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Tuesday 6 January 2009

What McCain should do after Super Tuesday

St Louis, Missouri
It is telling that John McCain’s lead in national polls of Republican primary voters is now greater than Hillary Clinton’s among Democratic voters. As Michael Barone points out, few would have expected the Republican contest this year to finish earlier than the Democrats but barring a major shock that’s what will happen.

This gives the Republicans a real opportunity in what will be a tough year for them. McCain needs to do two things once the nomination is secured: reach out to conservatives and appeal to swing state voters. These two things might sound contradictory but they need not be. To conservatives, McCain should emphasise that his record is actually really quite conservative—as Steve Hayes notes in the Weekly Standard, McCain was a Reagan Republican, not a Ford one, in 1976. The only issue on which he can be said to have definitely broken from conservative principles is campaign finance reform; immigration is an issue on which different strands of conservatism take different positions. McCain should emphasise his conservative positions while the Democratic nominating contest rages and monopolises the media’s attention.

Then once the Democrats have a nominee, McCain should start an aggressive campaign using his most popular and well know surrogates, the reform Republicans. The Democrats will be divided and bruised once their primary fight ends and McCain’s strategy should be to rock them back on their heels with a strong start to campaigning in the purple states.  

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