FROM: RNC Chief of Staff Mike Shields
TO: Interested Parties
RE: State of the Senate Race
Republicans began this cycle by making a commitment to change how our party committees operate. When it came to our strategy for winning in midterms, we recognized that politics is a team sport and the way to get the most out of our combined resources was for us to focus on core competencies that only the RNC can achieve. That way we could supplement the excellent work our friends were already planning to do. For example, why would the RNC need to be in the TV ad business when our colleagues at the NRSC are running a superb TV campaign for the fantastic candidates they recruited? Our job at the RNC should be to complement that work and supply a revamped ground game, empowered by new technology and new data analytics.
As we head into this final stretch, we are seeing this commitment paying off.
A NEW GROUND GAME
Gone are the days of the very successful "72-hour program.” With early voting and year round field operatives we have evolved the RNC into something new. We launched Victory 365 as a national, full time ground operation. Since last year, V365 has been working to identify low propensity Republican voters. These are voters that our data analytics say agree with us on the issues, but they might not vote without extra encouragement and contact. In all Senate target states, hundreds of staff and thousands of volunteers have so far identified a total of 2,450,747 low propensity voters to engage early and often.
Our work has been focused on getting these voters to the polls early or to vote absentee if possible, so that we build up our vote totals ahead of Election Day and cut into the Democrats’ traditional early vote advantage. While we’re turning out low propensity voters, our data tell us that Democrats have actually been turning out voters who would vote regardless.
Iowa provides an excellent example of the difference this effort has made. For a while last week, Republicans were ahead in absentee and early voting. That’s unheard of in modern Iowa voting. The Democrats have retaken a small lead, which was inevitable, but the point is Democrats are not where they need to be. Democrats have traditionally counted on not just winning the early vote but on winning it by a large margin.
In Colorado, for the first time an all-mail voting state, we have aggressively targeted low propensity voters and it is paying off. More registered Republicans have returned their ballots than registered Democrats and we are neck-and-neck with the Democrats on turning out “new voters.”
This would not be possible without the data analytics and tech field tools – like smart phone apps – to efficiently point our troops to the right voters. Our revamped digital operation is not only raising money online, but targeting low propensity voters online with social pressure GOTV messaging to complement what is happening in the field. The backbone of the RNC has always been our solid data but this is now being enhanced with in-house data scientists helping provide specific scores to every single voter in the country to help target mail, phones and door campaigns.
STATE OF THE RACE
Looking at the polls, Republicans are pulling farther ahead in states that Democrats didn’t expect to have to compete in—Iowa and Colorado, for example. And our candidates have closed large gaps in states where Democrats were counting on a comfortable lead—New Hampshire and North Carolina, for example. One-by-one, political handicappers are moving former “toss-up” states like Alaska, Arkansas, and Louisiana to “lean Republican” and “likely Republican.”
Defeating incumbents is difficult business. Not since 1980 has the Republican Party defeated more than two incumbents. Yet we’re on track to defeat many incumbents this time around. In the races for ten Democrat-held seats, Republicans are either in the lead or have closed the gap with their Democrat opponents: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia.
All this means that Republicans will arrive at Election Day in a strong position, and Democrats will not have the advantage they have come to depend on in past cycles. By using the same turnout techniques that are paying dividends in early and absentee voting for Election Day voting, we expect to be able to claim victory—even in places where we were never expected to win.
DEMOCRATS LOWERING EXPECTATIONS
Clearly Democrats see the same polling information we do. They see the same returns we do. So it’s notable that they are already trying to lower expectations.
On MSNBC Thursday morning, David Axelrod was trying to change the narrative and move the goal posts. Last week the Executive Director of the DSCC was predicting a Democrat Senate Majority, but this week, in an interview with the Washington Post, he suggested that “keeping the majority might not be the most likely outcome.”
For the head of the Democrats’ Senate committee to admit that much is revealing. They know they’re losing. In these final days, expect to see more Democrats (a) refusing to say they will keep the Senate, (b) desperately managing expectations, or (c) suggesting that Republicans should be doing better than we are—even though we’re already doing better than even they expected.
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Elections Election 2014
