Electing an RNC chair is a bit like choosing a Pope. A small group of people you’ve probably never heard, get into a room and start voting. Sooner or later a winner emerges.
This is an unconventional campaign (Disclosure: I used to work for Saul Anuzis and I wholeheartedly support his candidacy for RNC chairman.) The normal things you do in a campaign to move public opinion attract support just don’t matter that much. What matters is retail, hand-to-hand campaigning. It’s definitely Old Schoo here. there’s been a lot of it in the last month and it has become the most visible, active and expensive campaign for a party chairman in recent memory.
Still, what it comes down to is getting a clear majority of the 168 members (85 according the bylaws) who make up the Republican National Committee. That’s a pretty small universe of voters, similar in size to the College of Cardinals, the papal electors. (190) So small, in fact, that a candidate can personally meet every voter – and most have.
Saul, and other candidates also have done a good job of reaching out to the roots, the Republican activists across the country during this contest. And Saul has been stellar in is incorporating Modern Media technology to build a staggering – by GOP standards – stable of support among the ‘Net roots, especially the young. This has been a key push of Saul’s candidacy, the need to Re-boot the RNC to make it nimbler, faster and – this is really important – younger.
We shall see if all those frequent-flier miles, desk-side visits with members, vblog, tweets, emails, letters and phone calls have paid off tomorrow when the RNC begins voting (around noon Eastern).
For those of you who have not been following this race all that closely, which is just about everyone with a day job, here is how I see things shaping up:
There is one big factor at work in this race, and it’s something the MSM misses for the most part. The RNC is a group of members and members like to choose one of their own (read: promoting from within the ranks.)
When your party is that of the sitting president of the United States, the party leaders usually, out of deference, acquiesce to the president’s choice for chairman. After eight years of President Bush’s choices for chair, a majority of members want the next RNC leader to be a current, sitting member of the committee.
In this group, you have three people who fit this bill: Mike Duncan, the current RNC chairman who was appointed by President Bush; Saul Anuzis, the Michigan chairman; and Katon Dawson, the chair from South Carolina. (Handicap: All things being equal, smart money will be on one of these three to walk away with the brass ring here.)
There is another factor at play here, albeit not as strong as membership fealty, and that is a sense that the party needs to pick a known, media-savvy front man who can be an effective foil to the new and stratospherically popular President Obama.
In this column, there are two: Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate; and Michael Steele, the one-time Maryland lieutenant governor and one-time Free State U.S. Senate hopeful. Both men are savvy, smart, and darlings of the mainstream media (which matters little among this crowd). Both are also African American, which some say the RNC needs in the front office to broaden its appeal to minorities and help burnish a tarnished political brand in the Era of Obama. (Handicap: don’t count out Steele, for sure, but he’s disadvantaged by not being a current member of the committee. That could hurt in the count to 85.)
Chip Saltsman, the former chair of Tennessee and top adviser to Mike Huckabee, is in the pack but not seen as a serious contender.
I should be an interesting couple days here.
