In 2016, Hot Air senior editor Ed Morrissey is making his mark not just as a blogger, columnist and radio host, but also with a new book he says outlines a presidential path to victory for both the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

The book is Going Red, and it analyzes how two million voters in seven counties around the nation could decide the 2016 elections. Morrissey, who sat down with Stream Associate Editor Dustin Siggins to discuss Going Red, said that some of the inspiration came from watching President Obama march to re-election four years ago.

“We All Got The Shock of Our Lives”

The book opens on election night in 2012, says Morrissey. “I am in Hugh Hewitt’s studio, where we all think we’re going to be there for a celebratory night, and we all got the shock of our lives.”

Obama beat Romney by winning key voters in key states like Ohio and New Hampshire. According to Morrissey, “It became very clear that we didn’t understand who the voters were in these swing states and these swing communities.”

In 2012, many in the GOP assumed polls showing President Obama leading Republican nominee Mitt Romney were oversampling minority and Democratic voters, and thus overstating support for the incumbent. Morrissey says he was one of them.

“The reason we were doing this so-called unskewing of the polls, which turned out to be a huge mistake, was that we were convinced the electoral model had changed from 2008 to 2010. So we were thinking, ‘The pollsters were looking at an outdated model.’ We weren’t trying to be dishonest, we weren’t lying about this, we were just really wrong in our assumptions.”

That was the key, he continued. “We were wrong in our assumptions because we were making assumptions. We weren’t taking the time to find out who these voters were, where they were at, what Barack Obama was doing with his organizing and media strategy in 2012. And those errors compounded on each other to give a completely false impression of what we were going to see that night.”

They weren’t the only ones. “The Romney campaign had made the same assumptions and the same errors,” Morrissey said.

Pragmatism, Not Philosophy, Wins Swing Voters

Morrissey explained what his research and on-the-ground interviews for Going Red discovered. “Here’s what you find out when you go out and talk to people in these swing communities. They don’t see themselves as center-right, they don’t see themselves as center-left. They don’t even see themselves as progressives or conservatives. All they really want to do is find ways to make policy work and to improve the economy, improve their lives, and have the government get out of anything else it doesn’t need to be involved in.”

“It’s pragmatic,” he said. “So what you need to do, when you are going into these communities, is show how it will work.”

What Do You Say?

In a follow-up interview, Morrissey gave an example of localizing conservative political philosophy — responding to the federal government’s actions in Cincinnati, Ohio.

“When we’re talking about how you create openings to expand the footprint of conservatism and of the Republican Party, you have to contextualize that agenda for whatever community that you happen to be talking with,” he explained. “Something that came to me too late to include in the book — the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. The city has lost 40 percent of its population since 1970. So you have a lot of people that have fled.”

“The EPA decided to take action against the city of Cincinnati in order to force them to separate their storm drain system and their sewer system,” Morrissey continued. “The EPA is doing this with cities across the country. There are good reasons to do this, but it’s expensive, it’s going to be disruptive, it’s going to require a lot of infrastructure spending.” Maybe Cincinnati had “other priorities” for its tax dollars.

“Cincinnati put together a plan and presented it to the EPA, and the EPA accepted it. After this, the city of Cincinnati realized they could have done it differently and still met all the benchmarks of the EPA. So they commissioned a new engineering study, they came up with a different plan — one that would cost about 40 percent less than the original plan — and they went back to the EPA.”

“The EPA said, ‘Definitely not, we’re not even going to look at it, because we’ve already made our decision on this.'”

What should a conservative say in this case? “If you want to talk about federalism, smaller government and subsidiary, do you show up in Cincinnati and say, ‘Big government is bad, small government is bad, the federal government stinks’ — to a city that’s barely hanging on economically, that’s really struggling to get by?” asked Morrissey.

“Or do you say, ‘Those of you who live in the Metropolitan Water District, can you afford to have several hundred dollars more a year taken out of your pocket because some bureaucrat in Washington decided they didn’t want to bother … ? Well, this is what we’re talking about with smaller government.'”

Morrissey also praised Republican National Committee Chairman (RNC) Reince Priebus for doing the data-crunching necessary to garner the kind of insights discussed in Going Red. Priebus has stated for years that his goal is to catch up to the Democratic ground game, which has overwhelmed the GOP’s efforts in the last two presidential cycles. Part of accomplishing this goal is greater understanding of voter preferences and concerns — something Morrissey noted that “Republicans presidential campaigns haven’t done since 2004.”