Conservatives have facts and logic on their side but will not get anywhere with female voters until those principles are combined with empathy and an explanation of how their ideas would help the lives of individual people, according to former Hewlett-Packard CEO and former U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina.
Fiorina is the founder and head of the Unlocking Potential Project, a group dedicated to grassroots engagement of women on core issues. Her comments come in the wake of a new poll commissioned by right-leaning interest groups Crossroads GPS and American Action Network. The survey showed female voters still are not receptive to the messaging from the Republican Party.
Respondents characterized the GOP as “intolerant,” “lacking in compassion” and “stuck in the past.” A narrow plurality of married women do side with Republicans but single women of all ages prefer the Democrats by roughly a 40-point margin.
Fiorina says conservative women need to engage their friends because the case against continuing down the liberal road should be pretty simple.
“We need to stick with facts and data. The facts are on our side and this why Democrats continue to hurl what I call shameless, baseless propaganda, because they don’t have the facts,” said Fiorina, noting that the record of the Obama presidency has been anything but beneficial to women.
“More women are living in poverty than ever before. Women are bearing the brunt of the results of Obamacare. Women are not losing access to birth control as the Democrats claim, but they are losing access to their doctors. They’re losing access to their hospitals. They’re losing access to procedures that their doctors may be recommending,” said Fiorina.
“It is women and children who are being slaughtered by terrorists. It is women and children who are suffering in addition to soldiers of war. On the question of education, which women care deeply about, it is the teachers unions who are fighting against pay for performance. It is women as parents who lack choices in how to educate their children,” she said.
“I don’t think this is rocket science,” added Fiorina.
Why is the Republican Party having such a difficult time connecting with women? Fiorina sees two key reasons.
“I think the Democrats have very successfully used the ‘War on Women’ rhetoric to play up on women’s fears. They’re doing it again this election cycle. They used it very effectively in 2012. Unfortunately, in 2012, we never pushed back. We allowed Democrats to categorize women as single-issue voters, to categorize women as caring only about reproductive rights,” said Fiorina.
She says the other problem is how the right presents its messaging.
“Women don’t respond well to judgmental kinds of commentary. Women like to be persuaded by other women they know. I think our tone has to be empathetic. I think it has to be non-judgmental. I think we have to engage women in a grassroots effort,” said Fiorina.
The Unlocking Potential Project is focused on getting conservative women to intentionally engage their friends, co-workers and fellow church members in thoughtful discussions of the issues. Fiorina says the 2012 campaign showed that connecting on a personal level is the key to victory.
“In 2012, Mitt Romney won on every issue the exit polling data shows. But he lost by 62 points on the question of ‘cares about someone like me.’ Had he lost that question by 30 points he’d be president,” she said.
Fiorina says one good place to start chipping away at that chasm is to engage women on all the issues they care about.
“We’re not an interest group. We’re a majority of the country. Women care about every issue. They care about job creation. They care about health care. They care about terrorism. They care about security. They care about education, etc. One of the things we need to do is stop talking at high-level policy and start talking in a way that connects to a personal life,” said Fiorina.
She then used the example of taxation and regulation, suggesting an abstract discussion would do little good but for a woman interested in starting her own business, those issues could be intensely personal.
“In some states, it’ll take you 472 days to get through all the regulations and the permits. You might give up. That’s more than a year. If you make it through that process, you’re going to confront a tax code that’s extremely complex, thousands of pages. You might give up again because you can’t afford an accountant and a lawyer. That’s the impact at a personal level of over-taxation and over-regulation. That’s the way we have to speak to women, in a way that connects to their lives and their issues,” said Fiorina.
Fiorina says the perceived lack of personal empathy and the actual lack of an effective ground game are the two biggest impediments for the right in engaging women with conservative ideas. She asserts that the only way for conservatives and Republicans to narrow the gender gap is to change minds one at a time. She says doing the same thing cycle after cycle and hoping for different results is never going to work.
“If our party talks way up in the air, if our party comes across as judgmental, as lacking in empathy, as lacking in understanding of people’s real issues and problems, then we’re going to lose,” said Fiorina.
