GOP puts more boots on the ground in Nevada this election year
Republicans are taking the lessons they learned from the past three presidential elections and putting them to use in Nevada and elsewhere in 2016.
It’s led to an added emphasis on a boots-on-the-ground approach in the Silver State and much less reliance on phone banks to reach and recruit potential voters.
National and state Republican leaders reached this point by starting early with planning and taking a look at what worked — and didn’t work — in the past three presidential elections. Republicans won just one of those — in 2004 when President George W. Bush was re-elected. President Barack Obama won the next two in 2008 and 2012.
“We pretty much scrapped the old victory program,” said Chris Carr, political director for the National Republican Committee, in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
That means more doors to knock on along with other efforts to reach voters in person. National Republican leaders started laying the groundwork and planning in early 2015.
“We went back to 2004 and looked at all the lessons learned — good and bad,” Carr said. “And then we looked very in depth at what the Obama campaign had accomplished in ’08 and ’12.”
The 2016 election is high-stakes, particularly in Nevada. There’s an open presidential race. Republican billionaire businessman Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee and is expected to face Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Also, the open U.S. Senate race in Nevada has attracted national attention, with Republicans and Democrats battling for a successor to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who is retiring. Republican Joe Heck, a congressman, is facing Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, a former Nevada attorney general.
Numbers are already showing a dramatic shift in the Republican strategy from 2012. Nationally, the RNC and Mitt Romney campaign knocked on about 77,000 doors in June 2012. In comparison, the RNC has knocked on more than 200,000 doors nationwide since June 3.
“We changed up our program,” Carr said.
The new Republican ground game’s playbook takes into account what worked for Obama.
“They invested heavily in people, in boots on the ground,” said Carr, a former executive director of the Nevada Republican Party and Romney’s state director in Nevada in 2012.
Of Obama’s campaign, Carr said: “They had people that were in these battleground states much earlier than Romney, which meant they had better relationships with their volunteers and also with the voters and they did that by building out these neighborhood teams.”
In 2008, the Obama campaign added community organizing to the 2004 template that drove Bush’s win. In some ways, the 2004 Bush campaign was a textbook example of the first “modern-day campaign” that used microtargeting to reach voters in much the same way corporate America uses consumer data to target potential customers.
The ground game in Nevada started in the summer of 2015 when staffers were hired. They now have been on the ground for almost a year.
The party has identified 29 turfs, each with an identified 8,000 to 10,000 voters targeted. That group includes independent swing voters and “low-propensity Republicans” — those with sporadic voting histories.
The Republicans have 68 neighborhood team leaders, a title given to volunteers in the field program only after they go through training and meet basic requirements, such as hosting house parties and doing other activities to reach voters. The party also has 48 core team leaders.
In all, the party has more than 1,500 volunteers statewide so far for efforts that include Trump but also all the down-ballot GOP candidates, including Heck.
“I’m confident that our combined efforts will be second to none,” said Scott Scheid, senior adviser for Heck’s campaign.
On the voter registration front, Democrats in Nevada have an edge. Nearly 40 percent of the state’s registered voters are Democrats — 518,124 in all, according to May 27 secretary of state figures. Almost 35 percent of registered voters — 452,028 — are Republicans. There are another 247,344 registered independent voters, accounting for 19 percent of the state’s 1.29 million registered voters. The rest belong to third parties.
To bridge the gap, Republicans will need to register more voters and reach out to voters unaffiliated with the GOP.
Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald said it’s a “different state party” compared with 2012 and credited RNC leaders.
“We built a pretty good machine,” McDonald said. “We have a very aggressive ground game.”
He added: “We have a new machine to reach independents. We have a new machine to reach people who have fallen away.”
Contact Ben Botkin at bbotkin@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2904. Find @BenBotkin1 on Twitter.
