It's classic Rovian. They aren't trying to form coalitions. They are only interested in cutting down the votes for Democrats.
Becuase even if only a minority of blacks or gays or women or the poor vote for Republicans, those are votes that AREN'T going to the Democrats.
Here' a bit more on this. It extends far past just having databases..
AMY GOODMAN: What about the Republican strategy to reach more deeply into the African American, Latino communities, to immigrant communities?
PETER WALLSTEN: It's also a very important tenet of One Party Country, as we lay out in the book, that really under the leadership of the Bush brothers, George W. and Jeb, they tried to redefine the way the Republican Party goes after minority voters. Latinos, George W. Bush won 40% of the Hispanic vote nationally, which is a pretty remarkable number for Republicans. Jeb has won with huge numbers, not just the Cuban Republicans, but non-Cuban Hispanics in Florida who tend to vote Democratic, as well. And they did this with a strategy that some strategists call the “I love you” strategy, where they manage to appeal to a sense of emotion, rather than issues, in the case of Latinos.
In the case of African Americans, we can talk more about programs and issues that they use, but one that we lay out in the book is called the White House faith-based initiative, where the White House actually helped -- created a program to funnel taxpayer dollars to African American churches across the country, kind of bringing influential ministers into the fold, so they would turn around and campaign for Republicans.
You mentioned Hurricane Katrina. There's the immigration debate. There's lots of reasons right now why this outreach to minorities is strained. What we argue, though, is that the point was never to win a majority of these groups. The Karl Rove vision is to peel away slices of the electorate. So, Republicans don't need to win the majority of African Americans to win elections. They don't even need to win 20% of them. They could win 15% of African Americans, and that would give them the chance to really keep Democrats in the minority.
................... http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/13/1331232I think we need to face facts, the only reason the Repubs are struggeling is that they got everyhting they wanted and those policies blew up in thier faces. They screwed up. They screwed up too much to spin or hide. But the RNC isn't stupid They will learn and figure out how to hide the harm they do better next time. They wil figure out how get thier unpopular and failed policies passed by making them sound like something else.
And if we are depending on the Repubs to screw up just to get them out of office and stop thier policies, we will never win.
So what are we going to do about it?