30: Bottom-Up Growth

Grow the Republican Party from the ground up, not from the top down.

Other Information:

Bottom-Up, not Top-Down With regard to organization, the RNC, campaigns and our friends and allies have become too Washington-centric and top-down oriented. The best campaigns and organizations hire senior people and empower them at the state and local level. We need to grow the Republican Party from the ground up, not from the top down. This grassroots plan must be hinged with our political and social media plan. The RNC must hire seasoned Regional Political Directors and field finance directors to help state parties and campaigns win from the precinct level up. We need a lot more of the Evelyn McPhail grassroots approach to politics. As the committee was told by a participant during a listening session in North Carolina, "Make the precinct captain the most important person in a campaign." While the 72-hour program was incredibly effective during the Bush 43 years, we need to recruit significant local volunteers, rather than shipping in outsiders to do fieldwork. This should be a neighbor-to-neighbor effort, and non-party organizations with local ties and knowledge can play a key role.

Stakeholder(s):

• Third-Party Groups: The current campaign finance environment has led to a handful of friends and allied groups dominating our side's efforts. This is not healthy. A lot of centralized authority in the hands of a few people at these outside organizations is dangerous for our Party. This report pushes hard for campaign finance reform that would help the RNC return to its rightful position as the national Party leader, but we also believe the growth of more third-party groups would encourage more innovation and spread the resources beyond a handful of Washington, D.C.-based consultants. It's not that these consultants are not capable, but there will continue to be a huge risk of a 2012 repeat if we move forward with the same model.


• Conservative Groups: The conservative cause is fortunate to have many strong friends and allies promoting our beliefs and our candidates. One issue of concern is that too often it seems these outside groups (and our 2012 presidential campaign) tend to hire one vendor to handle all of their paid media, mail, phones, etc. We are concerned that leads to a lack of innovation and too many decisions being made by a small, centralized team. Don't forget that our base of voters is naturally skeptical of centralized leadership attempting to control too many things. Our friends and allies should hire multiple vendors to foster competition and more ideas and to minimize the risk of poor performance.


• Local Conservative Leaders: A number of these groups are empowering local conservative leaders to help rally voters behind the best conservative candidates. This is a much more effective approach than anyone in Washington trying to dictate our primaries.

Objective(s):

30.1: Field Organizers

30.2: Vendors

30.3: Local Conservative Leaders

Content