voices like trump. well, the panel is here and, of course, we have a former chairman of the republican national committee. michael steele, this is a tough call for reince priebus. i don t envy him. on one hand he wants to play referee. you know inside he d like to totally denounce but they don t want to alienate part of the party. what would you be doing here? i would have a slightly different approach. i would have gone out look, you ve got to have that sister, soldier moment with the party where you have to be honest and call it what it is. you as chairman right now would aggressively criticize one of your candidates. i would have said sooner this is not the tone, this is not the effort. we have an autopsy report that says one thing, you are running counter to that. you ve got to stake that claim. you ve got to be authentic. people are sophisticated enough to know when you re just full of bs. fact that you re not coming out everyone in the country reacted to this and you
you re out of the process. we have lesson four here for navigating the primary. fake it until you make it we re calling this one. and the idea here is you sort of position yourself as an official voice of your party, here is a perfect example of it was in 2011, michele bachmann, on the verge of running for president, the party didn t ask me to deliver a state of the union response but i m going to deliver one anyway and this was the result. good evening. my name is congresswoman michele bachmann from minnesota s 6th district. i want to thank the tea party express and tea party hd for invite meg to speak this evening. i m here at their request and not to compete with the official republican remarks. not to compete with the official republican remarks or look directly into the camera. thats with a the other thing she forgot to do. i remember looking at that at the time, she was, what, a third term member of congress and the campaign ended up going nowhere but she had her moment and w
republicans are worried as they go into the fall, that if there s not a real course correction by the party, that they re going to be digging themselves in even deeper hole. this conversation about shutting down the government, about not funding the debt, republican pollsters say that the only way that you can turn obama care from a negative for the president to a positive for the president is to link it to shutting down the government. on racial issues, trayvon martin, the party didn t have a positive message, they didn t express sympathy for his mother. on gay rights, there isn t a new message. talk to republicans, they say that eventually they re going to have to go to a message talking more about religious liberty and separating church and state. that hasn t been done yet. these groups that in the autopsy republicans know they need to reach, they re not doing anything to do it. and the biggest of all,
it is not an issue with opposition sort of galvanizes. is abortion headed in that direction? i never thought i would say that. you can look at the numbers, though, when you showed over a period of time, this has been a pro-choice country, in essence, for quite a while. so this trend has been going on. i think what we just saw in this last election really crystallizes where we are. so it s not just the polling numbers, but on election day, we saw women voters in this country stand up and say, we re not going to roll this country backwards. and the republican party really was leaning into this. and i think it s where we saw a huge gender gap for the president. we saw, just a mandate for women s leadership, an historic number of women. 80% of emily s list candidates won on election day. in new hampshire, we talked about earlier. new hampshire, all? governor, both senators, and two house members. i want to talk to you as a republican woman, the party
didn t talk all that much about abortion during the campaign, but abortion was talked about quite a bit during the campaign mitt romney, i should say, didn t talk much about it because of people like richard mourdock and todd akin talking about the legitimate rape comments. is your party on the wrong side when it comes to abortion, or is it just an issue you shouldn t talk about? i think if you re someone that s pro-life, you believe that life begins at conception, you have every right as a candidate to talk about that. i think that s not the conversation that wound up happening in this last election. it was a conversation, what was being talked about in this campaign was very damaging to the republican brand. but i don t necessarily think it means that all republicans should just jettison their beliefs on the issue. i think what s interesting is in that poll, when you saw the 54%, 74% legal, if you break it out into four different ways,