I do see the merit in what former Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) and retiring Rep. Steve LaTourette are advocating. That said, establishment Republicans need to shoulder a significant portion of the blame for the ballot box failures in 2012. From Breanna Edwards at Politico:

“Some of the groups that would have agreed with us on a lot of issues, they don’t even look at us. We scare them,” said former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.).

Davis appeared with retiring Rep. Steve LaTourette at the Capitol Hill Club Friday to discuss poll findings of Main Street Advocacy, a nonprofit managed by Davis. Their main message: partisans on both sides need to stop bickering so much and start compromising on issues like the fiscal cliff.

But both men said the GOP’s problem go beyond partisanship. Republicans, they argued, need to stop looking at voters as members of groups — whether it's women, African-Americans, Latinos or Asian-Americans — and just look at them as Americans.

From The Wall Street Journal:

A good sign for Team Romney, and another failed talking point for Team Obama. Gary Langer at ABC News reports:

A sharp advance among women has boosted Mitt Romney to his highest favorability rating of the presidential campaign – albeit still an unusually weak one – while Barack Obama’s personal popularity has slipped in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll.

Obama still beats Romney in favorable ratings overall, by an 11-point margin, 52 vs. 41 percent. But that’s down from 21 points last month, giving Romney the better trajectory. And both get only even divisions among registered voters, marking the closeness of the race between them.

All Romney’s gains have come among women – up by 13 percentage points in personal popularity from last month, while Obama’s lost 7 points among women. (Views among men have been more stable.) Obama’s rating among women, 51 percent favorable, still beats Romney’s 40 percent – but again that margin is far smaller than what it was six weeks ago.

An ABC/Post poll last week found improvement for Romney in vote preferences among married women. This survey finds that his gains in personal favorability, instead, come predominantly among unmarried women, who saw him uncommonly negatively earlier this spring.

Following Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen's now-infamous rant about Ann Romney never working "a day in her life", both the Obama and Romney campaigns have gone to great lengths to praise stay-at-home mothers.

But away from the microphones, TV cameras, rapid response press releases and Twittersphere, where do the candidates stand when it comes to supporting stay-at-home mothers with policy?

Mitt Romney emphatically backs Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's budget, which would slash funding to many social programs that help families and mothers -- particularly single mothers -- including Head Start, child care subsidies, Pell grants for college and a variety of health-care programs.

While Ryan's budget is quite popular among fiscal conservatives on, it's not the sort of spending blueprint that excites U.S. moms struggling to balance a household budget amidst skyrocketing gas prices and ballooning grocery bills, say some analysts.

Of course, not everyone agrees stay at home mothers would be disproportionately hurt under the Ryan bill.

"Stay at home moms are struggling, just like the rest of the middle class," Republican strategist Ford O'Connell argued. "Stay at home parents in general are hurting under Obama with rising gas prices, mounting national debt and high unemployment. It's going to be hard for the President to make the argument" that stay at home mothers are disproportionately affected under the Ryan budget.

Read more from Aliyah Shahid at the New York Daily News

Courtesy of the RNC:

From The Washington Post's Amy Gardner

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows not only that Santorum is doing better among GOP women than he was a few weeks ago, but also that he is less unpopular — and also less well known — among Democratic and independent women than his Republican rivals Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich.

Voters and political strategists alike say Santorum’s rise has less to do with his views on these issues than on his ability to relate to the daily struggles of the middle class.