How Smart Republicans Can Appeal to Normie Voters
As this year’s campaign season shifts into full gear, voters across the country confront the familiar feeling that our elected officials have lost touch with the issues most of us care about. The concerns of the average voter are not political investigations or who’s up in the polls, but rather the more mundane, kitchen table issues that dictate their lives: crime, health care, education, and energy.
Normal people will decide the result of the 2024 elections—not Beltway partisans and media insiders. It’s not too late for our political class to take note.
Republicans in Congress plan to notch some wins for the “base” this year—including investigating the Biden family’s business dealings with foreign governments and holding the administration accountable for an unprecedented flow of migrants across the southern border. But Republicans seeking to win a majority in 2024 should set one final resolution before the campaign season hits its apex: commit to reaching everyday voters outside of our base with positive solutions on the issues they remain focused on.
Here are a few of them:
1. Support good policing and prosecution. In recent years, voters around the country heard the call to “Defund the Police” loud and clear—and they do not like it. Crime exploded in many urban centers and reverberated out into the suburbs over the past few years (though some cities have seen violent crime decline slightly from recent peaks), hitting voters where they live and work. In response to the Democrats’ radicalism on law enforcement, Republicans should reply not with a blanket endorsement of all policing. Instead, they should try to split a supermajority of voters from the Democrats’ radical fringe: we support good policing. This acknowledges that there are indeed problems in certain departments and with certain officers, but that overall there exists a growing need for good, effective policing in our communities.
Congressional leaders should mimic the success of Reps. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) with their viral hearings on campus antisemitism, and haul in “progressive” district attorneys like George Gascon of Los Angeles and Larry Krasner of Philadelphia to ask them why successful prosecutions in their cities are down while crime is up. If Republicans can successfully use their congressional authority to shine a light on lax, defund-focused Democratic officials, urban voters across the country—those most affected by rising violent crime—might give our candidates another look.
2. Promote quality and choice in healthcare to drive down costs. Healthcare is another top issue for most Americans which seems to represent a third rail among elected Republicans. The GOP was caught embarrassingly flat-footed when it regained control of government in 2017. After nearly a decade of railing against Obamacare, Republicans presented no quality-driven alternative. But reforms that lower prescription drug costs, address hospital consolidations, and give more transparency to what consumers are paying at the doctor’s office would be welcome improvements to the current system. Voters consistently rank healthcare as a top issue, one where Republicans are notably silent—or know what they oppose more than anything else. Those Republicans who want to win should stop ignoring it and present ideas that leverage the market and competition to offer solutions.
3. Reduce the cost of higher education—by attacking administrative bloat. It is true that the Biden administration’s constant efforts to subsidize college graduates are fundamentally unfair to working-class voters—exactly the people who are trending Republican every cycle. But limiting the conversation to how to pay for the skyrocketing cost of higher education on the back-end misses an enormous opportunity. After all, it is the administrative bloat on campus—including among hated DEI bureaucrats—that has most contributed to spiking college costs. As universities hit an all-time low in popularity, Republicans in Congress should continue to push to tax their endowments to provide direct relief to graduates who are struggling, as a trio of lawmakers did in late 2022. Reducing the cost of higher education is a winning issue where Republicans can make a difference.
4. Promote a real “all of the above” plan on energy, while protecting the environment. For the first time this century, America became a net energy exporter. This was extremely popular with voters, and remains so. Regular working people are not looking to radically remake our economy or “end fossil fuels,” but rather to afford their electric and grocery bills and get on with their lives. A practical plan to produce more of the energy that we need right now would be similarly popular with voters, and it could be green as well—if it includes an investment in next-generation nuclear energy. Nuclear power is the greenest way we know of to produce energy, and works safely in countries like France. Georgia just opened the United States’ first nuclear power plant in over forty years.
Republican environmental policies should not stop with energy production. Cleaning up our waterways, protecting fisheries, and managing our forests better to reduce increasingly-costly and deadly wildfires (like last year’s in Hawaii) would be winning priorities. Regular voters should hear loud and clear what the “conserve” in conservative stands for, and that the GOP has responsible energy and climate solutions that are based in reality, can lower costs, and respect our natural environment.
With the Democratic Party increasingly captured by a radical, over-educated fringe, Republicans have a fantastic opportunity to establish ourselves as the adults in the room in 2024. That means being, and acting, more normal. We cannot control who will be running at the top of the ticket, but we can set the agenda in Congress—especially in the House.
Holding the Biden administration accountable is essential, but if normie voters only know about political investigations when they’re preparing to vote in November, the GOP will have failed, and for good reason. Republicans must also offer practical, conservative solutions to the problems regular voters face, and show them how right-of-center policies can help improve their lives and our society. After all, that is what most voters are looking for.
Albert Eisenberg is a political strategist who runs the messaging firm BlueStateRed. Based between Charleston, SC, and Washington, he has been featured on RealClearPolitics, Fox, Newsweek, and elsewhere. @Albydelphia.