Interesting story from Rebecca Berg at the Washington Examiner a couple of days back:
The Republican National Committee is taking a drastically different approach to spending its money in the upcoming mid-term elections next year, putting up more money early on in the campaigns to build the party’s grassroots rather than stockpile its cash until the final days of the election as it has been in the past.
As we’ve talked about before, grassroots field organizing hasn’t been in the Republican establishment’s blood in the past couple of election cycles (the Tea Party folks have had a monopoly on that aspect of campaigning on the Right). The party committees (RNC, RSCC, etc) and outside organizations spent big on TV ads, particularly late in the campaign, which is also when ads on local news broadcasts (political consultants’ favorite) are in heavy demand and hence expensive.
But if the RNC follows through on a field strategy (along with a new emphasis on digital, also mentioned in the article), Republicans are likely to get more bang for their bucks by building those long-term relationships with voters that Democrats have been learning to emphasize over the past decade. And as voters get hit with more and more advertising/media messages every day and through every conceivable medium, personal contact is one of the few things that can begin to break through the information clutter.
Of course, you still need the right candidates and the right messages, but this new grassroots emphasis is a promising change from the brain-dead TV-buying-by-the-numbers strategy we saw from Crossroads GPS, the Romney campaign and so many other groups on the Right in 2012. Dems should keep a close eye on this development.
– cpd