Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
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Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has a chance to replicate an election strategy that helped elect Republican icon Ronald Reagan to the White House nearly four decades ago, longtime Democratic politician Rahm Emanuel told CNBC on Friday.
Emanuel, appearing on ‘Closing Bell’, said he believes the former vice president can win over disaffected Republicans with a platform that has moderate language to catch up.
“This will be the year of the Biden Republican,” Emanuel said, citing the appearances of John Kasich, former governor of Ohio, Colin Powell, secretary of state under President George W. Bush, and Cindy McCain, widow of Senator John McCain, among other GOP members at the Democratic National Convention this week.
“Joe Biden will be a president, we will all be proud to greet,” Powell said in his message. “With Joe Biden in the White House, you will never doubt that he will stand with our friends and stop our opponents – never the other way around.”
Emanuel compared Republican voters mobilized against President Donald Trump to “Reagan Democrats,” the White, traditional blue-collar voters who crossed party lines to help elect Reagan to two terms as president. Reagan defeated then-Democratic client Jimmy Carter in a landing. The California Republican led 44 of 50 states in the 1980 race and 49 states in the 1984 race.
Democrats should not only attract Republican voters who want to oust Trump at the end of his first term, but keep those voters under the party’s big tent, said Emanuel, who served as the chief of staff of the White House under former President Barack Obama. He made the same case in a Wall Street Journal opinion poll Saturday, saying voters in suburbs in areas of Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, battlefield states that Trump won in 2016, could be flipped.
The lack of support for a “Green New Deal” and “Medicare for All” in the Democratic platform helps the party balance between the wishes of the moderate and more progressive members, Emanuel told CNBC.
With a broad coalition of supporters ranging from four-star generals to Black Lives Matter supporters, Biden can use his decades of government experience in Washington to ‘culturally move them into a comfort zone,’ he said.
“My opinion is that you do not want this to be a transactional election,” the former Chicago mayor said. “You want this to be the chance of a transformation election.”
Democrats, seeking to capitalize on a fractured Republican Party, presented a string of video footage of leading Republicans at their first virtual national convention closing Thursday.
However, the party runs a fine line as it seeks to satisfy its progressive wing, which is seeking transformation policies.
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