What Pawlenty and Walker had in common was that neither seemed to be listening to conservative Republican primary voters. They seemed to hearing about how to manipulate those voters from consultants and donors who despised the actual Republican electorate. It turns out that those voters were less dumb than the donors and consultants (and Walker and Pawlenty) assumed. Walker went off cluelessly into that good night by saying that the weakly performing candidates should drop out so that the Republican Party can unite behind an optimistic alternative to Trump.
That is nonsense. Trump is a symptom, and he will be gone soon enough. The disease is a party establishment that does not understand – and does not care to understand its own voters. It treats those voters as either a menace to be defeated, or a barbarian horde to be recruited. (Walker managed to do both in the course of his campaign.) Then, the establishment politicians wonder why they are distrusted and hated.
So how did Romney – a liberal Republican governor of a Democratic state – succeed where Walker and Pawlenty failed? One reason is that Romney listened to Republican voters and made an effort to articulate their principles and priorities.
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