The GOP and the Six Million

by Patrick Ruffini :: April 18th, 2008 12:54 am

Rarely a Saturday has gone by the last few weeks that I haven’t gotten someone e-mailing me that they’re off to their Republican county conventions to fight the RonPaulbots. I didn’t think much of it. But something jogged me and I decided to do some Googling. Even at a 30,000 foot level, it’s pretty remarkable.

Missouri:

UPDATE, 10:45:  A Ron Paul volunteer and organizer in Kansas City confirms that the Jackson County Republican caucus elected a nearly-complete slate of Paul delegates at its convention Saturday.

Larry Holland says the caucus elected more than 170 Paul delegates out of an estimated 187 available.  Those delegates will eventually, directly and indirectly, pick delegates to the Republican National Convention.

Alaska:

Alaska (where Paul came in third, wth 17% of the caucus vote) held its state convention Mar. 13-15, in Anchorage. Ron Paul Alaskans reports that, thanks to efforts at the district conventions, Paulunteers “were to were able to secure 105 delegates to State, or roughly 30% of the total.” At the convention, the Ron Paul Republicans (RPR) managed to pass several platform resolutions, calling for repeal of the Patriot Act, opposing Real ID, and advocating abolition of the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Education. Another resolution, opposing the Iraq war, lost; author Chris McGraw notes that “we were simply unable to pull support from anyone outside of the Ron Paul delegates for this purpose”.

Minnesota:

Over the weekend, [Ron Paul supporters] captured six of a dozen GOP national convention delegates elected at congressional district meetings. The rebellion has left local party officials crying foul, even as state leaders downplay the importance of the unexpected result.

Florida:

Nolan Chart correspondent “Paul from Clearwater, Florida” recently reported on his local caucus: “I got about 30 Ron Paul meetup members to join and become Commmittee Members for the Local Republican Party…. We get there, roll call is taken. We each individually introduce ourselves. The Chairmen of our county and surrounding counties are there. Voting time comes around and THEY DO ALL OF THE VOTING. No one else. And of course they vote themselves in and it is over”

The Orlando Sentinel reports that “similar struggles are occurring in other Florida counties and states.” In Orange County, party chairman Lew Oliver led a move to block Paul supporters from becoming precinct captains at this month’s party meeting. In Pascoe County, Paul supporters were asked to publicly pledge their loyalty to the GOP.

Let’s take a look at what this means, both short term and long term.

Short term, county convention delegates elect state convention delegates. In many cases, the state conventions elect delegates to the national convention. The end result could be a lot of Ron Paul people sitting on the floor in St. Paul, pledged to vote for John McCain but free agents otherwise.

Little will be decided by the delegates. Outwardly, their goal is to get Paul a speaking slot, which I imagine he’ll get, at 8:05 p.m. on Tuesday night.

But by far the biggest impact delegates can have is through floor demonstrations. In some ways, their reactions to the speeches set the tone for the convention, amplifying messages from the stage. Remember how Pat Buchanan enraptured the floor at the 1992 convention but lost the country? Or how the Texas delegates turned their backs on gay Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe in 2000? Now, imagine, Paul loyalists get 20-30% of the seats on the floor in St. Paul, controlling delegations like Missouri, with a significant presence in Minnesota, with closest promixity to the stage. Can the speakers safely voice a pro-victory message in Iraq without a significant amount of boos and catcalls? How will this look on television? And don’t forget, national conventions are also heaven for reporters trolling for off-message quotes from delegates.

The long term aspect is what fascinates and disturbs me. It’s not that Ron Paul supporters are a fearsome army in raw numbers. I don’t worry about them taking over the party. They couldn’t manage 5% of the vote in most states, and are violently opposed by the other 95% when they care enough to show up.

It’s that last part that worries me. If they care enough to show up. In primaries and generals they do. At county conventions, where the party’s identity at the local level is forged, they don’t. Ron Paul supporters are the only ones motivated to organize a bloc of people to take over local Republican Parties across the country. That matters.

I can’t fault them, can you? Dodging on loyalty oaths aside, all they are doing is Grassroots Organizing 101. Even the social conservatives who traditionally filled this role have punted, drifting into lifestyle-based forms of self-identification. What is remarkable is that this is being pulled off by an historically smaller and smaller base of people using the Internet. All because the regular Republican organization across the country is demoralized, demobilized, and eviscerated.

Nationally, it doesn’t look like help is on the way any time soon. The McCain campaign is making a strategic gamble that they can do this without a grassroots organization – and certainly nothing on the scale of 2004. It’s a strategy that’s consistent with McCain’s actual strengths and weaknesses, and from that perspective, I suppose you can justify it.

The problem is that this overlooks some broader realities about the evolution of politics in favor of some narrower, McCain-specific realities. In an over-the-air campaign like 1988, volunteers probably didn’t matter much. In 2008, we’ve seen how active supporter bases can be everything. Look at Obama. Look at the left’s swift, coordinated block-tackle of ABC News. And even in the GOP, look at how grassroots candidates who appealed strongly to a specific niche exceeded expectations (Huck and Paul). The Internet empowers geographically distributed communities to fund campaigns, to set the tenor of media coverage, to explode little YouTube clips into a big, big deal. These are the 5-6 million people on each side who can be inspired enough to sign up for the nominee’s email list, visit blogs, spread messages and volunteer. In caucuses, these types of people represent 100% of the turnout universe (including older people if you take out some of the tech references). Let’s round up and call these groups the Six Million (this is a smaller group, I think, than “the base”).

Republicans haven’t had a concerted strategy for reaching the Six Million since the 2004 election, and help is not on the way in 2008. McCain won the nomination despite the Six Million, is resigning himself to running at a severe financial disadvantage, and is bypassing them by pivoting into general election messaging (blasting Bush on climate change?). At the grassroots level, no one seems to care that these regular Republicans — who are more often than not down the line conservatives on economic issues, cultural issues, and the war — are going home and leaving local parties in the hands of the Paulbots. The Congressional leadership abandoned the Six Million by overspending, and only embraced earmark reform after it was too late. The President abandoned the Six Million on immigration — though that’s a tough one, since restrictionism has very little resonance outside the Six Million.

The Democrats, meanwhile, can be easily confused as a customer service organization to their Six Million, as opposed to a messaging entity targeting the Sixty Million (or, voters). The Six Million includes MoveOn (3 million). The Six Million probably correlates to the 2-3 million emails Obama has today and the 5-6 million he’ll have by November — though that includes some of Obama’s in-house Six Million, younger people from outside the process. If you were to take a poll, the Democratic Six Million would be 70% for Obama and 30% for Clinton.

The focus on the Six Million — which quickly yanked the party in a harder, more partisan direction in the post-9/11 era — can lead to oddities that may well poison the Democrats’ sure thing in 2008, most prominently the nomination of a William Ayers-Jeremiah Wright associate for Leader of the Free World.

That should cause at least a few sighs of relief in Republican circles — but it doesn’t negate the power of an energized Six Million. The standard litany on the right — about the lack of online donors, shot grassroots organizations, the desire for its own MoveOn, and (expletive) Ron Paul supporters taking over county conventions – can all be traced to a lack of care and feeding of its own Six Million in the mid-2000s. Even now, many envision they can create grassroots organizations from the top down, using an issues matrix conjured up by a pollster. Sadly, it’s not that easy. When the right idea to energize the Six Million comes, it won’t come from a “MoveOn of the right” occupying a D.C. office suite funded by an initial round of 7-figure commitments. It will come from someone working outside their den in far outside the Beltway hosting a little activist website that hits the right message at the right time on a $7 shared server.

If we don’t want Ron Paul people controlling our party machinery by default, and if you’re tired of the Obama online fundraising headlines, we need to be focusing on the best minds on empowering David-with-his-slingshot from the Six Million. Even if that means a  little less emphasis on the Sixty Million in the short term.

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