The Shadow Convention for the GOP's Future

By Shane Goldmacher, Politico

19 July 16

 

t was mid-April when as many as 1,000 alumni of the most recent Republican administration descended on Dallas for a staff reunion to reminisce about sunnier times. Former President George W. Bush autographed cowboy hats, Vice President Dick Cheney snapped selfies and First Lady Laura Bush chatted up the crowd. The memories were happy; the fajitas were plentiful.

When it came to talk of 2016, though, the mood was grim. The Republican primary had just narrowed to essentially two choices, each anathema to these card-carrying members of the GOP establishment: Ted Cruz and, even more egregiously, Donald Trump.

But few were as dark about the Republican Party’s future as former President Bush himself. In a more intimate moment during the reunion, surrounded by a smaller clutch of former aides and advisers, Bush weighed in with an assessment so foreboding that some who relayed it could not discern if it was gallows humor or blunt realpolitik.

“I’m worried,” Bush told them, “that I will be the last Republican president.”

Donald Trump, who will officially become the Republican nominee on Tuesday, has done little to inspire renewed confidence since.

Instead, he has solidified himself as an erratic, underfunded and scattershot candidate, plagued by staff turmoil and missed opportunities. In the run-up to the convention, he sued a former aide for $10 million. He canceled his vice-presidential announcement citing a terror attack in France, went on cable news and declared America to be in a world war and then announced his pick at the original time slot anyway on Twitter. Within hours, Trump was rocked by leaks from within his inner circle about his own late-night waffling on the single most significant decision a presidential candidate can make.

But it is the rise of Trump’s divisive style and embrace of white resentment politics—anchored by proposals for a wall to keep Mexicans out, an immigration ban preventing Muslims from coming in and talk of cheating by China and ripping up trade deals—that has many of the Republican Party’s elders, privately and publicly, predicting defeat this fall at the hands of a diversifying electorate and fretting about long-term fallout.

In interviews with more than 40 of the Republican Party’s leading strategists, lawmakers, fundraisers and donors, a common thread has emerged heading into the general election: Win or lose in November (and more expect to lose than not), they fear that Trump’s overheated and racialized rhetoric could irreparably poison the GOP brand among the fastest-growing demographic groups in America.

And so, to an almost unprecedented extent, as the 50,000 Republican activists, officials and media pour into Cleveland this week, there is something of a convention within the convention. Many of these GOP titans—the intellectual and financial pillars of the party and its possible future elected leaders—are plotting a parallel course.

In delegation breakfasts, private hotel suites and steakhouses across Cleveland—and farther afield for those, like Jeb Bush and his family, who are skipping the festivities—they are laying the foundations for the next political battles they believe can actually be won: first, to preserve the GOP majorities in the House and Senate this fall, then to save the Republican Party itself.

From the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch to an increasingly influential GOP financier Paul Singer, from those who fell short in 2016—Ted Cruz and Scott Walker—to those who could be fresh faces in 2020—Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, Nikki Haley—from House Speaker Paul Ryan to the not-so-subterranean contest for the chairmanship of the RepublicanNational Committee, the maneuvering is underway to pick up the shards of the shattered GOP.

“There’s a school of thought that Trump, who’s gonna get crushed, will somehow teach the party a lesson and they’ll get it out of their system,” said Stuart Stevens, who was Mitt Romney’s chief strategist in 2012. “I don’t have confidence in that.”

Indeed, many are already at work to rearrange the fractured pieces to their liking—and advantage.

“After every election where there’s a seismic loss on one side; it shatters the power structure and rebuilds it,” said a top Republican strategist intimately involved in such discussions both in Washington and among the GOP’s biggest donors. “There’s a void that exists. And if you’re not prepared to fill it, the chances are the same people who brought you this disaster will.”

This is their story, the story of the shadow convention of Cleveland.

***

Eight days before the official kickoff of the Republican National Convention, Annie Dickerson, a close confidante of Paul Singer and a delegate from New York, played host to a small gathering at the Urban Farmer’s Steakhouse, an upscale eatery a few blocks from the Quicken Loans Arena. As a member of the RNC’s platform committee that would meet in the coming days, Dickerson wanted to have “an intimate discussion amongst pro-freedom individuals who share a more welcoming vision of the future for the Republican Party,” according to an invitation obtained by POLITICO. The American Unity Fund, a Singer-backed nonprofit, underwrote the gathering as its members strategized how to strip anti-gay language from the Republican Party’s official platform.

The effort would be a spectacular bust.

Calls to overturn gay marriage remained. Provisions opposing transgender bathrooms were inserted. “Natural marriage” was hailed. Pro-gay rights Republicans tried to insert language condemning Islamic terrorists for targeting LGBT individuals a month after the attack in Orlando, and Rachel Hoff, the first openly gay platform committee member, challenged her fellow Republicans, “Can you not, at the very least, stand up for our right not to be killed?” The measure lost.

But Singer and his political operation are dedicated to reshaping the Republican Party with that “welcoming vision.” The gay rights fight is more of a side project for the hedge fund manager who is focused on national security, in particular staunch pro-Israel policies, lower taxes and a conservative judiciary. He has given money to immigration reform efforts in the past but his advisers say it is not a focus. What makes Singer so influential is that he can stroke a $5 million check to boost Marco Rubio and then pour $2.5 million more into an anti-Trump super PAC, while he also has a large enough network of friends to be among the most effective bundlers of direct contributions in Republican politics. Singer’s circle of sometimes-allied donors includes billionaires such as Todd Ricketts, Cliff Asness, Dan Loeb and Charles Schwab, and he has been reaching out to more wealthy financiers recently in hopes of expanding his network, according to people who have set up such calls for him.

Singer has slowly assembled this constellation of disparate donors—with himself at the nexus—through groups like American Unity Fund, Winning Women (which, as the name suggests, seeks to elect more women) and, most significantly, the American Opportunity Alliance, which hold secretive semi-annual meetings. The groups are independent but all connected to him. Singer is also a prominent donor to the Republican Jewish Coalition, which itself is planning a post-November push to refocus the GOP’s priorities after Trump, according to one of the group’s leaders. The RJC will hold a political briefing for donors in Cleveland on Wednesday, though Singer isn’t expected to be in town.

“There is a reasonable bet that there’s going to be a lot of death and destruction for the GOP on Election Day,” said an operative involved in the Singer network. “And donors like Singer, who have the resources and relationships and commitment to stay engaged, will need to play a role if the pieces are going to be put back together into something more conservative and more electable than Trumpism.”

So far, Singer’s ambitions have outpaced his success. One prominent Republican strategist, speaking anonymously at the risk of angering so important a donor, laughed at the series of recent losses: immigration reform, Rubio, Stop Trump, gay marriage. “Singer’s group is shaping up to be 0 for life,” the strategist said.

But there could be an opening for Singer, especially because the dominant network of GOP financiers of the past half decade, the Koch network, has shown signs of a reorientation, at least in terms of direct electoral politics.

Singer and the Kochs are disgusted with Trump. “It’s either racist or it’s stereotyping,” Charles Koch said of Trump’s controversial criticism of a federal judge’s Mexican heritage. “It’s unacceptable.” Singer has said Trump’s economic policies, if implemented, would amount to “close to a guarantee of a global depression.”

They appear to have taken different lessons from the 2016 primaries, however. Singer wants to remake the party; the Kochs want to re-educate the electorate. The Kochs, for instance, have little appetite for the minutiae of the RNC platform committee that Dickerson was fighting over. “We could care less,” said a person intimately familiar with the Koch network. “It’s not what we do.”

“We are not trying to move the party,” said Frayda Levin, a major donor and the chair of the board of directors of Americans for Prosperity, one of the biggest arms of the Koch network. “We believe freedom lies, as Thomas Jefferson said, in an educated public and, for the most part, the party will reflect what they believe the American people want. We have to start with the constituency.”

If the 2016 primaries showcased the divide between the Republican elite and the electorate—on trade, on immigration, on entitlement spending—then the Kochs want to emphasize the latter, leveraging what remains the biggest nonparty political infrastructure in America.

James Davis, a spokesman for Freedom Partners a key group in the Koch network, disagreed with the idea that the group was pulling back from politics in any way. “Our electoral efforts are focused on freedom-oriented members of the Senate,” he said.

Singer’s political operation declined to comment for this story.

Singer has, in recent years, assembled a talented and connected roster of formal and informal political advisers: Dan Senor, a former top Romney aide and Paul Ryan confidant; Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society; Angela Meyers, a former national party finance director; and Conor Sweeney, another ex-Ryan adviser, among them.

The Paul Ryan overlap—Senor and Sweeney—is particularly notable. Ryan flew down to Palm Beach in March to attend the most recent gathering of the American Opportunity Alliance, and the two share more than just advisers. They are largely in sync on economic policy, foreign policy and modernizing the GOP’s image, even if they differ on specifics.

In fact, in late June, Singer hosted a previously unreported fundraiser for Ryan in Manhattan. “Regardless of what happens in November,” Singer told the donors, according to a person who was there. “Paul Ryan will be indispensable to the future of the conservative movement.”

***

No figure looms larger in the Cleveland shadow convention than Ryan, who is chairman of the official convention proceedings but has a frenetic schedule to boost the fortunes of House GOP members—and his agenda.

Ryan is busily fighting to ensure Trump only rents the Republican brand, at least when it comes to the GOP’s ideas and policies. Ryan dragged his feet before endorsing Trump and since doing so has condemned him for “racist” rhetoric and talked constantly about “A Better Way,” the branding of the House GOP’s agenda that pointedly applies as much to Democrats as the Republican nominee. On Monday, Ryan scheduled it so, though he is the convention chairman, he was not at the dais as chaos broke out as anti-Trump delegates tried to force a roll-call vote.

Ryan and Trump disagree on fundamental, and traditionally core, GOP principles. Ryan favors free trade deals, has backed comprehensive immigration reform and wants to rein in entitlement programs. Trump is a trade protectionist, whose immigration policy centers on building a mammoth wall and a deportation force, and he wants no cutbacks to entitlements.

Ryan, the former House Budget Comittee chairman and a self-styled ideas man of the GOP, has done his own national publicity blitz, including a recent CNN town hall, to ensure Trumpism doesn’t define Republicanism. “Look,” Ryan said during the televised town hall, “when I hear something that I think doesn't reflect our values and principles, I'm going to say it.” Last Friday night, his office emailed out a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that read, in part, “Paul Ryan and Donald Trump neatly define the poles of the GOP in 2016.”

Ryan has endorsed Trump but, somewhat remarkably, the two have still not appeared in public together, robbing cable networks and the rest of the media of any photographs or video of the highest-ranking Republican in elected office and the Republican nominee for president in the same shot.

Many see the tug-of-war between Ryan and Trump over Republican policy as just as significant as the battle for political control. If Trump exploited a divide between the elite GOP agenda and the electorate, Peter Wehner, a senior adviser in the Bush White House, said, “Republicans have to find how much of it is Trump, how much of this is Trumpism.”

There has been talk of forming a new organization to help, with calls for a reassessment akin to the Democratic Leadership Council from the 1980s, the politically minded think tank that paved the way for moderate Democrats, “third way” politics and, ultimately, Bill Clinton.

After 2012, the Republican Party commissioned an “autopsy” that called for almost the opposite approach to presidential elections that Trump has taken: inclusive rhetoric for Hispanics, outreach to minorities and comprehensive immigration reform. Ryan, though, with his anti-poverty agenda and explicit outreach to African-Americans and young voters is hewing to the autopsy’s blueprint. But if Ryan is chiefly working to define the GOP this cycle and into 2017, there is no shortage of Republicans maneuvering with their eyes on 2020.

***

Ted Cruz decompressed from his crushing 2016 loss by starting to plan for 2020.

Yes, he and his wife went to Mexico less than three weeks after losing the Indiana primary. But the Cruzes didn’t go alone. They were joined by his campaign chairman, Chad Sweet, his national finance chairman, Willie Langston, and his campaign manager, Jeff Roe, who came for part of the trip even though his second daughter (name: Reagan) had been born only about 10 days earlier.

It was a sign of just how tight-knit Cruz’s inner circle had become by the end of the campaign and Cruz’s unquenchable thirst for politics. Cruz has kept a lower profile since withdrawing but behind-the-scenes his political organization has continued to hum. Most of Cruz’s senior team is staying in his orbit as he has shuffled staff, had allies launch two new political groups and tended closely to the big donors who helped underwrite his campaign.

Cruz has already announced he will run for reelection to the Senate in 2018—but there are plenty of signs he still has an eye on the White House. Cruz and Roe have commissioned a massive, top-to-bottom review of the decisions made in the presidential primary, from big choices, like where they traveled and advertised, to small ones, like whether it made economic sense to rent dormitory halls in Iowa and New Hampshire for volunteers, rather than book them hotel rooms.

Cruz, an obsessive about the mechanics of politics, revels in such minutiae. “Most campaigns treat data as an afterthought, and they don't invest in it, and they're not willing to have decision-making follow the data,” Cruz said on Politico’s Off Message podcast this week.

The post-mortem’s findings, presumably, would yield a how-to manual for 2020. “Most wars,” as Cruz said in the podcast, “are not won in a single battle.”

In late June, Cruz invited more than 100 of his top bundlers and donors to a retreat in La Jolla, California, that is reported here for the first time. They were treated to meals, a cruise and detailed presentations about how the campaign spent their money and what was coming next by some of Cruz’s top brass, including Roe, chief strategist Jason Johnson, data and research director Chris Wilson, political director Mark Campbell and senior adviser David Polyansky, according to two attendees.

Campbell, meanwhile, is launching two new nonprofit groups, a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4), to house some of Cruz’s senior team, as first reported by National Review, including Paul Teller, his former chief of staff, Bryan English, his Iowa state director, and Brian Phillips, his campaign rapid response director. Polyansky, who began on Scott Walker’s staff but rose to become one of Cruz’s most trusted advisers during the primary, has since taken the helm of his Senate office as chief of staff.

The idea is that the allied nonprofits will tend to Cruz’s grass-roots donor base, synergize with other movement groups, generate fresh legislative ideas, and organize Cruz’s early-state travels. One Cruz adviser compared the entities to what Ronald Reagan’s allies created after 1976 and that paved the way for his nomination four years later.

“These groups are important to keep that movement intact,” said another Cruz aide.

In Cleveland, Cruz and his allies began working even before most of the delegates arrived. Another of Cruz’s former campaign hands, Ken Cuccinelli, pushed to incentivize Republican-only closed primaries—the contests where Cruz performed best—in 2020. The effort failed. And last Friday, Cruz quietly flew in and out to appear before a gathering of conservative leaders, known as the Council for National Policy, where his introduction was greeted with a thunderous, minutes-long standing ovation, according to two attendees.

He is hosting a thank-you reception at a waterfront bar on Wednesday for his supporters who are serving as delegates, and on Wednesday he will deliver an address that aides say will focus on the conservative movement and principles—essentially his supporters and his agenda. Cruz has so far declined to endorse Trump. It is highly unusual to be granted a prominent speaking slot without an endorsement but with hundreds of loyal delegates, and Trump seeking party unity, Cruz has carved himself an exemption.

Others are angling for the future, too. Sen. Tom Cotton, who has endorsed Trump, has scheduled meetings with the Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina delegations, as has Gov. Scott Walker, who lasted only briefly in the 2016 contest. Both Walker and Cotton are slated to deliver convention speeches. Cotton already headlined a big South Carolina fundraiser, and in August is headed to a GOP gathering in Nevada, hosted by the state’s Republican attorney general.

Then there are the Trump foes—Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who has been the most outspoken senator opposing Trump, and Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who rebuked Trump in the national State of the Union response in January. They are staying away from Cleveland and tamping down talk of their political futures but are nonetheless discussed as among the party’s rising stars.

“The overt activity of a number of failed candidates is unprecedented,” said Scott Reed, chief strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which itself has sparred with Trump over trade. “And quite unseemly.”

***

“Unseemly” is the exact word one veteran member of the Republican National Committee used to describe the shadow contest underway to replace Reince Priebus as head of the RNC. The reason? The race is premised on the very idea that Trump loses. Because if he wins, presidents almost always hand-pick their preferred RNC chair.

But despite that fact, two GOP leaders are not-so-quietly angling for the job: Robert Graham, chairman of the Arizona Republican Party, and Matt Pinnell, a former Oklahoma state chairman who is currently on staff at the RNC as the national state party director. They’re both traveling the country and actively wooing the three committee members. In the most overt move yet, Graham has invited RNC members to schmooze at a Kid Rock concert on Thursday. Pinnell countered with a roving happy hour last Saturday, held in the auspices of his job at the RNC.

The contest—as with everything about the Republican Party—is revolving at least in part around Trump.

As staff, Pinnell is widely viewed inside the RNC as Priebus’ preferred pick, with a job wrangling state party chairs that has given him a natural base among the 168-member committee. He gets to travel the country on the party’s dime, as his job is to train and earn the trust of one-third of the committee. Graham’s base is believed to lie in the West—he even recently took a trip to Hawaii—and he is out of favor in the RNC’s Capitol Hill headquarters. Graham has been an outspoken Trump backer, trying to whip the Arizona delegation to unify behind the presumptive nominee.

The anti-Trump forces have taken notice. Beau Correll, a delegate from Virginia, called him an “absolute madman” for apparently heavy-handed pro-Trump tactics. “I find that frightening that someone being as heavy-handed and thuggish … would aspire to lead the whole party,” he told anti-Trump activists on a recent conference call.

Others could jump in, too. Ohio chairman Matt Borges leads a key battleground state and is well-regarded. South Carolina chairman Matt Moore is young and fast forging friendships. But the RNC race—Priebus has signaled he’s done after two terms—might not be an internal tussle but a broader one.

Even in its diminished state in the age of unlimited super PAC money, the party chairmanship remains one of the most influential posts to exert influence over the GOP’s direction. Some of the party’s top financiers have even discussed throwing their weight behind a preferred pick. And the potential for a broad reassessment has raised the specter of outsider wild-card candidates mostly in idle barroom chatter—a termed-out Chris Christie, say, a still-looking-for-a-prominent-political-job Carly Fiorina or even Mitt Romney.

***

“The day after the election we’ll get back to being the anti-Clinton party,” said Alex Conant, a veteran Republican strategist and longtime Rubio adviser. “Which we’re actually good at being.”

"We’ll have a really good midterm,” he predicted, and a deep bench for 2020.

But being the loyal opposition and building a political majority in big-turnout presidential years are different. And the question will still be what the Republican Party actually stands for.

Charlie Spies, who was a lawyer for Jeb Bush’s super PAC, said one hindrance for many Republicans to speak out effectively about an alternative vision for the GOP is that they can be so easily dismissed. “All of the people preaching inclusiveness and growth for the party were tied to campaigns that lost,” he said. “So that immediately questions our credibility.”

But after November, if Clinton is president, Trump would face the dreaded “loser” tag himself.

As Ari Fleischer, one of the co-authors of the Republican autopsy report that recommended a more inclusive party, said: “The manner in which Trump has campaigned is just the opposite of the recommendations we made. We’ll know on Election Day whether we were right or he was right. ... If he loses, I strongly suspect it will be because of everything we warned about.”

The Republican debate about whether there are enough disaffected working-class white voters in the Rust Belt and other states to offset the fast-growing Hispanic population and the GOP’s plummeting support among blacks (Trump scored a remarkable zero percent among African-Americans in two recent swing state polls) exhausts Stuart Stevens, the Romney strategist.

“I feel like a lot of these discussions in the Republican Party are like somebody’s driving with 20 miles of gas and they need to go 100 miles,” Stevens said. “And they’re debating whether or not they need to stop for gas. The car doesn’t care. The car will stop.”

Lanhee Chen, who served as a top Romney policy adviser, noted how unusual it is that the Republican Party is going through these convulsions before the general election has even formally begun. “I didn’t hear anyone talking about what direction the Republican Party would head after Mitt Romney the week before the convention [in 2012],” he said.

Trent Lott, the former Republican Senate Majority Leader, who has endorsed Trump, said the forces currently buffeting the Republican Party, and the country, remind him of the impeachment proceedings he saw up close against Richard Nixon in the 1970s, when he was a young congressman, and later against Bill Clinton in the 1990s, when he was a senator.

“Here’s the conclusion I’ve come to: American democracy and our form of government is much stronger than any individual,” Lott said. “Things look pretty bleak right now. But this too shall pass.”