state parties

In Part 1, written earlier this month, I focused on the need for not only the chairman, but all members of the RNC, to develop multiple leaders in campaign operations, policy, communications, fundraising and technology.

Dear Mr. Chairman:

Congratulations on your victory today. Your ascension to the chairmanship of the GOP is not only historic in nature; it also shows that many of the members of the RNC (as well as many of us in the grassroots and netroots of the party) were yearning for something different.

As someone who cares deeply about the issues surrounding ethnicity in America, I sincerely hope that the legacy of your chairmanship is not defined by your race, but by your efforts to move this party in a new direction. May you be remembered many election cycles from now, not as the first African-American chairman, but as a chairman who led with conviction and creativity during a time of transition.

One interesting thing to note is the process that we witnessed today. It took six ballots to get yourself elected, and it was still a close vote: 91-77. Whether this shows a split within the committee when it comes to strategy or personality, there does seem to be a split. I not only encourage you to reach out to all members of the RNC; I not only encourage you to reach out to conservative grassroots leaders that work within or without their state and local parties. I encourage you to have an honest exchange of ideas with Republicans across this country, and move this party from one that feeds off of anti-intellectualism to one that encourages political innovation and entrepreneurship.

You have endorsed the Rebuild the Party plan, and I will hold you to your pledge to implement this plan. There are many components to the plan that Patrick Ruffini and Mindy Finn have built. Let me focus on three things that I feel are especially important.

Hold campaigns and local parties accountable. Patrick and Mindy give specific goals for Congressional and Senate races when it comes to raising money and recruiting online activists. Here's what I would like to see. Ask every state and local party to give specific grassroots, electoral and fundraising goals. Publish those goals online. Reward parties that exceed expectations. Hold accountable those parties that fail to meet their goals. Shame works just as well as potential victory when it comes to incentivizing hard work and smart strategy.

Time for a new fundraising model. The plan calls for our 2012 Presidential nominee to be in a position to raise over 50% of their money online. The old model relies on the assumption that you have to raise money first in order to win supporters. Wrong! The Obama campaign taught us that with a true "movement" campaign, you want to gain supporters, and then get them to donate and volunteer, not necessarily in large amounts, but in smaller amounts over and over again. Qualitative characteristics of a fundraising model should matter just as much (maybe even more) than the quantitative characteristics. Just as "online activities" should not be a separate department within any party, fundraising and "the ask" should be integrated in as many facets of a campaign as possible.

When it comes to keeping state parties accountable, don't stop at Congress. It should be obvious to us that the state legislative and city council seats must be our farm team to develop leaders that can move up politically. But there's another important reason to focus on positions like Secretary of State and smaller legislative bodies like school boards. Decisions made closest to the people are critical, yet underreported. State and local governments truly are the laboratories of democracy, and we need good conservatives to run the public policy experiments.

Mr. Steele, promise me you will do two simple things: lead and develop leaders. Provide objectives and a vision, and inspire our grassroots to find new ways to achieve those objectives. Once again, congratulations!

Sincerely,

Matt Moon

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: Leadership is action, not position.

Today, RedState made its endorsement in the RNC chairman's race. (I've stayed agnostic on the matter.)

"We believe strongly that should Ken Blackwell not have enough votes to be RNC Chairman on the first ballot, Mike Duncan deserves the votes on the second ballot."

The Next Right has been dedicated to promoting discussion on the future of the Republican Party. RebuildTheParty.com has done a great job in formulating a set of plans that the GOP can move forward with. The debates over messaging, policy, technology, campaign strategy, the role of the RNC, and the role of the chairman have been healthy. But the discussion over the chairman's race needs to be set in the proper context.

Some of the candidates have been discussing "decentralization plans" and the "importance of state and local parties." But the fact is that the 168 members of the RNC don't answer to the chairman they elect. On a broad scale, state party chairmen, committeemen, committeewomen, and the state executive/central committees they represent already have a sufficient amount of freedom to effectively execute their own strategy. So here's a message to the members of the Republican National Committee:

We don't need a chairman. We need operational leaders. Even if the next RNC chairman executes some or most of the RebuildTheParty.com plan, it doesn't necessarily translate into state parties benefitting from change at the top. Chip Saltsman might know the political mechanics in Tennessee. Michael Steele might know the political mechanics in Maryland. Ken Blackwell might know the political mechanics in Ohio. But state and local party officials should not depend on the limited knowledge of the next RNC chairman and his staff to assist in building a farm team. State and local parties need to recruit their own people to formulate a "Rebuild Plan" of their own, independent of the RNC, which takes into account the idiosyncrasies of their region.

We don't need a chairman. We need policy leaders. State and local governments are truly the laboratories of our democracy. State and local party officials not only need to recruit and elect candidates that can innovate within state capitols and city halls. It's necessary to strengthen the lines of communication with the state think tankosphere and issue-based grassroots organizations to assist in policy innovation, with full knowledge that vigorous debate and disagreement will exist. The more internal policy competition there is, the better policy there will be to present to voters.

We don't need a chairman. We need communications leaders. This is very simple: the more spokespeople within state and local parties, the better. Having different communications leaders for different issues and different segments of society is critical to any grassroots outreach. Unity in message is not mutually exclusive with the quantity of available messengers.

We don't need a chairman. We need fundraising leaders. The Obama campaign showed incredible creativity in their fundraising capacity and the ability to provide tools to those who wanted to raise money from the bottom up. State and local party leaders should not solely look to the national organization for fundraising assistance. Since people feel more connected to a government that's closer to them (state legislators, city councilmen, etc.), state and local parties should recruit human resources to come up with creative fundraising outlets for these organizations and candidates.

We don't need a chairman. We need technology leaders. This also goes without saying. With all of the above intact, state and local parties need folks willing to build the tools that can catalyze many facets of a party or campaign operation.

I'm not belittling the importance of the next RNC chairman; this person will hopefully provide the vision and leadership necessary for the national organization to succeed. But just as some of the decisions of the federal government don't necessarily directly affect state and local governments, the fate of state and local parties are not, and should not be, directly tied to the success (or failure) of the national organization. We need to be reminded that state and local parties have the ability to determine their own future.

This also means the members of the RNC need to be in constant communication with each other, sharing best (and worst) practices and keeping each other accountable for the goals that they set.

The future of the Republican Party is not the responsibility of one man and his staff. It depends on the cultivation of leaders at the state and local level, both inside and outside the party organizations. The position (or lack thereof) within the party does not make one a leader; it's whether or not you take the actions necessary that defines leadership. Just as RNC members should keep the national chairman accountable, so should we shift some of our attention to state and local organizations and keep their leaders accountable. The Republican Party will move in a positive direction when leaders in different states rise to the occasion.

Even though we've made fun of him for saying this, Barack Obama would say: "We are the ones we've been waiting for." So the question to the members of the RNC is this: what are you waiting for?

New York State is a Microcrosm of the Republican Party's Problems

I know that this statement seems unfathomable, but its true. New York State has some really good local parties, right now few and far between, but a few. Other than that, New York State's local parties are stuck in the dark, without message, without leadership, without volunteers, without outreach, etc. They have pictures on the walls that depict shadows of their formerly great selves, but the shell is all that remains.  This was the case even before a number of  Republican Congressman retired, lest they get defeated. Despite the party being hollow, the shell still does remain, and this is what Republicans in New York and throughout the country must look to fill.

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL (As long as you don't play the media game)

If there is anything that we can take from David Plouffe's recent interview in Conde` Nast, it is two things: 1. Don't buy the media's telling of the story as a party or campaign. People don't trust the media. However, make the media buy your story of the party and campaign. There are increasingly less media figures anyway so this might even get easier. 2. Start up campaigns with strong grassroots emphasis from the managers can focus mainly on grassroots and work.

Note here that there need to be managers. This is where we come in. Even the Ron Paul campaign had managers that decided what the logo, etc. was going to look like at first, but after that they enabled the grassroots to do what was necessary to get the ideas out.

We, who read and participate in these blogs, need to be the new managers. Stop worrying about who the next RNC chair is going to be. I hope it matters and it makes a difference, but in all likelihood it won't. We need to be the new chairmen, we need to be the new local party leaders, we need to be the new recruiters to fill the shell of our state parties so that we can have principled individuals rise to the top, drudgingly go to the Federal government to state the Republican Party principle that problems are best solved by those closest to the problem.

I mean of course our Republican Party elected officials in Washington don't listen to the grassroots and vote against bailout after bailout...there is no one of any significance who can hold them accountable back at home. So while King David Patterson's taxes on everything sits as a foreshadow to what will be the media story with the Obama administration (he HAD  to raise taxes, there was no other option), lets start at the local level and state levels and prove that there are other options. Where do you live? Go to your local party, and get involved. If they won't let you, then start running your own candidates. Anyone who is reading TheNextRight.com obviously has a better handle on the ways of the world than does the local party chairman. BEAT THEM at their own game. As for me, this will probably be my last post for a while, because that is exactly what I am going to do.

I have spent the last week recovering from the disappointment of election day. I have spent a lot of time talking to the mid-level operatives from the McCain campaign. (the top level are on TV playing the recriminations games, in undisclosed locations, or drinking their brains out in Vegas)  There are things that we can learn from this election.

The first is that John McCain won the primary because of an often neglected part of the coalition: military voters. Redstate's Erick Erickson said the point well on the night of the Florida primary:

Tonight was not a failure of conservatism, but a triumph of military voters who have made their home in the Republican Party because we are the party of a strong national defense.

In both South Carolina and Florida, they won it for McCain. In the grand coalition of the GOP, we've talked about social conservatives and fiscal conservatives. We've all ignored the military voters, except John McCain. And he won them big. His message resonated.

This is not a sufficient grassroots for the GOP in a national race, but it was a powerful one in the primary. We as a party should feel and water this part of the coalition better than we have done in the past. We will likely get a generation of candidates who served in Iraq and/or Afghanistan who will be powered by the volunteer work of volunteers who supported McCain. In addition, I wouldn't be surprised if this developed into a meaningful faction in GOP politics in the next couple of years.

Second, the GOP is good at managing the mechanics of GOTV. However, we are not very good at managing and empowering our grassroots. The Democrats are. Open Left's Mike Lux, now on the Obama transition team, said:

I am grateful that field organizing and working with grassroots volunteers is actually in fashion again, and in so much bigger a way than it has ever been in my lifetime.

At a time that technological and volunteer energy was at an all-time high, even on the GOP side, the RNC deployed a mythically small number of field staff, opened a mythically small number of campaign offices, and generally deprioritized grassroots. We simply didn't tap into that energy effectively. Often we failed because we were inept. Often, these were the product of intentional decisions by state parties (see below) who were afraid of new people (see above). More broadly, a whole number of volunteer engagement plans failed to materialize. I still have drafts of some of them.

Third, many of our state parties are completely dysfunctional. COMPLETELY. There have been some horror stories out of state parties that should have been able to pull their own weight but simply weren't. I won't name names yet, but it is not good. There is indeed a correlation between the states that have lost elections and the state of their parties. There are two solutions to this. Either someone needs to take them over from below or, much less preferably, they need to be fixed top-down from DC with new staff, bypassing and eventually surpassing the state parties.

Fourth, history will probably show that the mistake of squashing of the libertarian grassroots out west in the form of the Ron Paul campaign could resonate for years. Fewer activists, less money, etc. Many people will try to blame McCain and/or his campaign, but I do not believe that a single state party stood up for a significant part of their grassroots. Often, the parties were so weak that they ended up being complicit in tossing out Paul-supporting libertarians because they were afraid of new people coming in and taking over. These same parties were already in desperate places because of their inability to respond to the growing strength of latino voting blocs with outreach to bring them over. These are not the responses of healthy parties.