The RNC Problem
"Opinion"09/03/2010
Paul Munnis
If you were on the Republican National Committee and had just received a request from the Minnesota Republican Party for money to help fund the campaigns of Emmer, Demmer, and Bachman, would you write them checks or would you ration your resources?
My guess is that these Republican candidates are very much on their own. They judge Demmer’s campaign to be important or else Boehner would not have come to Minnesota. They want to retain Bachmann so she was also a part of the Boehner tour. Tom Emmer looks like a hopeless cause but they have invested in attack ads against Mark Dayton hoping for the best. What was raised by Boehner was it; the well is dry.
Furthermore, when fund raising is poor then so will the voting be poor. Every dollar a candidate raises from a voter is assurance of a vote because people don’t invest in candidates whom they expect to lose. Right now GOP fund raising is poor.
There are too many House and Senate seats to defend and to try to capture for the amount of money in the RNC’s coffers. They must therefore prioritize and those with a low index of electability will not get very generous help.
The Republicans are making a desperate play for corporate money right now but the recent demonstrations against Target Stores is giving the nation pause over the wisdom of retail stores who are in need of sales aligning themselves with political parties in need of votes; thus possibly alienating themselves from their customers.
That is not the way to win friends and influence people and retail sales are all about happy customers.
For example Target spends a fortune each year in advertising and it’s all wiped out in minutes by rebelling customers who are boycotting them. Corporate money looks like low hanging fruit to the RNC but it comes at a price to the donors. Also, after money is spent on attack ads and there is no assurance that the donor represents a real bloc of votes or that the ads will assure votes. If transparency is upheld by the Courts then the listeners will know which company provided the poison.
When this sort of a scenario develops the political strategist must combat it and so they turn to the use of polls to try to influence people to donate to them. The skew the polls to show they are in the majority. They then hope that Party despair will be overcome and the pocket-books of donors will open up. We are in that phase right now.
These appeals are to Independent voters who align themselves with whomever they judge to be the winning Party. The Republican Party faithful have been worked over hard and there is little to no money available anymore. Yet the Independent voter is reluctant to bet on less than a sure thing. They will wait awhile until the voting outcome is obvious.
I think the Republican Party is full of bluster right now but the wind is out of their sails and they are sweating plenty. Should they lose this election in a big way then they are finished. We will see in the next eight weeks what reality is.