If Republicans hope to woo blue collar voters they have to present a positive vision, says former Pennsylvania Senator and GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum.
"Hoping your opponent self-destructs is not necessarily a great strategy," Santorum said Monday on
Fox News Channel's "Hannity."
"They're not putting forth a positive vision."
He said one of the reasons he felt compelled to write his latest book was to lay out such a vision for working class voters. "Blue Collar Conservatives: Recommitting to an America That Works," was released Monday by
Regnery.
"As many as six million blue collar voters stayed home from the polls, and there’s good reason to believe that a large majority of them would have voted Republican if they had voted," Santorum writes in the book.
He told Fox's Sean Hannity that Republicans have to show people who want to vote for the GOP that they care enough to at least talk to them about where they are and how they can make it better.
"They don't believe in government handouts. They don't believe in big government programs like Obamacare," Santorum said of blue collar voters. "And they don't believe in all these cultural changes that are going on that the left is trying to push to sort of rewrite American culture."
They do, however, see Republicans as being pro-business, he added. And Republicans didn't help dispel that image in the 2012 election by talking primarily about balancing the budget, cutting taxes for higher-income individuals and cutting government benefits.
"If you're 70 or 80 percent of America, you're saying, they're not talking to me," Santorum said.
Politico described the book as a conservative manifesto, adding that Santorum suggests that "he is the GOP's best bet to connect with these voters in his all-but-certain second try at the White House in 2016."
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