Takeover (36 page)

The Republican National Committee and its associated organizations are totally incapable of competing technologically with the Democrats. Nor do they show any inclination to change their strategy.

In Leahy and Medina’s analysis, the Republican establishment consultants who currently control the RNC are not conservatives, competent campaign practitioners, or honest and reliable people. Their primary function is to drain the bank accounts of Republican donors, transfer that wealth to themselves, and deliver inferior campaign management services to Republican candidates through
a tightly controlled crony system.

These services are so outdated that the candidates who receive them are at a competitive disadvantage. While doing all this, the elite GOP “crony consultants” minimize and deny the value of grassroots campaign technology, and marginalize candidates and activists that really want a conservative America.

Leahy and Medina predict that left to their own devices, it is highly likely the Republican establishment will not be able to maintain control of the House in 2014. With a Democratic-controlled House and Senate in the last two years of a Democratic president’s final term, there will be no constitutional constraint on President Obama’s unconstitutional actions that will destroy the free-market country we know and love.

When Obama won in 2012, he did not have an overwhelming national mandate. Obama won because he successfully and brilliantly won hundreds of micro campaigns all across America. Only through advanced technology can conservatives compete in any significant way. For example, we must master the science and execution of micro-targeting church-attending home school families through meaningful communication.

The way for conservatives to do that, and to win in the primary and general elections, is to mount aggressive get-out-the-vote campaigns that focus on person-to-person communication, using what voters tell them on the doorstep to craft personalized messages of encouragement and support delivered through a state-of-the-art, analytics-driven data base and communication system.

To accomplish this vision, conservatives must change the way the Republican primary election game is played so as to give qualified, boat-rocking conservative candidates like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul far better chances of defeating establishment Republicans.

Medina and Leahy said that grassroots conservatives can do so by first removing the political consultant class from the process of selecting and managing conservative candidates. Then replacing them with a new political infrastructure powered with low-cost, state-of-the-art,
voter contact technologies that draws its manpower from the largely volunteer conservative grassroots army that has sprung to life over the past four years and is now awaiting a path to victory.

What’s more, this new political infrastructure can be created at a fraction of the cost of the stodgy, tired, expensive television advertising–driven campaigns of establishment Republicans managed by the political consultant class.

The Real Conservatives National Committee plan started with these simple propositions:

• Do not hire Washington-based consultants to drive your messaging and fund-raising.

• Do not spend most of your money on wasteful television commercials.

• Do not focus on needless and ineffective rallies and petitions.

• Do give local control to local groups.

• Do be respectful to local organizations and groups.

• Do provide local groups needed resources, unlike Washington-based groups, which take resources from them.

Leahy and Medina point out that to begin the process, volunteers must be taught how to use the voter contact system by participating in a fun day of door-to-door political canvassing. Their activities consisted of door-to-door canvassing of Republican primary voters, using state-of-the- art smartphone technology that integrates with sophisticated databases, as well as old-style paper-and-clipboard data collection. For the volunteers who do not have smartphones, walk lists from the database management system can be printed, and the results of the door-to-door canvass can be inputted the old-fashioned way.

The Real Conservatives National Committee conducted a “National Ground Game Day” on May 25, 2013—Memorial Day weekend—that was a smashing success.

Obviously, key to making the Real Conservatives National Committee plan work is finding an inexpensive, tested, reliable, robust, easy-to-use database that tracks voter behavior at the individualized level. The Real Conservatives National Committee has tested and recommends Moonshadow Mobile’s Ground Game mobile application.
¹

Leahy and Medina researched numerous other technologies, and say none compare from a tech or finance standpoint; accordingly, they selected Moonshadow Mobile as the Real Conservatives National Committee’s exclusive voter canvassing technology partner. Ground Game was used by a number of political campaigns during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. During the 2012 election cycle, former Reagan administration official Tom McCabe’s Associated Strategies used Ground Game in four campaigns. Three of the four races in which it was deployed resulted in conservative victories:

• Two State of Washington State Senate Races

• One congressional race—Keith Rothfus, (R-PA)

In the fourth race, an incumbent congressional candidate, Ann Marie Buerkle (R-NY), was defeated, a result due in large part to redistricting by the Democratic Party–controlled state legislature.

These past election results show that the most effective way to influence undecided voters, or to confirm committed voters, is to deliver six “communication touches” between the initial canvass and Election Day.

To be most effective the grassroots campaign must deliver these follow-up contacts or “communication touches” in four ways:

1. E-mail communications

2. Text messages

3. Follow-up personal visits at the voter’s residence, with a brief conversation and literature drop

4. The alternative media of direct mail

These were used by Tom McCabe and Associated Strategies in the four campaigns they worked on in the 2012 election cycle.

In addition to the focus on using effective grassroots campaign tactics and tools to defeat the Republican establishment’s typical advantage in money and fatal addiction to consultant-run TV campaigns, Leahy and Medina offered two other important insights.

First, the grassroots campaign to Republican primary voters must focus on the three core values of the Tea Party movement: constitutionally limited government, free markets, and fiscal responsibility. They must demonstrate how those values support public policies that influence the key issues identified for each voter in the door-to-door canvassing.

Second, conservatives should strive to avoid splitting the conservative vote in the primary, and establish a “vetting” process or some means of coalescing grassroots constitutional conservatives around one candidate. This is the key to fielding the best challenger to an incumbent establishment Republican, or to an establishment Republican who has been, as Lorie Medina once said, “anointed by the string-pullers inside the Beltway” as the favored candidate in an open seat.

Dan Schultz’s plan took an entirely different tack from the elective office–focused approach of Lorie Medina, Michael Patrick Leahy, and their Real Conservatives National Committee strategy. What
Dan says is, “Calling talk radio stations does not really DO much. Twittering and ranting in chat rooms about what’s happening does not really
do
much.” If you want to save your country, then “you MUST become a ballplayer in the real ballgame of politics: It is your civic duty to become involved in Party politics.”

Schultz goes on to point out that conservatives have the power and the numbers to take back their government from the current crop of officeholders who seem hell-bent on ignoring the strictures of the United States Constitution and foisting socialism upon Americans, but to do so we conservatives have to do more than complain or read a book—we have to invest a few hours a month in attending the meetings of our local Republican Party.

Every square inch of the United States is within a “political neighborhood,” a precinct. When you vote, your polling place is your precinct’s polling place. Your precinct has a number and, probably, a name. Dan Schultz lives in precinct number 918, Tempe 59. His precinct has eight precinct committeemen. He is one of them. Each of them was elected in the primary election. To get on the ballot, each of them had to get ten signatures from Republicans or independents in the precinct. That’s it. Ten signatures.

Schultz says it took him about forty minutes to get the signatures—the Party gave him a “walking sheet” for his precinct that told him in which houses Republicans and independents lived. In some precincts, the precinct committeemen only had to get three signatures. Every state has a different system. Some, like Arizona and Ohio, elect the leaders in their precincts. Other states require meeting attendance and dues. None of the requirements are onerous. Schultz has compiled links on his website to some of the states’ rules relating to how to become a leader in your precinct.

Encouraging conservatives to run for precinct committeeman has been a longtime goal of the First Lady of the conservative movement, Phyllis Schlafly. Her e-pamphlet
The Most Powerful Office in The World Is NOT The President of the United States!
is a great starting point and primer on the importance of the precinct committeeman
in Republican politics.

How is this a strategy for taking over the Republican Party and governing America according to conservative principles in 2017?

It is simple. We have a two-party political system. One group of Americans has hijacked the Democrat Party and has been able to fool enough Americans to vote for their candidates, who usually run as “moderates.” Another group of Americans has hijacked the Republican Party, which claims to represent conservatives, but all too often governs from the same Big Government progressive perspective as the so-called moderate Democrats.

Phyllis Schlafly calls precinct committeeman and women “the most powerful political office in the world,” because they determine who gets the chance to be elected to office at every level of government. Schlafly sagely observes:

• To change things, we must change the laws.

• To change the laws, we must change the people who make them.

• To get elected, your candidate must be on the ballot.

• To get on the November ballot you must win the Primary.

• To win the Primary, you must get the support of people who make endorsements in the Primary, who reliably vote in the Primary, and who get out the vote of others in the Primary.

Those people are the precinct committeemen.

Now, here is the open secret establishment Republicans don’t want you to know:
half
of the Republican precinct committeeman slots, on average, in 2008, in every state, were
vacant
. (In Arizona, where Dan Schultz is from, he says it was worse—over
two-thirds
of the slots were vacant; now, they are almost up to half strength.)
And the currently filled slots are split about fifty-fifty between conservatives and “Republicans In Name Only” (RINOs). What if conservatives could fill up all the vacant slots?

As Dan Schultz said: Do the math.

The Republican Party would be transformed from a half-strength, ideologically split party into a full-strength, 75 percent majority conservative political juggernaut.

Why have I never heard about this?
you are probably wondering. And more important, why have you never heard about this before from your local Republican Party?

Dan Schultz says that it is because virtually all Republican incumbents, including many who profess to be conservative, are terrified that you and other conservative Americans will figure this out and replace them, too, because they have not fought hard enough to preserve your liberties.

They are terrified a more principled conservative adversary might get the backing of a majority of precinct committeemen in their district and state and throw out the incumbents. Like the new, conservative grassroots Tea Partiers and 9.12-ers did in Utah in 2010, denying incumbent senator Robert Bennett the primary nomination by keeping him off the ballot and endorsing boat-rocking senator Mike Lee at the Utah GOP state convention. In 2012 Indiana incumbent establishment Republican Richard Lugar was opposed by over half the Republican county chairs in the state, and likewise lost the primary.

What’s more, precinct committeemen—and only precinct committeemen—get to vote in the party elections that determine the leadership of the party.

Think of it. The more conservatives who become precinct committeemen, the more conservative the party, and its candidates, will become. The Party again might appear to the voters to offer a clear choice from the Democrat Party, rather than an echo of it.

Precinct committeeman is a volunteer position. You put into it the effort you can and want. Some will do more, some less. But, even
if you put in only two or so hours a month, you will be making a real difference, especially in light of the fact that you will be eligible to vote for your local party leaders.

As a precinct committeeman, you will also be eligible to attend your county committee meetings and elect your county leaders. You will be eligible to attend the party nominating convention (assuming you can get elected as a delegate). You could even become your state party chairperson or one of the two Republican National Committee members from your state.

If you want to see establishment Republican Reince Priebus replaced as Republican National Committee chairman with a principled, limited-government constitutional conservative, then you have to start in your neighborhood by running for precinct committeeman or woman.

Dan Schultz says you can’t blame the incumbent elected officials and the existing party leaders for keeping the large number of vacancies a secret—their goal is to hold on to their power.