Why a GOP veteran might support an Oprah 2020 run

While the entertainment and political worlds converged this week on the idea of Oprah Winfrey possibly running for President in 2020, after her viral Golden Globes speech, one longtime Republican strategist is enthusiastic about the prospect, and could even see himself supporting her in a hypothetical race against the current White House occupant.

“I think that people who are not taking her seriously are making a huge mistake,” Noam Neusner, a former speechwriter and Jewish liaison for President George W. Bush, told Jewish Insider on Tuesday. “And you know, she could definitely win. She could definitely win.”

“She’s likable. She has spent the last 25-30 years of her professional career talking to people, listening to people, understanding how to win people over,” Neusner explained. “She’s great. She’s great at it, and provided that she wants to do this, she still has to present a political agenda, but I think that – politically speaking – what matters to voters, for the most part, is a comfort level and likebility. She’s going to score very high on those issues, provided that there aren’t some skeletons in her closet.”

Asked if someone like him, who is a traditional and longtime Republican, would vote for Oprah over Trump, Neusner said: “It’s possible.”

“I mean, a lot depends on the condition of the country somewhere around the summer of 2020. If things are rough in the economy, if the country is facing a foreign policy crisis or a foreign policy headache, if there’s a sense that Trump doesn’t have command of the country’s interests, yeah, a Republican could very well decide to vote for Oprah,” he asserted.

“But that’s not going to determine the outcome of the election,” Neusner continued. “What will determine the outcome of the election will be the intensity that she creates among Democratic and liberal voters. And whether she gets key voters in swing states and married women. I think that it would be very hard for Trump to win in any group of female voters if he were running against Oprah. If she were a female Joe Biden on policy, she would probably do quite well. On the other hand, if Trump is sitting on a strong economy, decent prosperity, even with all the distractions that come with his presidency, and sometimes even with all the frustrations that come with this presidency, Republicans aren’t going to suddenly abandon him. They might actually really be excited to vote for him again.”