Action Sports with Leigh Roche

An outside group launched by a Republican multimillionaire is looking to change the way the GOP handles its outreach to women voters.

John Jordan, a California winery owner and head of the group Americans for Shared Prosperity whose work in outside groups has gained attention in the last year, is planning to air two women-focused spots nationally over the next few days during major news shows like “Meet the Press” on NBC and on Fox News, as well as digitally across national print publications including POLITICO.

Jordan said he is bothered by the Democrats’ focus on a “war on women” that emerged in the 2012 campaign cycle, but also believes Republican messaging has been weak in pushing back.

So the ads he commissioned from Florida-based ad-maker Rick Wilson feature a woman speaking direct-to-camera about issues like the economy and national security, in a 30-second spot and a 60-second one. She accuses Democrats obliquely of treating women like single-issue voters, and talks about President Barack Obama as if he’s a boyfriend she’s stuck with for a few more years. “The goal here is to communicate with women voters in a way that outside groups and campaigns haven’t,” Jordan said.

“Women voters care as much about the economy jobs death and spending as do other groups - but certainly on the Republican side there’s been no effort to reach that group,” he said.

He noted that poll after poll shows Democrats with a lopsided advantage with women voters, “even in states where the nominee is a woman — for example, Joni Ernst in Iowa, Monica Wehby in Oregon.”

“The Republican advertising techniques have not changed since the ’80s … the one size fits all advertising by the Republican party has been bad,” he said. “The purpose of this is to treat women voters more like adults than either the Democrats or Republicans have.”

Republicans have been concerned about better messaging to women voters since the 2012 cycle came to a close, but have had difficulty breaking through, according to a number of polls this cycle. Democrats have argued the issue is not rhetorical tone or messaging, but policy issues, that are at the root of the GOP’s gender gap with women.

The spot was met with mixed responses on Sunday.

Some GOP strategists, like ad-maker Alex Castellanos, praised it on Twitter. Others, like former Mitt Romney deputy campaign manager Katie Packer Gage, criticized it.

“Further evidence that some GOP ad makers simply don’t ‘get’ women. Really guys? Is this your gender gap solution?” she tweeted.

One GOP strategist who worked in the 2012 campaign and with the Republican National Committee pointed out that the spot was very similar to a web ad the RNC did in 2012 called “The Breakup.”

“It worked well on digital but it never moved numbers to justify it on broadcast as it wasn’t giving any information to voters to move them,” the strategist said. “The ads that the Romney campaign ran focused more on economic issues for women was the obvious stuff that tested well.”...