With the Republican presidential contest dragging on longer than they’d hoped, party officials are urging the remaining candidates to refocus their debate on the economy and to put aside arguments over divisive social issues that party leaders fear could undermine GOP efforts to beat President Obama in November.
The warnings come as the race boils down to front-runner Mitt Romney and his chief conservative rival, Rick Santorum, whose unabashed embrace of issues like contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage and online pornography is helping Santorum win over the party’s conservative voters but steering the debate away from voters’ top concern: the economy.
“The country has no jobs and Santorum wants to change the topic to banning your personal behavior in your bedroom,” Wayne Allen Root, chairman of the Libertarian National Campaign Committee, wrote Monday. “Now that’s a rallying cry for conservatives. March in lock step toward mass suicide.”
Santorum has won the hearts of many conservatives with his unflinching advocacy of social issues, but that’s not a winning strategy in a fight against an incumbent president who is most vulnerable on fiscal issues, political strategists argue.
“In any year in which an in issue such as the economy is so central and when such an overwhelming majority of voters say that it is foremost on their minds,” social issues just become a distraction, said William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution.
Romney has tried to remain focused on the economy, and the private-sector experience he claims prepared him to deal with it, but he has been forced by Santorum to weigh in on issues like abortion, on which Romney has shifted positions over the years. Conservative voters are already suspicious of Romney’s commitment to issues important to them and that continuing debate is making it harder for Romney to win over those voters and lock down the nomination.
“It’s foolhardy to try to parse every social issue from the basket of issues confronting us, the major challenge of our time, which is the threat to American exceptionalism,” said Ken Blackwell, of the conservative Family Research Council. “We can’t get back to limited government if we don’t take care of the issues affecting the American family and when the church is silent.”
But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the party’s 2008 presidential nominee, is among those urging Romney to avoid divisive social issues.
“He’s got to focus more on the economy,” McCain told NBC News. “Every day that goes by with these attacks on each other is a day that President Obama wins.”
The debate over social matters is only providing Democrats with ammunition for the fall campaign, analysts warn.
The Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign are already rallying an army of female voters by characterizing Republican opposition to federally mandated insurance coverage for birth control as a “war on women.”
When Santorum claimed in a campaign stop in Illinois Monday that “the issue in this race is not the economy” but government overreach, Romney’s campaign shot back that Santorum is unprepared for the job.
“If anyone needed evidence that Rick Santorum is an economic lightweight, they needn’t look any further than his statement today that the economy is not the issue in this race,” said Gail Gitcho, a spokeswoman for Romney.
