Plan of Steele

In 1977, David Norcross began his career in national politics as New Jersey’s representative on the Republican National Committee. That same year, Reince Preibus was preparing for kindergarten.
For a full generation, Norcross has been part of the RNC’s cadre of kingmakers. But on Jan. 30, the Preibus generation took over, as the young Wisconsin GOP Chair—along with a new guard of young Republican leaders—helped Michael Steele score an upset victory to become the new face of the RNC.
That Steele won the chairman’s race didn’t surprise many Republican activists across the country. The telegenic former Maryland Lieutenant Governor has developed a national following with his Fox News commentary. And those of us who had seen Steele behind-the-scenes of his 2006 Senate race knew him as a free spirit whose first instinct is to rethink campaign conventions. An insurgent campaign in a time of internal party unrest fit his personality well.
But Steele’s Jan. 30 win did shock the old bulls of the Republican establishment. Unlike most—if not all—of his predecessors at the RNC, Steele’s war counsel wasn’t stocked with the old guard. Norcross—like Bush consigliore Ron Kaufman, legendary Ohio party boss Bob Bennett and Karl Rove protégé Terry Nelson—was working the floor of the Capital Hilton for another candidate. Rove’s hand-picked incumbent Mike Duncan and South Carolina Chair Katon Dawson were more conventional men, more comfortable to the lobby-law wing of the GOP hierarchy.
The core of Steele’s winning coalition were the RNC’s newer members—people like Preibus and mostly-unknown state party chairs like Jim Greer of Florida and Bob Tiernan of Oregon. Half of Steele’s 21-person “whip team” on the committee rose to their current Party leadership roles after the disastrous election of 2006. They’re the brave ones who swam toward the sinking ship.
Steele came by his campaign tenets honestly, matriculating through party ranks in forgotten quarters. He was first a county chairman in Maryland’s largest Democratic county, then became state chairman in a blue state that rarely made national target lists. He campaigned on a reform platform different from his rivals: He was the only candidate with an “ethics” prong that pledged to stop headquarters staff from forcing favored vendors onto state parties; he insisted he would fund campaigns in even the bluest states.
As a conservative Catholic, Steele hit expected right-wing high-notes, but he also talked about school choice for urban children and long-term solutions to poverty. Steele carries three Blackberries and is prone to flurries of past-midnight emails, and he made a convincing case that he would bring the GOP’s campaign technology into the digital age. And—even more unusual for a candidate for the party’s ultimate inside job—Steele preached that too many Washington Republicans had become the very thing the party had always argued against—big-spending courtiers soaking in taxpayer dollars.
In every significant way, Steele made sure his campaign screamed “change.” And amidst what looked like a sleepy Christmas-time race, Republicans responded in ways few inside the Beltway press corps noticed.
Though the race is decided by a finite pool of 168 party insiders, Steele asked Republican activists around the country to sign up to support his bid for chairman. In the two months after Obama’s dispiriting rout, his website enlisted 42,000 such activists.
Blaise Hazelwood, Steele’s campaign manager, put the 42,000 to work. Hazelwood first came to prominence as the driver behind the “72-Hour Task Force” in 2001—the party’s last meaningful revision to its tactical campaign playbook. This time, Hazelwood innovated again, asking those online supporters to email their national committee members. While urging a vote for Steele, the supporters pledged a specific donation of volunteer hours to their state parties. This caught the eye of hungry state chairmen like Preibus.
This was a fresh committee: 141 of the 168 who voted had never served through a contested chairman’s race. They were much more impressed by Steele’s actions than by the cajoling of the old bulls. Steele was himself an underutilized talent during his term on the committee in 2001 and 2002. That experience birthed an Election Day operation surprisingly ready to do hand-to-hand combat against the GOP’s most experienced operatives.
Only a handful of Steele’s whip team had participated in the last open chairman’s race in 1997—and some were attending their very first RNC meeting. But Steele recruited skilled private-sector negotiators and grass-roots politicos who, whatever their familiarity with their committee brethren, knew how to line up votes.
And Steele did not abandon long-time committee members. Two senior committeewomen, the low-profile Miriam Hellreich of Hawaii and Joyce Terhes of Maryland, had quietly, over decades, pieced together their own networks. On the penultimate round of balloting, Hellreich’s credibility with the previously obscure “island caucus”—the block of RNC members from the territories—gave Steele the boost he needed to pass Dawson for good.
In short, Steele built a leadership team—and a winning campaign—with tactics, ideas, and coalitions rarely before used in the GOP. Steele promised to shake things up at party headquarters—and to the old guard’s surprise, the new RNC was in a mood to shake. Brad Todd and his partners at OnMessage Inc. created TV ads for Michael Steele’s 2006 Senate race and were volunteer advisors in Steele’s race for RNC Chair.