as I thought it would be,” but he also cautioned that “we’ve done little to prepare for the general election.”

He said many Hispanic-Americans would be receptive to Republican positions and rhetoric on traditional values and support for entrepreneurs, but need to hear positive appeals, in addition to promises to secure the border.

Both Rove and Cantor also warned that the media focus — particularly on televised debates — tends to shine attention on process stories and what Rove called “intramural warfare” rather than the broader messages of candidates.

But Hispanics are only one wing of the electoral coalition that Bush-era Republicans hoped to build that now appears increasingly unfriendly to the party this year.

If Romney’s comments on immigration have bloodied him for the fall campaign, then the whole GOP field’s extended back and forth on contraception — last night and on the trail for weeks now — is unlikely to win over many of the independent suburban women who helped Bush to reelection eight years ago.

After initially deriding the contraception issue as a marginal topic in the 2012 campaign, the candidates all took the bait when asked about it in Wednesday night’s debate, prompting a lengthy conversation that featured Ron Paul commenting on the difference “hormonally” — or lack thereof — between birth control medication and the morning-after pill.

As with immigration, few top Republicans will call for an out-and-out revision of their party’s stance on the issue.

But concerns about tone and attitude abound, as senior GOP strategists fret — mostly in private — about the message it sends to have four middle-aged or elderly white men holding forth about birth control in a national forum.

“Life is a winning issue for conservatives. But it’s always been an issue where tone matters and imagery matters. How you talk about it matters. We win on life,” Gillespie said. “Whichever side is deemed as extreme on the issue is losing. If you’re seen as extreme or trying to impose your views on others you run into trouble on either the pro-life side or pro-choice side.”

Former Bush White House political director Sara Fagen called the contraception flare-up a “distraction” from issues Republicans are more likely to win on — a point other Republicans echoed, emphasizing the need to stay focused on the economy.

“As a general rule, when you’re in a bucket talking about women’s health and morality that’s not a space you want to be in long term, particularly when people are focused on jobs and gas prices,” she said. “Not only is it a distraction, but it makes voters think we’re not focused on things that are important to them.”

And former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who has insistently called for modernizing the GOP on subjects such as gay rights and immigration, said that on a range of issues, “The Republican Party risks finding itself in the dustbin of history if it fails to recognize the inexorable demographic trends sweeping America.”

“This doesn’t mean you give up your core principles but rather that you connect them to the broader American themes of opportunity, jobs, freedom and individual dignity,” he said.

There’s always the hope, some party leaders point out, that Obama will simply do the GOP’s work for it with Latinos, women, independents, seniors and other influential, politically volatile voting blocs.

If the economy takes another turn for the worse, the jobless rate jumps, gas prices continue to rise and Obama fails to respond effectively, the president’s current advantages could quickly melt away, driving voters across demographic groups toward the anti-incumbent party.

Former Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, a Romney backer who was governor of Utah before joining the Bush administration, argued that the task of coalition-building is inherently different for a party that’s out of office, and that to expect the GOP to work with Bush-style electoral math is simply unrealistic.

“The coalition for Republicans to win is a coalition of disaffected people,” Leavitt said, noting that means winning back “groups that last time abandoned the party.”

“We will have Hispanics and Latinos who do feel let down by Obama. … The best thing that can be done, and the thing I think people are yearning for most, is an economic turnaround.”

As to the risk of alienating swing voters in a long nomination fight, Leavitt shrugged that that’s just the way primary politics works.

“That is of course the age-old dilemma of running in a primary with the understanding that you’re going to have to run in a general,” Leavitt said. “If I [had a solution], I’d be a popular guy.”