Forever Trump

Republicans' new reality: Forever Trump

Win or lose in November, his supporters have already won key positions within the party that ensure their influence will extend well past 2016.

By Kyle Cheney

Donald Trump’s Republican doubters like to think of him as an aberration, a one-time dalliance with a candidate who, once he’s defeated this fall, will be swept off the stage, leaving the GOP back in their rightful hands.

They’re already wrong: Even if Trump never sets foot in the White House, his stamp on the Republican Party will linger long past 2016.

Trump’s primary run spurred a string of like-minded allies to ride his coattails into positions of power within the Republican party, including seats on the Republican National Committee. With or without Trump, they — coupled with a host of conservative rabble-rousers swept in with the help of Ted Cruz — already marshal enough power within the party to change its course, whether the GOP establishment likes it or not.

Adding staying power to the 2016 rebellion is the fact that many of the incoming RNC members have won 4-year terms, virtually guaranteeing they’ll exert significant influence over the Republican Party through the 2020 presidential election and possibly long after.

“The one thing that I’ve seen across the country are change agents getting involved,” said Maryland’s David Bossie, the Trump ally and Citizens United CEO who ousted a 12-year member of the committee Saturday. “Whether they are 100 percent with me or not, I appreciate people who will stand up and be counted. That’s really I think what Mr. Trump’s done is given voice to a whole bunch of people who are going to be heard.”

In other words, when Republican elites lost control of their party during the 2016 primary, they lost it to a movement that has no intention of giving it back.

Along with Bossie, the next RNC roster will feature pro-Trump firebrand Lori Klein Corbin of Arizona and anti-establishment Cruz zealot Cynthia Dunbar of Virginia. They’ll join the potentially dozens of new RNC members that will take their seats in July after the national convention. Many current members are leaving because of term limits set by state parties. At least two were ousted in competitive races, with other contests still to come over the next three weeks.

The RNC, which includes two national committee members and a GOP chairman from every state and territory, drives the party’s message, fundraising, data gathering and presidential nominating process every four years. Members are elected either by state party insiders or at annual state conventions, where party activists gather to choose their leadership.

Turnover is nothing new on the 168-member RNC, which typically sees a 40 percent change in membership every four years, according to party officials.

This year, Trump’s fierce race against Cruz led to intense wrangling at those conventions that spilled over into the races for national committee posts. Though Trump himself didn’t get involved in recruiting or campaigning for RNC allies, the ginned-up interest by supporters of the two outsider candidates has fueled some of the RNC’s turnover.

The new members arriving on the Trump-Cruz wave will bolster the ranks of a slim but loud minority that is already pushing to give more power to grassroots Republicans — from Virginia’s Morton Blackwell to Oregon’s Solomon Yue. Though Trump and Cruz were bitter rivals on the campaign trail, both candidates’ followers share an anti-establishment fervor that could give them common cause when it comes to reforming the party.

“The Trump and Cruz forces are natural allies and reflect a lot of the conservative orientation that you’ve seen historically in the party,” said Jim Bopp, a former RNC member who is now special counsel to the RNC. “Every four years over the last decade, the RNC becoming increasingly conservative. I think that influence has grown … I do think that we’ll see a dramatic change. I do think that aspects of what is going on right now is revolutionary.”

What the new RNC member would like to accomplish is another matter. Typically, critics of the current structure argue that it’s too top-heavy — prone to control by Washington D.C. interests rather than the GOP grassroots. That’s reflected in presidential nominating rules that tip power away from local parties and toward the RNC — from the way delegates are selected to limits on how much support a candidate must earn to be eligible for nomination.

Blackwell told POLITICO he’s hopeful that the anti-establishment fervor driving today’s political climate helps him reshape those battles.

“Since I first started paying attention to these things back in the 1960s, there are probably fewer movement conservatives on the RNC than at any time. That is because we’ve had the nominations of McCain and Romney, neither of whom is sympathetic to movement conservatives,” he said. “I think it would be reasonable to assume that since a big majority of the delegates elected to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland supported either Cruz or Trump, that there would be more anti-establishment people elected.”

Blackwell hopes that will translate to what he says would be a new approach: “Under the new committee, there will be greater opportunities for power to rise from the bottom up rather than the top down.”

Trump hasn’t shown any direct interest in reshaping the RNC to fit his anti-establishment mold, but his supporters — as well as those who backed Cruz — stuffed convention halls and helped tip the balance of those meetings anyway.

“He didn’t directly have any role in Dave Bossie’s campaign, but obviously, we saw a different element come into central committees and different party offices,” said Louis Pope, who was bested by Bossie at the Maryland convention.

Pope, who was vying for a fourth four-year term as an RNC member, said he saw the seeds of change planted in 2012 when libertarians attempted to take over aspects of the convention that nominated Mitt Romney for president. Those changes have been reinforced and accelerated this year, he said.

“You’re going to have a more conservative party. You’re going to have a little bit more libertarian party,” he said. “Less, for lack of a better word, establishment.”

Shane Goettle, who won an election to fill the seat of retiring North Dakota committeeman Curly Haugland, said he supported multiple candidates before he came around to supporting Trump. But he said he now views the lesson of Trump’s candidacy for the GOP as shaking up the status quo.

“I don’t buy the idea that Trump is the end of the Republican Party. Trump is an opportunity for this party,” Goettle said. “I think shaking things up can be good.

That doesn’t mean, however, that these insurgents will have full power over the party. Establishment-backed Republicans continue to hold top posts at the RNC, and committee veterans cautioned that the ranks of these RNC newcomers are unlikely to rewrite the calculus on the RNC’s core functions.

Indeed, some of the newcomers fit the mold of more traditional RNC members, such as Keiko Orrall, an ally of moderate Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and supporter of Marco Rubio’s presidential bid; California’s Harmeet Dillon the first Indian American elected to the RNC; and Tennessee’s two new members: Oscar Brock, the son of former Sen. Bill Brock, and Beth Campbell, a veteran party insider.

“I don’t see a whole lot of maverick in either one of them,” said Peggy Lambert, one of the outgoing Tennessee RNC members.

But the impact of the anti-establishment wave won’t just be felt among the RNC newcomers. It’s also influencing members who are already on the committee.

“You can’t ask for voters to give their input, and then they give it to you, and you just ignore it. That’s what some in the party want us to do, they want us to act like it didn’t happen,” said one veteran RNC member who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Donald Trump won. That’s the fact. That has consequences.”