RNC: Mike Shields
NRCC: Liesl Hickey
NRSC: Rob Collins
RGA: Phil Cox
RSLC: Matt Walter
Republicans Organized and Confident for 2014 Mid-term Elections ...1 of 1 >
July 16, 2014 - Leaders of the five national Republican campaign committees expressed confidence about the party's prospects in the upcoming mid-term elections during a joint press briefing at the Capitol Hill Club.  Republican National Committee chief of staff Mike Shields cited an "unprecedented level of cooperation" among the committees and highlighted the ground game and data infrastructure the party has been building up over the past year as part of its Victory 365 program.  The numbers are impressive.  Supporting more than 16,000 volunteer precinct captains, Shields said, are:

"There's 304 field staff: 24 state directors, 280 actual field staffers across the country have opened up 147 different offices.  We've supplemented that with 15 data directors, these are regional field data operatives who work with state parties and work with campaigns to help train them and to utilize the data tools that we've been putting out into the field so that the campaigns can work with us on that.  We have 30 Hispanic engagement staff across the country, 15 African-American engagement staff and 8 Asian American and Pacific Islander engagement staff..."

Shields said these resources have been built out around the country in partnership with the other committees; the RNC in a sense provides the "backbone" of the Republican efforts.  He said the first "live fire" implementation took place in the March 11 special election in the Florida's 13th CD, where David Jolly defeated Democrat Alex Sink by about 4,000 votes.  Looking toward November, Shields said, "The primary focus of what we're working on are the 10 million-plus low propensity Republican voters."  Shields concluded his remarks with a brief overview of the political landscape, noting that "it looks like 2010 in terms of how independents break and the way that our base is motivated going into this election." Leaders of the other four committees followed Shields and offered similarly upbeat assessments.
RNC communications director Sean Spicer opens the briefing.
Democrats face a difficult challenge in holding on the the Senate majority.


DEMOCRACY IN ACTION Partial Transcript / C-SPAN video

Mike Shields: I've been around the party committees most of my career and I can tell you we have an unprecedented level of cooperation that goes on between all the folks that you see working up here and all their staffs, and I think it's one of the reasons why we feel so confident going into this election season, that how well we work together, the amount of information that we can share with one another.  When you don't have the White House and you have different groups that are all working sometimes there's not that unifying force but I think we're all headed in the right direction, we all believe that we're very confident about what we're going to see this fall, and I think another thing you're going to pick up as a theme from all of us is how confident we feel about going into the fall elections, about where Republicans are, where we're headed, and there's some very common things that we're seeing in a lot of the different races that make us feel good about where we're headed.  We have a lot of work to do, but we still feel very good going into the fall elections...

[Slide: "We are working together."]

That was the first point.  We're working together.  Like I said, from the RNC's perspective it has been a real pleasure working with the House and Senate and governors' campaigns, building out the national ground force that we have, working on the data solutions that they need for their campaigns, has really been truly a partnership working with all of them.

[Slide: "2014 GOP Ground Game"]

Here you can see a map of where our ground game is.  We have built out, following their lead [the other party committees], I mean we really do our targeting from where we need to put the troops that we have on the ground based upon where they are telling us that they have targeted races and that they need help.  And so there's a lot of different roles to play on the team.  We're all team mates here together.  We, as many of you have heard from us in briefings, we decided at the start of this cycle to ask ourselves what are sort of some existential questions at the RNC. 

- What's our role? 
- What can we do best? 
- And, what can we only do?

And we decided that there were really two things that we had to focus on: building out the ground game and working on our data infrastructure.  There's a lot of TV ads that we're going to get run and you're going to hear from my colleagues on how they focus on that messaging and they do the candidate recruitment and a lot of other things very well, but what the RNC knows that we have to do is provide that backbone, and it starts with a full-time national ground operation. 

We launched what we call Victory 365 (+) this year.  It's an update of the old Victory program at the RNC; we started it in June of 2013 and you see the states here that are on this map.  We have staff here across the country that are permanent staff.  They're there to work year round in precincts, in local areas; it's essentially community organizing, and it is not an RNC that waits until five months before an election.  That could work when you're maybe buying television.  You can buy ad time and sort of work toward the end.  In the past the ground game had been done the same way and that, we learned that doesn't work.  If you're going to start putting people into communities and building relationships, you need to be there a lot sooner and so we have been spending our money throughout the entire cycle building this out, following their lead as to where do they need that help.

And I think you can see some of the numbers.  We currently have 16,000 precinct captains recruited in the top precincts that we, working with our colleagues that we've determined are the key places that we need to have volunteers so these are folks--  We're not trucking volunteers, throw on a bus over a weekend.  These are folks that live in these communities, that have relationships in these communities, they know where to go knock on the doors, and they're building relationships with local voters and they're on the ground now.  And it's a volunteer force.  We certainly have paid staff.  We have over 200 staffers across the country; 91-percent of the RNC political department does not work at the RNC.  So this is all being led by a paid staff, but we're really building a true volunteer army to help us in the elections.

[Slide: National Ground Game / Expanding the Ground Game]

And there you can see there's 304 field staff: 24 state directors, 280 actual field staffers across the country have opened up 147 different offices.  We've supplemented that with 15 data directors, these are regional field data operatives who work with state parties and work with campaigns to help train them and to utilize the data tools that we've been putting out into the field so that the campaigns can work with us on that. 

We have 30 Hispanic engagement staff across the country, 15 African-American engagement staff and 8 Asian American and Pacific Islander engagement staff.  So built into that ground game is also something that goes back to our Growth & Opportunity report that we published last year addressing the demographic challenges that the Republican Party faces, and not just looking at hiring someone as a coalitions director down the hall, but putting our engagement staff as a part of our field staff so that they're in those communities, working to get those voters. 

And again something you can't do when you wait 'til the end is suddenly build a relationship in a minority community that the Republican Party may not have had before.  And so we've been taking that lead once again from our House and Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, where they've seen the need for that, and working with them to hire those staffers.

As I mentioned we have by far most of our political staff don't work inside the Beltway; they're out around the country.  We mentioned the number of precinct captains we've recruited.  We think that we've got about 30,000 by the end of the election we need to get to, so we're well on our way considering now we would really just have been standing up a lot of Victory offices around the country in a typical election cycle in the past.  We've already made 1.3 million voter contacts so those volunteers are not just out there you know sort of learning the ropes and getting involved and putting on a T-shirt; they've actually been out doing voter contact and utilizing some of the tools that we've put into the field.

The primary focus of what we're working on are the 10 million-plus low propensity Republican voters.  We know that our job is to focus on turnout and the Democrat party in the past has done a good job focusing on those lower propensity voters.  Both parties have lower propensity voters that we need to focus on.  Again having this field staff allows us to really zero in on those voters and of course using the voter scores that we've brought on line that are now available in all 50 states.  We have a new 1 through 100 voter scoring system that we've discussed with some of you.  We used to put voters in one of about five buckets, low propensity Republican, high propensity Republican--  We now have an extensive national survey backed voter scoring system that puts every voter in a 1 through 100 score.  It's available to all of our campaigns so that we can really zero in in a granular way on voters.  We used that in the Florida 13 special election which Liesl can talk about with the NRCC.

And then of course the canvassing tools that we've put in the hands of all of those volunteers.  We now have a system that our state parties have been purchasing where we have a canvassing app that goes on a smartphone.  It loads up the information through an API , an automated system.  We gather information at the doors that immediately gets put up into the RNC's voter file and our database and shared with the campaigns instanteously so we have real time data being generated by those volunteers.  So they're not only out in the field working to persuade voters and talk to them, they're out gathering data and making our entire data set and our voter file better, more robust and more accurate.

[Slide...]

Sort of talked about that.  Additional data gathered for--  Well the voter scores are being enhanced from now through the election; weekly we'll be doing thousands of poll questions that will give us a running track of certain issues across the country and continuing to enhance those models that we have on the voter scores.

[Slide...]

Skip ahead here.  Talking about our strategic initiatives, I mentioned this with our African-American, Asian Pacific Islander and Latino political departments.  We also have our 14 in 14 program, working 14 weeks back from the 2014 elections to get women volunteers more engaged in Republican Party politics, and this is a proactive program.  Our co-chairman Susan Day--Sharon Day, excuse me, is heavily involved in this.  Working to recruit women to get them more involved in Republican Party politics, say we want to get you off the sidelines, we believe in what you can do to help us, we think that will eventually also generate operatives and candidates in the future (+). 

And our youth program.  You know we now have a youth director that's working to organize college campuses.  In the past I think the Republicans had looked at College Republicans as a group of volunteers that we could shift somewhere else and we were getting beat in the college towns.  And we now look at them as here's an army of folks that we can help win in those local areas where they already are and then roll them into our Victory 365 program so they're using the same data tools and the same doorbelling and phone calling strategies.

The Florida 13th special (+), Liesl can talk a lot more about this.  We talk a lot about it at the RNC.  I have to say of course the NRCC did a brilliant job of going in early, doing a lot of persuasion mail and running a fantastic campaign with David Jolly.  We were working on the ground game.  You know they spent $3 million and did some very smart things, but we were working hand in hand with them to provide them the canvassing tools, the voter scores and the volunteer base in Florida 13.  It was really the first live fire way that all the things that I just talked about were able to be implemented in a campaign and we won the race by less than four thousand votes.  So we beat the Democrats at their own game.  They talked a lot about their voter scores in the Virginia governor's race.  They suddenly quit talking about all the things they were doing in Florida 13 I think because they saw the way that we were able to implement a lot of this and win an election.  And now what we're working very hard to do is to implement this across the country in all of the races that we're going to be involved in.

[Slide...]

And then just talking briefly about the GOP brand.  53-percent of Americans believe it is more important to have Republicans in charge and act as a check and balance on President Obama and his policies and I think a lot of the voters that we're looking at in polls it looks like 2010 in terms of how independents break and the way that our base is motivated going into this election.  The GOP holds a 15 point advantage amongst voters with high interest in the midterms and our base is much more motivated, and the presidential approval below 50-percent, just 27-percent believe the country's headed in the right direction; these are all very, very, very bad numbers for Democrats and one of the reasons why we feel optimistic.

Also even with minorities.  We would never say at the RNC that by putting our strategic initiatives program together and hiring an African-American field staff that we're suddenly going to carry 50-percent of the African-American vote in the 2014 elections, and we've never said that that was our goal.  But our goal is to start cutting into the lead that the Democrats have.  It's a long term process, but as you can see on the survey here, just going from 11-percent to 16-percent is a pretty good improvement for us.  We think that showing up and being a part of the community matters.  I can tell you there's certainly some congressional districts where if you took 5-percent off the Democrats' lead with African-Americans they can't win the race any more, and so we really feel that that's a very significant thing for us to continue to do.

Fighting the war on women.  Working with the NRCC we just did a big national survey to provide our candidates with some tools on how to push back on the sort of the false narrative of the war on women.  The GOP wins when we stop allowing the Democrats to set the false narrative on this.  Women's priorities are the economy, government spending, education and health care are things that when we actually manage to get our message through to women, they cut in our favor according to the survey data that we've seen.  They're not happy with the status quo either and they're looking for really pragmatic solutions and Republicans can offer that this fall and we feel like our candidates are now being armed with those tools.  And then of course Harry Reid is busy blocking working families bills that are being sent to him, and then our engagement efforts as I mentioned the 14 in 14.

The weakening Democratic brand.  Obama's approval rating stands at 40-percent.  He's now considered the worst president since World War II.  Of course 40-percent approve of his handling of the economy.  40-percent approve of his handling of Obamacare.  I mean these are numbers that we don't really see a way that the Democrats are going to be able to shake, we don't see what's on the horizon that's going to change, and you see this when you see Senators and people completely avoid even appearing with the president.  It's only July; that's only going to get worse as we continue.

Just to let you know in terms of the messages that win, these are some research pieces that'll be coming out from the RNC; sort of shows you where our focus is.  Obamacare, energy, the economy, government mismanagement and weakened Democratic brand.  So I'm going to turn it over now to my colleague...

[event continues for another 40 minutes]

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