GOP builds national campaign network from its grass roots

The Republican Party over the next few weeks will open a series of local campaign offices in a half-dozen key swing states to help mobilize GOP voters this fall and catch up with President Obama's head start in campaign organization.

By Jessica Kourkounis, Getty Images

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign stop Monday in Aston, Pa.

By Jessica Kourkounis, Getty Images

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign stop Monday in Aston, Pa.

Over the next two weeks, these "victory offices" opened jointly by the Republican National Committee and state GOP committees will develop and share voter contact information, grass-roots organizing and get-out-the-vote efforts with state party committees. By summer, the network will be at the service of the party's nominee, presumably former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

The new offices being established by mid-May in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Mexico, Iowa and Wisconsin join those opened by the Republican National Committee in March and April in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, Michigan and Colorado.

The plan, RNC Political Director Rick Wiley said, is create the network to get Republicans to the polls in the 12 battleground states that will determine who wins in November. The offices, he said, are "the ground game run by the RNC in conjunction with the states."

That ground game will ultimately become part of the Romney campaign.

Federal campaign law requires that the state party, national party and presidential campaign pay for some services themselves and not share money.

But as a practical matter, "There is not going to be an inch of daylight between us and the RNC," said Colorado Republican Party chairman Ryan Call. And once the Romney campaign ramps up, "there will not be an inch of daylight between us and the campaign either."

Much of the work has already been taking place, said Annaliese Wiederspahn, spokeswoman for the Republican Party of New Mexico. There, the state party has already been on the ground contacting voters for months, focusing particularly on state House races, where Republicans are only three seats shy of a majority.

"We have spent so much time, district by district, learning what's going on in these districts" that the state party can provide the national party a tremendous road map of what issues resonate in the state, she said. The big benefit the state party receives from the partnership is "having them on the ground and helping us to build infrastructure … and help us ramp up and scale up quickly," she said.

Republicans and Democrats agree that the Obama campaign has a head start in setting up state offices for the presidential campaign. "We did that slow build while they were in primaries," said Obama campaign spokeswoman Katie Hogan.

The RNC wanted to open offices in the 12 battleground states by May, even without an official nominee, Wiley said. That's because the Obama campaign has been "building this for a year. They have had an opportunity to get out ahead of us."

Obama's campaign claims to be a 50-state operation, and has offices in states such as Wyoming and Nebraska that the president has little chance of winning in November. Even if Obama won't carry those states, Hogan said, volunteers there "can just as well make phone calls into a battleground state."

Not so with the RNC, Wiley said. It won't open "victory offices" in states such as Alabama and Mississippi that are expected to vote Republican. "We don't have to," he said.

But in states such as California, New York and Illinois, "there will be places where the RNC spends money to ensure or maintain our House majority," Wiley said. There will be "some victory programs in those congressional districts as well," even where there is not a statewide effort.

Republicans generally believe that Democrats will need a bigger ground game effort because they face an "enthusiasm gap" — young voters, minorities and other parts of the giant coalition that elected Obama in 2008 are simply less excited about him and less motivated to get to the polls than they were four years ago.

"We're fortunate in the sense that there is a great deal of Republican enthusiasm to make Obama a one-term president, so the task is to harness that excitement and turn it into a network that gets voters to the polls," said New Hampshire GOP Chairman Wayne MacDonald.

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The National Journal Big 10

The oft-stated maxim that a week is an eternity in politics must have rung true with Senate Republicans as February drew to a close. With the surprise retirement of Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, what once had seemed assured—that enough Democratic seats were vulnerable to strong Republican challenges for the party to take back the majority—now seems much less likely.

Snowe’s exit throws a once-safe Republican seat up for grabs. In a state where Barack Obama won 58 percent of the vote in 2008, Democrats seem to have the height advantage, although independent former Gov. Angus King’s entry into the race could complicate things. Democrats don’t have many strong opportunities to play offense this year, but the few GOP-held seats they will target offer good odds: Along with Maine, challenges to Sens. Scott Brown in Massachusetts and Dean Heller in Nevada are among the most-pressing Republican worries.

But that’s not to say that Republicans should completely abandon hope of controlling the upper chamber, which would require a net gain of four seats if President Obama is reelected or three if Republicans take the White House. The races for Democrats’ open seats in Nebraska and North Dakota lean heavily toward the GOP; Sens. Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Jon Tester of Montana are running in states that Obama will likely lose; and Democratic retirements in New Mexico, Virginia, and Wisconsin—as well as the possibility that Sen. Sherrod Brown could find himself in a tougher-than-expected race in Ohio, leave the GOP with alternate paths for amassing a majority.

To keep track of the battle for control of the Senate, National Journal will feature updates on the 10 races at the heart of that fight—the NJ Big 10. Our coverage of key races will stretch across platforms, including daily updates in National Journal Hotline, snapshots and analysis on Hotline On Call and in National Journal Daily, and broader looks at the factors that will capture the national mood in National Journal.

The 10 Senate races—currently those in Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin—may change as the year progresses (the same way the Dow Jones industrial average sometimes drops a stock that no longer proves representative of the market). But the number of competitive races in a year that has seen more Senate retirements than any since 1996 underscores just how fluid the dynamic remains.

As we kick off our coverage, the two most dominant national trends are working at cross-purposes. On one hand, the number and breadth of competitive Democratic-held seats in play in the Senate conspires to tilt the odds in Republicans’ favor. On the other, an improving national economy, Obama’s growing strength in the polls, and the very real prospect of some states’ bitterly divided GOP primaries producing weak and perhaps overly conservative nominees all auger well for the tenuous Democratic majority.

In Missouri, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, the GOP primary choice can be cast as a longtime insider (Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, Nebraska Treasurer Don Stenberg, and former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson) pitted against a younger firebrand (former Missouri Treasurer Sarah Steelman; Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning; and Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald) and a relative outsider (Missouri businessman John Brunner; Nebraska state Sen. Deb Fischer; and former Rep. Mark Neumann of Wisconsin). As the Republican Party struggles to find its post-George W. Bush identity, the outcome of all three primaries will affect GOP chances to take back the Senate.

The two constants across all 10 states are the presidential race and the uneven economic recovery. The president’s approval ratings are still too anemic to provide Democrats with any significant advantage in all but a few states. And even though the economy continues to turn around, most Americans still say they don’t believe that things are getting better.

Both of those factors are likely to decide the ultimate makeup of the Senate.

In a hyper-partisan atmosphere, fewer voters are casting split-ticket ballots, meaning that Democrats such as McCaskill and Tester and Republicans such as Brown and whoever emerges in Maine will have to take the most of a small slice of independents to hold their seats. Generally more party-line voting should benefit Democrats in states such as Florida, Wisconsin, New Mexico, and Virginia. But the Senate Democrats who won in 2006 almost uniformly benefited from widespread dissatisfaction with President Bush; now they will have to contend with the choppier waters of mixed reactions to Obama that vary considerably from state to state.

Perhaps no Senate race will demonstrate the pull of the presidential contest better than Virginia, where Democratic former Gov. Tim Kaine and Republican former Sen. George Allen are facing off; the two are close in the polls, and a boost in turnout driven by the presidential contest could have a determinative impact.

Obama’s reelection bid and the slowly improving economy will stand tall amid the battle for the Senate. Whether those two factors will provide coattails for Obama’s fellow Democrats or cast shadows over their chances remains to be seen. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s job security and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s chances for a promotion will depend on outcome of the NJ Big 10.

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GOP Candidates Are Ready for a National Conversation on Race (The Atlantic Wire)

In March of 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama gave a widely-praised speech calling for a national conversation on race. A little more than two years later, that conversation had only gotten "dumber," Politico's Ben Smith wrote, with Fox News constantly airing images of "new Black Panthers" and MSNBC hunting for racists in the Tea Party. But now it seems the Republican presidential field is ready to renew that dialogue. Newt Gingrich told Maryland Republicans Thursday night that, "No administration in modern times has failed younger blacks more than the Obama administration." But the Republican candidates are still finding their footing when it comes to race, occasionally saying something kind of... weird. Gingrich noted, "I will bet you there is not a single precinct in this state in which the majority will pick for their children food stamps over paychecks." Was there ever any doubt of that?

Related: First GOP Debate with Recognizable Candidates Will Be on June 13

Gingrich--who has a long history of talking about racial issues--has called Obama the "food stamp president" (he would be the "paycheck president"). But he isn't the only 2012 contender to say it's time to go after the black vote. At the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans last weekend, Michele Bachmann pointed to high unemployment rates among blacks and Latinos and said, "This president has failed the Hispanic community. He has failed the African-American community." Bachmann managed to avoid sounding tone deaf, unlike some of her 2012 rivals.

Related: GOP Debate Preview: Hey, We're Not So Bad

Rick Santorum has focused less on economic issues than social ones in his flirtation with minority voters--which makes sense, given that black voters are generally more socially conservative than the rest of the Democratic Party. But he got into trouble making his case on abortion. "I find it almost remarkable for a black man to say, 'No, we're going to decide who are people and who are not people,'" Santorum said, referring to the Three-Fifths Compromise, which said slaves counted as 60 percent of a person in awarding states seats in Congress.

Related: The GOP Presidential Field Keeps an Even Lower Profile

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, currently enjoying a lot of buzz and he considers getting into the 2012 race, appeared to have a tin ear Thursday night at a national conference for Latino government officials in San Antonio. The Associated Press' Chris Tomlinson reports that Perry got a very tepid response from the audience during his speech, with this being the biggest cringe moment:

But a joke about how perfect it was to appoint Jose Cuevas to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission because his name sounds like Jose Cuervo--a brand of tequila--fell flat. Perry struggled to regain his confidence as he described Texas as a land of opportunity.

Slate's Dave Weigel observes that Herman Cain causes some reporters to stutter stupidly when trying to ask him about race. Still, his comments about being a black Republican occasionally raise eyebrows. He likes to say his his poll numbers show the Tea Party isn't racist. He says he's okay with being the "black Mike Huckabee." He says Jon Stewart makes fun of him because he's black. And, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, he seemed to say he was more authentically black than Obama: "Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America," Cain said. "And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a black man in America. ... Barack Obama is more of an international."

Related: 15 Months from the Convention, Here's Your Republican Field

Disaffected Republican speechwriter David Frum says Republicans aren't wrong to try to appeal to minority voters. He writes that Gingrich is "making sense... when he asserts that the social catastrophe creates a political opportunity for a party that can bring forward practical ideas to revive economic growth." But Frum says Gingrich falters when he fails to realize that non-Republicans--especially minorities--don't hate Obama as much as Republicans do.

"Given that minority voters in particular do not blame Obama for the bad economy--in fact, continue to respect and admire him--the mood of raging Republican contempt for the president almost guarantees that we will speak about him in ways that deny us any audience for our policy message."

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