Republican candidates are learning many lessons from underperforming in 2022. One is that playing only to conservative press is preaching to the choir, a good strategy to land contributions, book deals, and a Fox News Channel consulting gig, but not to win a majority from an electorate stacked against them. 

The way Republicans limit themselves to like-minded outlets reminds me of my days at Fox News Channel. In the months after the October 1996 launch, congressional Democrats boycotted those of us trying to book guests, hoping to strangle the upstart network in its crib.

As our audience grew, though, Democrats could no longer cede it to the other side. They wanted to chase every vote, knowing that President Clinton had failed to top 50 percent in 1992 and 1996, and that the Reform Party candidate, H. Ross Perot, had helped deliver him the White House both times. 

“If all you do is talk to people whose votes you already have,” radio host Derek Hunter told me, “you’re going to end up with a very dedicated group of losers. And if you’re not confident enough in your message to speak with someone who doesn’t like or understand it, you have no business running in the first place.” 

In the 1950s, journalist Mitch Ohnstad claimed to have asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, eliciting the response, “Because that’s where the money is.” In his autobiography, Sutton said that although he’d never given the answer, he might have because it “couldn’t be more obvious.” 

Since our human tendency is to miss the forest for the trees, the fake quote gave birth to the Willie Sutton Rule. For accountants, it’s taken as a reminder to target the biggest area of spending to recoup the most savings. For the GOP, the rule applies to a fact about the electorate hiding in plain sight: They’re outnumbered.

The GOP candidate for president has won the popular vote just once in the last eight tries, stretching back to 1992. Democrats have 48 million registered voters nationwide, an advantage of 11.6 million over Republicans. Democrats cross the 50 percent threshold in seven states worth 73 electoral votes compared to three states for Republicans worth 22. 

President Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, wrote in Common Sense about how Mr. Trump “focused almost exclusively on energizing his base” in 2020. Feeding them “a steady diet of red meat,” he “pandered to his base in a way that reinforced and intensified the alienation of many suburban voters in the battleground states.”

MAGA partisans flocked to the polls, but Mr. Trump “also generated a more massive turnout for Joe Biden.” The GOP cannot win vote-for-vote battles. Victory is only possible if they convince Democrats to defect and independents — who make up a voting bloc almost as large as Republicans — to join their cause. 

And what are those voters watching, reading, and listening to for news about the issues of the day? Not right-leaning news, talk radio, or Twitter feeds. They’re consuming CNN, MSNBC, and newspapers where when Republican candidates show up, their main goal is to “own the libs” in Mr. Trump’s image.

Conservatives eat up those snippets like catnip, which is great for ratings and retweets, but the numbers show it has low odds of landing a candidate in Congress, a statehouse, or the White House. And, as we saw in November, painting a picture of America that your audience wishes to see leads to counting your red waves before they wash ashore. 

After President Nixon’s 49-state landslide in 1972, Pauline Kael, a film critic for the New Yorker, reveled in her isolation from the nation’s political majority. “I live in a rather special world,” she said. “I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are, I don’t know.”

Reviewing movies didn’t require Kael to worry about the Sutton Rule. But Republicans seeking high office can’t limit themselves to their partisan comfort zones, insulated from Democrats and independents like “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.” The good news is, they know where the voters are. Now they’ll just have to go get them.