Upset that the Nevada Republican Party recently voted to remove anti-choice, anti-gay language from its official platform, GOP state assemblyman Ira Hansen took to The Janet Mefferd Show yesterday to argue that the party made a grave mistake in avoiding such social issues.
Hansen said that Republicans are failing to win support from young voters because they are “being alienated partially because of this absence of values.” He argued that Republicans could win support from new voters by embracing the “Pat Robertson wing” of the party.
That’s right, Hansen thinks the GOP politicians would become more competitive among youth if they were only more like Pat Robertson.
We don’t see that younger recruitment into the party. I think they are actually being alienated partially by this absence of values. I also think as people get older, they lose some of their drive to fight, I think that’s even true of the pro-life, traditional marriage type crowd. I think they are basically not just shell-shocked but there’s like — you know what, I’ve been fighting this twenty, thirty years; me, I’ve been involved in the Republican Party virtually since I was eighteen, going back to the Reagan era. But I’d probably say in Nevada you still see a big strong element going back to the Pat Robertson campaign in 1988, and that was when there was a huge fight here in Nevada between the Rockefeller wing of the party, as I call them, and the Pat Robertson wing. And with time the Robertson wing won and you had these social issues openly adopted by the Republican Party. And, by the way, in the ‘90s and 2000s, the Republican Party actually did very, very well in Nevada with those in the platform.
