Asking "Impolite Questions" Post 2022 – Ron Nehring

Ron Nehring:

We are seeing fundraising abuses on the part of some candidates and some party committees that are just the highest form of malpractice.

Eric Wilson:

I'm Eric Wilson, managing Partner of Startup Caucus, the home of campaign tech innovation on the right. Welcome to the Business of Politics Show. On this podcast, you're joining in on a conversation with entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. Our guest today is Ron Naing. His extensive resume includes former chairman of the California Republican Party. He was the Republican nominee for Lieutenant Governor in that state, and he served as national spokesman for Senator Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign. In our conversation, we dig into his post-election takeaways from 2022 and where Republicans can improve before 2024. Ron, in your op-ed on the hill last month, you struck what I think is fair to say, a pessimistic tone about campaign autopsies from political parties about political parties. Why is that?

Ron Nehring:

It starts with the fact that typically, number one, we have to recognize that in the US presidential election our campaigns in the US are candidate driven. In Europe, they're party driven. So here in the United States, the number one decision maker in any campaign is the candidate, and they are they're the person in charge. The party has much less influence over the candidate selection and the waging of the campaign than than in Europe. And so when a candidate loses the number one decision maker is already gone <laugh>, right? They're, they're, they're typically out of the, out of the equation there. And so then you know, you have a for example, in the recent case of the R N C, well, we'll do an autopsy. Well, those autopsies tend to be done by political people. And for anyone to suggest that you can do a post-campaign autopsy and politics is not gonna enter into the equation, you know, really isn't dealing, you know, with with reality. And so when you're trying to get an objective assessment, it needs to be done by people who have the flexibility and the liberty to call a spade, a spade that don't have an ax to grind politically and don't have an incentive to, you know, put you know, put a lipstick on a pig when, when mistakes were made. So it's very, very difficult to get an objective, helpful post campaign. Autopsy autopsies, therefore tend to be either polite or useful. But rarely are they both.

Eric Wilson:

Yeah, and I think back to the 2012 growth and opportunity plan, you know, after MIT Romney lost to Barack Obama in 2012, the party came up with lots of recommendations, and then four years later, the, the electorate just went the complete opposite way. And so it, it is interesting that it does seem to be like a, a political exercise. And, and it is always funny when, when the, the recommendation from the people who make money selling something is to buy more of that stuff,

Ron Nehring:

Right? A and, and you bring up a great point. So here, the R N C in 2012, after the Romney loss puts out this this post-election autopsy in 2016, the Republican nomine, Donald Trump does exactly the opposite of everything in that autopsy. And he wins. Now, someone an oversimplified argument will be, well, the, you know, the autopsy was worthless. You know, look in fact the autopsy would've been prescription for another failure. But in reality you know, Donald Trump in 2016 was greatly aided by the fact that he happened to be running against the world's worst democratic candidate in Hillary Clinton. And so a Trump victory was also a Hillary Clinton defeat. And so this tends to be much more complicated than just saying, well, we lost in 12 here's what should have been done differently. And somehow pretending that that is gonna be relevant for a completely different set of circumstances against a, an opponent who is unknown and unpredictable that many years out. And so so we have to be really candid about, about the usefulness of such reports.

Eric Wilson:

Well, let's, let's stay on memory lane for just, just a few more minutes. And I'm thinking about, you know, in the, the, that 2012 report, it said Republicans need to do better with Hispanics and African Americans. Well, turns out the symptom was correct, but the prescription was, was wrong, right? So rather than taking kinder, gentler tone, Donald Trump went the other way, but also drove up our, our performance with those minority groups.

Ron Nehring:

Yeah, because there are elements at play which contribute to how Latino voters or African American voters and other groups voters in other groups make decisions. And, and it turns out that for many Latinos for example, they tend to be more culturally conservative than white liberals. And so if the prescription is, oh, we're gonna win more Latino voters by being more appealing to white liberals it turns out that that's not the case. And that is that as the left has gone further and further to the extreme on these cultural issues and issues related to gender and the like, they are creating a gap with for example, many people in the Latino community, less so in the Asian community, by the way, if you look at the breakdown of where mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Latinos and Asians come down on, for example, gender issues.

But the more the Democrats go go off down to down this extreme woke path on gender issues, the the greater of an opportunity they open up. And then the question then becomes, well, repub, are Republicans willing to activate that hinge on those issues? And there's some people who will, who will argue, well, no, you know, just, that just doesn't occur to them. By the way, very often the people who are writing autopsies have very little in common with the communities that we're talking about winning over. And so it's much easier to write an autopsy report from, you know, your cubicle in Washington DC than actually go out into the community and talk to people and get their feedback on what's happening.

Eric Wilson:

Alright, so what should we be looking at if, if not these, these party autopsies?

Ron Nehring:

Well, I think that it really starts with this notion that we have to run better campaigns. And there's really no excuse today for anyone to run kind of a half baked campaign for office for number of different reasons. Number one as a candidate or as a campaign staffer or even a volunteer, you, you can get training out there from organizations like the Leadership Institute and plenty of others, which which operate out in the field to provide those skills needed to run a solid campaign. So that's point number one. Number two is that we have to do a better job vetting our candidates. And this is where this highly polarized political environment, which we're in, really teaches many people the wrong lessons about how you run an effective political campaign. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> social media rewards people for being more punchy, being more extreme, and being more controversial because that drives engagement.

If you get people mad then then people are more likely to engage with you. And that's what the social media companies want because they monetize that engagement. Because the more clicks means more ads, and more ads means more revenue on the other side. However, in in politics, intensity only goes so far. You actually have to build to a majority, which by the way, nobody in the media and nobody in social media has to do, but candidates have to get to a majority. And so that means doing a proper vulnerability assessment on your own candidate from the beginning so that you can anticipate what are the attacks likely to be coming from the other team as opposed to this environment where we're in today, where that's kind of glossed over, the attacks come in and we just endlessly double down pretending that that will actually work.

So better training on the part of people involved in campaigns, including candidates and staff running more professional campaigns, starting with a proper vulnerability assessment so that attacks can be anticipated. Look, bad information happens in campaigns, but surprises are not okay. Bad information is okay. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's not to quote, okay? But we don't expect every person in politics to be perfect, but surprises are not okay. There's ne there should never be an instance where a candidate is, is completely dumbfounded by an attack coming in from an opponent when when that should have shown up in a vulnerability assessment.

Eric Wilson:

And one of the buzzwords that came out as soon as we got the results on the election night in back in November, was candidate quality. You heard all of the pundits talking about that. And I think that that sort of bears out in, in the data. There's also evidence of campaign quality. Like you talk about what, what does that really mean, and how can we objectively assess the quality of a candidate?

Ron Nehring:

Yeah. Well, that's why that's, I'm gonna continue on the path with a vulnerability assessment. And that is before a candidate makes a decision to run for office, they should perform a, a proper vulnerability assessment on themselves so that they can understand what their opponent is gonna discover about them. And from there, make a decision as to whether the campaign is winnable or not. <Laugh>. And we've seen plenty of candidates out there running who they clearly do not appreciate, number one, how vulnerable they really are. And and number two they th they, we've been kind of drawn into this psychology where if I just double down on whatever the fault is, or if I just engage in enough what aboutm that that will get me through it and I'll be able to win. Well, it doesn't really work that way because voters really do pay attention to a candidate's narrative, not just where they stand on the issues. And this is a really important distinction to understand. Candidates are strong when they're strong in three areas, their ideas, their narrative and and then on top of their narrative, their skill. So they need to be strong in all three areas. And just because you're great on the issues does not mean that you necessarily have a great narrative, a great story, as opposed to one which is full of vulnerabilities, which a, you know, a well organized opponent will be able to exploit and produce your defeat.

Eric Wilson:

And a lot of that comes from just having done this a few times, right? I feel like we've had a number of first time candidates or people who come from outside the realm of plastics, which is, which is great, good to have that perspective, but there is this kind of muscle memory that comes with having done this before, right?

Ron Nehring:

Yeah. I think there are two things that, that come to mind. Number one is your first is your worst. The first time you run for office, that's gonna be when you make all the mistakes, that's when you're gonna, you're gonna say stupid things, you're gonna do stupid things, you're gonna miss opportunities, et cetera. And so it candidates really are stronger if they are running for the, for the Senate or governor after they have run and hopefully won election to a local office. Number one, they'll be better candidates. And number two, they'll have the credibility from the lower elected office which hopefully they were elected to. But what you also find is that there are plenty of people out there who let their egos drive their strategic decision making, and they think, well, I'm a titan of industry, or, I'm a celebrity, or, I've been really successful in some other part of my life.

And oh, by the way, because I get my political education from Facebook, everyone in politics is a moron, and therefore I'm smarter and look how accomplished I am. This ought to be easy. And they underestimate the amount of skill that's required and the amount of scrutiny candidates and competitive races are subjected to. And so there really needs to be an under a better understanding, hopefully on the part of future candidates as to that level of scrutiny, the skill that's required. And, you know, if you've never run for office before and you're gonna make all of those first time mistakes, and it's gonna be in a general election campaign that's highly competitive, that's a very, very different thing. And it's a lot harder than if you ran for a local office and won, got the kinks, worked out, honed your political skills, and then brought the credibility of that office to which you were elected to the next campaign. Boy, what a stronger position a candidate can be in if they follow that path.

Eric Wilson:

One of the things that parties can do to improve candidate quality or, or at least the competitiveness, competitiveness in the general election, is through improvements to nominating systems. What recommendations do you have on that front?

Ron Nehring:

Yeah, boy, that's that <laugh>, Eric, you, you really hit it right on the head there. And that is, there is a role for a political party here. And unfortunately, what we've done over the course of last a hundred years is to divorce political parties from their own nominating process. Here in California, political parties have no role whatsoever in nominating a candidate and having that tied to their appearance on the ballot at all. The top two vote getters in the June primary, regardless of party here in California, when you're running for a state or federal office, this is crazy. Yeah, top getters go on to the general election, which by the way, takes place five or more months later. And so it's a very long period of time, and that amounts to really just a runoff election. And so political parties that want to avoid this re repeating the same mistake here, can set up a screening process.

Maybe that's completely voluntary, et cetera. You know, political people can find a way to create the carrots and sticks needed for people to go through a screening process so that there's some greater confidence. There are, there are parts of, in California here where people in the donor community want to require that candidates and competitive races must go through a training process mm-hmm. <Affirmative> before they can be, they can receive the endorsement of this business group or that other group, et cetera. So the two mechanisms that they're looking at, number one is requiring training and certification on the part of candidates, and perhaps also people working on campaigns. And then number two, having them do the vulnerability assessment on the candidate. Because the candidates have an overwhelming tendency to say, no, no, no, everything's fine. There's nothing that I've ever, you know, done wrong ever.

That's, you know, of any note. And then that winds up not being the case. So there are mechanisms that political parties and third party groups can, can do to you know, to, to screen out. And by the way, the donor community has a strong incentive because they don't wanna fund the candidate who look good initially and then turn out either run terrible campaigns because they have no training background or you know, it turns out that there's something there which which the other team found out about. And and then it's too late.

Eric Wilson:

One of the things that we've had a lot of success with here in Virginia is implementing rank choice, voting for primary nominations. You know, we have a long tradition of, of conventions. The last couple of years we've been doing a lot of ranked choice voting in the primary. I know there, there are lots of issues with it in kind of a general election context that really improved both the tenor of our campaigns being more positive as, as well as the, the outcome. So, you know, governor Glenn Youngen nominated in an r CV contest and swept statewide offices for the first time in over a decade. So I, I definitely think you're onto something there, Ron, with how do we make that process, you know, pull it back into the party and give people a role there.

Ron Nehring:

Yeah. And, and there's a tendency, of course, since this is politics to use screening process is for example, when you have a screening committee or so, well, everybody wants to nominate their friend, or, you know, there's some backroom deal you know, et cetera, and that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is, are there objective processes that can be put in place to improve the quality of candidates, or at a minimum to reduce the surprises that that come along down the road. In California, for example, we have a provision in our state party bylaws. Unfortunately, it was passed over my strong objection at my last convention as as chairman. And this was in response to the Prop 14 top two primary system where if you're a Republican in California and you're running for a state or federal office and you make it into the top two, you automatically have the party's endorsement.

Now that sounds fine, until you get to the realization that, well, in some hopelessly democratic districts, the guy who runs, you know, is a really bad guy, right? And and we've, and there have been cases of people with really bad backgrounds running, and, and they, they ran because nobody's sane ran for that office because no Republican was gonna win it. So some lunatic runs some lunatic with a terrible background who has said terrible things about people, they automatically get the party's endorsement. And then after all the damage has been done, and after it gets national attention, then the party can take an, can take an action to pull the endorsement back. But by that point, the damage has been done. That's not a really smart way to run a nominating process or an endorsement process. So you, I think you're, you're spot on in that people in party office should take the opportunity to look at their nominating processes and say, what can we do to produce better quality candidates? Not necessarily candidates of one philosophy or another, but ca candidates who are just less, like, less vulnerable to attacks from the other team.

Eric Wilson:

You're listening to the Business of Politics Show. I'm speaking with Ron Naing about lessons we're learning after the 2022 midterm elections and what we can do going forward. Ron, one thing we've seen in some of our post-election polling is that fundraising appeals, like text messages and emails, have actually become some of the most voluminous forms of voter contact. Why is that becoming a problem be for campaigns?

Ron Nehring:

Well, I think one big problem that we've seen is this awful, awful trend of making fundraising appeals, which insult your donors. Now, this is the, the most backward, most bizarre trend. I never would've expected to see the type of fundraising appeals where the first line is, you let us down. Are you still with us? <Laugh>? Have you betrayed the party? You

Eric Wilson:

Didn't use that when you would call it major donors when

Ron Nehring:

You were, oh my gosh. You know, absolutely not. And, and in fact, what you wanna do a, as a candidate or a party leader is treat your donors well, not giving 'em special access, that's not what I'm talking about. But to treat your donors well, to respect that every donor is making a gift, and that's not something they have to do. Right? And they are parting. And very often these donors who respond either to direct mail or online appeals, they tend to be senior citizens. And many of them are un fixed income. And boy, we had better make sure that if there is a donor who's on a fixed income, who's contributing 25 or $50 to an appeal that you treat that donor well and that you spend that money in a responsible way because that is a gift that they were not able to buy for their granddaughter.

And that, or that may make it a little more difficult to make ends meet for them that particular month, but that's not what we're seeing. We are seeing fundraising abuses on the part of some candidates and some party committees that, that are just the highest form of malpractice. And the damage that's being done is those appeals. So tho those appeals happen because there's some fundraising consultant who says, look at all the money that this brings in. If we try appeal A, which is polite, it's not bringing in a fraction of the money that appeal B is bringing in when we insult donors and kick them in the head. And that may be true, except the numbers do not capture the number of donors you are losing and the number of future gifts that you are, you are sacrificing by having an appeal that insults the very people you're relying upon to fund your campaign. It, it political committees that are engaging in this are destroying the lifetime value of their donors.

Eric Wilson:

Right? It's, it's really shortsighted. And the, there's a role for political professionals to, to play. Obviously, candidate quality I is an issue, but our grassroots seem to keep ignoring electability as a key attribute. Aside from, you know, more ethical kind fundraising tactics, what, what can political professionals do to help our party course? Correct?

Ron Nehring:

Well, I think one, one aspect here is that very often, and look, I'm a movement conservative. I've been in the, in the conservative movement for 34 years. You know, I'm a movement conservative on every issue down the line. I've worked in the conservative movement, you know, you name it. There are many people in our party who when they hear electability, what what they think they're hearing is someone saying, we need a more moderate candidate mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, or you have to settle for a candidate who's not a champion for what you believe in. And that is a false choice. We can have great conservative candidates who are principled, who are willing to take on the establishment in Washington, but who also don't have a vulnerability book, you know, six inches thick <laugh> with all types of problems because of all the bad judgment that they've demonstrated in their lives.

If we fail to vet our candidates, the other team will do it for us, but they'll do it in the general election, and we'll lose the seat or we'll lose the, you know, the, the office or whatever. So I think part of this, and this is a really good discussion for us for us to have, is that, quote, an electable candidate is not necessarily the more moderate candidate, and it's not the candidate who is content free or, you know, or just wants to be in office and doesn't really care about solving problems. You know, I think the candidates who run to be someone are not nearly as strong once they're in office as candidates who run, who want to do something. People like Reagan Thatcher, they, for them, the job began when they got into the office. It didn't end when they, when they were elected.

The job only began at that point. And so we have to make sure people understand we're not talking about peop nominating people who don't care about anything. In fact, we want people who are committed to putting conservative ideas and solutions into action. But what we are talking about is we have to anticipate the campaign that will be waged against our candidates, and then we have to evaluate our candidates as to will they be able to withstand the campaign that's gonna be waged against them, or is there another candidate who will also put conservative ideas into action? Who will be stronger, who doesn't have the same vulnerabilities, who will be better in that general election contest, not because there's some ideological squish, but because they're stronger in terms of their narrative when held up against the narrative of the other team.

Eric Wilson:

Ron, I wanna get your take on another problem that we've identified in some of our post-election analysis and, and seen in polling is that Republicans completely gave Democrats a free pass on social media platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok, where young voters are particularly active. How do you assess the G o p miscalculation on, on youth outreach in the, the 2022 midterms?

Ron Nehring:

Well, look this is a major contributing factor. It's one of the two major contributing factors to the red wave evaporating into the Crimson Trickle in 2022. And that is that you had two two things that combined in this. One is that youth voter turnout was the second highest in modern times, a and wow, the Democrats got a 28 point advantage in voters under age 29. Now, in the past 20, 30 years ago, it was about even among voters under 29, but now the Democrats have opened a 28 point gap that is a real problem. And, and so there's a strategic and messaging problem, and then there's a, an operational and tactical problem. The strategic and messaging problem is that, that we have to, we have to win those people over, because many of them, we can't just rely that while they're, they'll become conservative when they get older. With a lot of them, they're not.

Eric Wilson:

We're actually yeah, seeing the opposite. Yeah.

Ron Nehring:

We have to meet these voters where they are and not leave them there, right? But we have to go meet them where they are, not where we are. We have to meet them where they are, and then bring, bring, bring them and not leave them there, you know, bring them along. Much of our polling is distorted because many people at age 18 to 29, they're not answering their phone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, they're very difficult to poll, you know, et cetera. And so there's an operational question in here as well, in terms of how do we restructure our party and campaign apparatus so that we do a better job connecting with these voters? And, and, and look, we're not gonna agree on every issue, but we have to find what is the hinge, what is the strategic issue which we do have in common or candidate attribute, which we do have in common, that we can activate that hinge, that we can bring them along.

And this is where this terrible habit inside the Republican party of just endlessly doubling down on every mistake you've made, is really killing us because we have to be able to look back and say, you know, we missed something here. Maybe we have to do something a little bit differently. Rather than you know, just double doubling down on that and, and basically blaming the voter for not coming over to us for being stupid you know, et cetera. They're not those voters are making a decision, and we have to be candid about why they're making the decisions, which they are. So this is where the analytical component within the Republican party is very often broken. And what a political professional can do is introduce an element of having an evidence-based campaign. Because if your candidate has gotten their political education from Facebook or from social media, th you know, that's not reality. That's not the real world. That is home to conspiracy theories and nonsense. And at political professional part of what you're paid to do is to bring that element of reality and an evidence-based campaign plan and an evidence-based pathway to victory to the table that that is, that is rooted in the real, real world and not rooted on, on some, in some meme that someone saw in a Facebook group.

Eric Wilson:

Right? Well, I do think part of the, the challenge is that we've overcorrected to, to being data driven. So I think evidence based is, is the right balance here? Because if, if you say, look, we're only gonna target people who have voted in the past or model like conservatives, you're actually gonna stop talking to people. And then we certainly have gone to more base turnout elections. So I think you've, you've really hit the nail on the head of, of balancing your data with other forms of input and making sure that you're also making a broad case to anyone who might be listening.

Ron Nehring:

Well, y you know, I'm really glad that you just said the part about the base turnout element, because I really think that base turnout has been one of the biggest myths in the Republican party on the campaign side for years. And that is we have given up on trying to win the argument mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and instead we're just trying to pump up the turnout by just enough to win by a whisker. And here's the problem with that. The problem with that is that even if you win the election, you don't win a mandate. Exactly. And when you don't win a mandate, you can't get anything done. When Reagan came in, in 1980, he had a mandate because he won a majority, right? But notice that we've been talking in the Republican party about fiscal responsibility for my entire life, and yet the national debt today is 31 trillion.

It's 11 trillion more than it was on election day in 2016. So it's not, not enough to win elections. You have to win a mandate if you really care about getting something done. If your only goal is to just have a fancy office and have a title then that doesn't matter as much. But if your goal is to really put conservative ideas in action, you have to win a mandate. And in order to a man have a mandate, you have to win a majority. And we and many people in our party have given up on that and just try to, you know, gin up, turnout a little bit more. Well, guess what? The Republican base is aging out. There are many people who we've relied upon in the past who are simply not with us anymore. They're being replaced by voters who are more skeptical of political parties in general, and the Republican party in particular, we have to rediscover in the Republican party how to win the argument, how to persuade and not just turn out.

It's a completely different skillset, and it's one which we've lost sight of. If you take a look at Australia, for example, where in Australia voting is mandatory, it's like a $25 fine. It's an infraction if you don't turn in your ballot, but voting is mandatory. And so go t v pumping up the turnout is not a component in Australian campaigns. It is entirely focused on persuasion. And our country has gone in the opposite direction where many of us in the Republican party have given up on trying to win the argument and are just trying to do these overly emotional base turnout tactics that are more polarizing and that very often don't work. I e the 2022 midterm election where we were not trying to persuade sufficiently voters under age 29. We were telling ourselves, well, they vote in such small numbers that they won't matter, right? Well, guess what? They turned out in much higher numbers than the polling was able to track. And that wound up resulting in the defeat of a lot of Republican candidates who if we were trying to win the argument and trying to win a majority, they would be in Congress or the Senate or the state houses today, and instead they were defeated.

Eric Wilson:

Well, Ron, we've discussed a lot of problems, so I wanna bring us back up and end on a positive note before we wrap up. What are some solutions you see that smart people, like our listeners should be working on developing

Ron Nehring:

The 20 24, 20 23 in some states, but 2024 election cycle is already underway. And, and this is a time when I think political party leaders need to, need to be hard at work and not simply saying, well, you know, the election isn't for, you know, more than another year, et cetera. Now is the time to make sure that you're building your precinct organization to make sure that you map out every single elected office in your county or your state or your you know, you're lo locality, including school board, fire board, water board, city council, mosquito abatement, districts, all those offices. <Laugh>, map out every office that's up in the next election cycle. Map out every elected office holder who holds one of those offices, even if they're non-partisan. Find out what political party they're in, recruit candidates for the seat you don't hold. Make sure the candidates who you recruit get the training that they need, that you vet them and screen them before you get them the nomination.

And then let's go out and campaign on the issues where, and the candidate qualities where we have things in common with the voters. And let's stop running campaigns like we run a social media account, which is designed to promote controversy instead of building toward a majority. So the, the biggest asset that Republicans have at this point in time is that we have a runway, and if we use the next year to do the things that I just described, we will create the conditions for more victories on election day in 2024. If we forego the next year and just kind of, you know, focus on having arguments on Facebook and following what's happened, you know, in happening in the Hapless Biden administration then we will waste that time. And we won, have as many victories because the other team is already organizing labor unions, left wing political groups, George Soros, all those guys. They're, you know, they're not waiting, but they're organizing and our team needs to take advantage of our greatest asset, which right now is

Eric Wilson:

Time. Well, thanks to Ron Naing for a great conversation today. You can learn more about him on his website, which I'll link to in our show notes. If this episode made you a little bit smarter, gave you something to think about, and it certainly did for me, all that I ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague. The benefit is that you look smart in that process too. Remember to subscribe to the Business of Politics Show wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode. You can also sign up for email updates on our website at business of politics podcast.com. With that, I'll say thank you for listening. We'll see you next time.

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