Calpeek is one of the "must subscribe" political newsletters in California. Dick Rosengarten is always a credible source and has a stable of consultants and political leaders on both sides of the aisle. You can find out more here.
Calpeek’s December 11,2006 edition has the following article about the CRP turnout operation and what others think. This echo’s what I hear almost daily from consultants, candidates, party activists, and GOP county chairs. May won’t speak up for fear of the Governor’s political operation. (You’ll know it isn’t my writing bcause the grammar and speliing is pretty good).
One part of the story isn’t correct. We still don’t have a full accounting!
DOUBTS STILL LINGER ABOUT $20 MILLION CALIF. REPUBLICAN PARTY GOTV EFFORT THAT FLOPPED
Editor’s note: By the time you read this story, the Calif. Republican Party‘s Board of Directors will have met in Sacramento to get a full accounting of their multi-million dollar GOTV effort that benefited Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger‘sreelection, but failed to deliver for any of the other down ballot candidates, except Steve Poizner.Will this accounting by GOP campaign operatives, including folks from Team Arnold, be on the up & up OR a white wash? Here’s our commentary & analysis…
…GOP consultants Calpeek contacted for this story and previous stories all had essentially the same complaints about the Republican GOT V effort: it was run mostlyfor the benefit of Gov. Arnold. And indeed, in his Nov. 20th blog, BOE Member Bill Leonard (R) said in part, "Accusations have been flying that the CRP’s Victory ’06 was actually Arnold ’06, period." He went on to say, "Accusations remain just that: undocumented. What is needed is full disclosure by the CRP leadership – a detailed political audit of how this campaign was waged, specifically, how did the CRP spend $20 million."…
…Turns out that Leonard wasn’t the only GOPer who has called for an audit. So did CA Republican Assembly chair Mike Spence. Spence says there needs to be an outside audit, not one where the same consultants who ran the GOTV do the audit. Former CRP Chair Mike Schroeder agrees on the need for a "healthy outside audit."…
…The key questions as far as some GOPers are concerned are these: 1) how much wag actually spent on the GOTV effort?; 2) did the phone banks mention candidates other than Gov. Arnold? 3) how many volunteers did the Calif. GOP have on election day? And 4) did the GOTV mail sent by the CRP mention anyone but Gov. Arnold???
…CRP Chair Duf Sundheim wrote an op-ed article in the Dec. 4th’ Ventura County Star.The title was "State GOP Going Strong." Some GOPers refer to Sundheim’s article as, "State of Denial."…
… FYI: our sources say that when most of the down ballot GOP candidates learned that the CRP GOTV effort wouldn’t be helping them, they tied to raise some funds on their own. But there wasn’t enough time and it didn’t pan out. Stay tuned…
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.
December 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am
The party should help ALL nominated Republicans in the general election. Not just the governor’s chosen few. We could of elected a very qualified centrist Secretary of State and conservative Lt.Governor if Arnold and his staff gave more attention to them.
Victory 2006 deserves scrutiny by all Republicans liberal and conservative.
It seemed the GOTV effort has been progressively worse over the years. 1998 and 2000 was the best ones in recent history and maybe we should go back to those days.
December 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I have quite a bit of first hand experience with the Victory programs over the years. I was San Diego’s person in 1996, was the central regional director for the 1998 program, and the state field director in 2000. I was a Deputy Political Director during the first Schwarzenegger election, and shared turnout responsibilities with David Reade.
This year I did some fairly minor strategic/technical work but think I was distant enough to put my unbiased 2 cents in.
Victory actually does a variety of things, but lets stick to GOTV because that’s what the conversation appears to be about.
First, I can’t really speak to who was on the material because I cant remember who paid for what that came to my household this time around.
Second, I don’t blame the statewide losses on the gotv programs – I blame them on the demoralization of our base via the Congress. I was polling in several different parts of the state and I watched ‘intensity’ among our voters sink, while the intensity among Democrats continued to climb. The driver was Congress. To win our statewide races we needed the Dem and Ind turnout to fall and the Rep turnout to increase due to the public blowout at the top of the ticket – this didnt really occur because of national events(The odd exception to that rule was San Diego County where GOP intensity surged the last few days BUT where a number of our statewide candidates still lost. I dont know why, yet.)
Third, I think the Governor has a large cross-over appeal to Dems and Inds that simply does not rub easily off on other Republican candidates. Maybe the linkage could have been made better – and that appears to be much of the arguement I’m hearing.
Fourth, this was simply not the worst of the gotv programs I’ve seen. I was there in 1998 and it was a disaster. From what I could see in the fairly large number of counties I was working in, the 2006 program had some real strengths and some problems. In short, I think the AV program was well run at both a strategic and a tactical level. I think the accountability measures for tagging voters were revolutionary, and I will use them from here on in. And while many of the folks on the ground were young and inexperienced and from outside the state, they are always young and inexperienced… thus the importance of the accountability measures. From what I could see most of them worked their asses off, and for the most part did a pretty good job at doing what they were asked to do with one exception: the actual Election Day turnout programs could have been much better in most places, and in some places they appeared not to actually exist in any meaningful way.
I guess this is all to write I dont really buy the ‘we got stabbed in the back’ arguement, nor do I think this election was lost for statewide candidates at the gotv level.
This being the case, do I think the CRP needs reform? Yes. And I don’t mean the power grab we had a couple years ago disguised as reform (hey, wasn’t I a whip for that one?). I mean a real hard look at our CRP programs and a real hard look at where every dollar is going… both for general operations and for the victory programs.