Obama Pollster: GOP Has ‘Tolerance Problem’ - the Hill’s Ballot Box

This puts the best possible face on the problem while still describing it well.

President Obama’s top pollster said the Republican Party has a ‘tolerance problem’ and predicted it will continue to struggle at the ballot box if its members don’t have a major tonal change.

“If Republicans approach this as if they have a Latino problem, I think that they are missing a larger dynamic that’s in place right now. I believe that the Republican Party has a tolerance problem,” Obama pollster Joel Benenson said at event hosted by the center-left group Third Way Wednesday morning. “When you define people who look differently than you as illegal aliens and use that term over and over again and talk about self-deporting them, that’s a tolerance issue.”

Benenson said other examples of the GOP’s “tolerance problem” included their calling those who believe in global warming “job killers,” and its stances on gay marriage, Planned Parenthood and contraception. He said voters who don’t agree with the GOP were hearing a “very strident, intolerant point of view on specific issues” and called them a “party of orthodoxy.”

“They should rethink how their positions with these groups are implicitly defining them,” he said. “If they think they can solve their problems by picking off any one of those groups and saying ‘we’ll fix our problem here or there,’ this goes to whether you have core beliefs that are in line and in touch with the vast majority of Americans.”