Next GOP Chair? It's Anybody's Guess

GOP insiders say Friday’s contest to elect the next chairman of the Republican National Committee will be a long and drawn-out affair, with multiple ballots necessary to determine the winner.

In part, it’s a reflection of a party that, even after a nearly three month-long chairman’s race, remains deeply uncertain of which candidate can best lead the GOP back to power.

Linda Ackerman, the Republican committeewoman for California, said Wednesday that she was waiting to see the candidates interact with each other at the RNC meeting at Washington Capital Hilton hotel before making up her mind.

“They’re all saying pretty much the same thing. They’re all saying what we want to do for the party. They all have a little different twist, but they all know what we want,” Ackerman said. “Other than that, I just want to get a sense, a personal sense, of who would be the best one to lead.”

The RNC’s voting rules require a candidate to collect a simple majority of 85 votes in order to claim victory. In the absence of a consensus choice among the field of five candidates, though, the election appears destined for numerous ballots, involving many hours of deliberations punctuated by intense lobbying and political horse-trading between votes.

Public estimates of the five candidates’ support have tended to place incumbent RNC Chairman Mike Duncan at the head of the pack, followed by former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele and South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson, with Michigan Republican Party Chairman Saul Anuzis and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell behind them. 

Former Tennessee Republican Chair Chip Saltsman, whose campaign imploded after he sent out a CD featuring controversial partisan music, withdrew from the race Thursday.

But the candidates’ public support only measures the commitments they have for the first ballot. And first-ballot support can be unreliable, Republicans say, because RNC members will often cast their first vote out of a sense of personal or political obligation, planning to vote their true preference on a later round.

“People here vote for different people for different reasons. Sometimes it’s geographic: someone from my region’s running and I feel obligated to vote for them on the first ballot,” said Massachusetts Committeeman Ron Kaufman, who supports Duncan. “I owe you a favor, so I’m going to vote for you on the first ballot. Sometimes it’s about personal relationships.”

Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer, a member of Steele’s whip team, agreed.

“I think the first ballot is loyalty and every ballot after that is qualifications and ability to lead,” Greer said.

Each campaign is banking on its ability to post a strong enough vote total on the first ballot to stay viable for the second round of voting – when they’ll have to show momentum by picking up fresh support.

Duncan is widely expected to lead after the first round, and the sitting chair’s opponents have tried to inflate expectations for his performance by predicting a haul of close to 70 votes out of a possible 168 votes. And some members have suggested that if Duncan doesn’t win the contest right at the start, his support will bleed away quickly.

“My feeling is Mike Duncan either has to win on the first ballot or he has to get very close,” said New Jersey Committeeman David Norcross, a Dawson supporter who ran for RNC chairman in 1997. “If he does not, I think he is going to begin to lose votes in bunches, and I don’t know where they’re going to go.”

That’s a contention Duncan backers firmly reject, dismissing the idea that he’ll break 60 votes in just one round of voting.

“They’re trying to set expectations that can’t be reached,” Kaufman said. ldquo;There are enough good men in this race that it’s going to go for at least three ballots.”

And the incumbent’s supporters say his strong relationships with the great majority of committee members, coupled with his solid performance as chairman in a difficult election cycle, would make it possible for him to inch his way up to 85 votes.

“If Mike is way ahead on the first ballot, I think it’s just a gradual march for him to peel off those votes,” said one committeeman who backs Duncan.

If Duncan starts to fade, however, there will be a scramble to pick up his supporters--and each of his opponents has a different strategy for peeling off his support. Indeed, if any candidate stumbles in the first round his opponents will hurry to pull his supporters into their own camp.

For Steele, who claims between 30 and 40 supporters and is expected to post a strong second-place finish in the first round of voting, the goal on the second and third ballots will be to scoop up enough support to put some distance between himself and the third-place finisher, in order to become the clear alternative for anti-Duncan voters.

“When you lose those ballots from the first [place finisher], then they will start filtering off to the second- and third-tier candidates, and Michael Steele will get a significant percentage,” Greer predicted. “It would probably bring up the third-tier candidate, but probably not so much that the membership will see that the third candidate can catch up with Michael.”

Dawson is expected to lag behind Steele on the first ballot, but rack up around 30 votes. And his backers think Dawson’s a better vehicle than Steele for disappointed Duncan supporters, since Dawson and Duncan have been making essentially the same pitch to RNC members, touting their managerial experience and insider savvy.

“People looking for experience, thinking that they’re doing Duncan because of experience, Katon is a very logical next place to go,” Norcross said, suggesting that Dawson could also draw support from Anuzis and Steele backers as well.

Anuzis and Blackwell have a longer route to victory, and their opponents say they face steeper odds to pick up traction if there is an extended balloting process.

But Anuzis, like Duncan and Dawson, is popular with his fellow committee members, and his supporters say he’s well positioned to pick up second- and third-place support.

Helping Anuzis is the fact that Steele and Dawson both have flaws that make them unacceptable to some segments of the committee: Steele’s past association with the moderate Republican Leadership Council makes him anathema to some social conservatives, and Dawson’s past membership in an all-white country club has many voters hesitant to make him the public face of the GOP.

Blackwell looks less like a consensus alternative than Anuzis, drawing much of his support from the right flank of the RNC.

But his team believes that their hard core of support will last over many rounds of voting, and predicts that Blackwell’s stock could rise fast if a moderate choice like Steele appears to be gaining an upper hand.

While the election’s outcome may be in doubt, one thing is clear: the campaigns are preparing for a very long day.

“You should prepare for the possibility of the election going all day Friday and even into Saturday,” John Yob, Blackwell’s campaign manager, wrote in a strategy memo to supporters. “Those of you who have booked return flights for Saturday should be aware that the election conceivably could stretch late into the day on Saturday.”

RNC Co-Chairman Jo Ann Davidson, who’s helping lead Duncan’s campaign, told reporters Wednesday her candidate was ready for a lengthy voting process.

“We know that this will go to more than one ballot,” she said. “We expect it to be a vey interesting day.”