It is rare for an RPV Chairman to complete his term in office. He often steps aside the year prior to end of his term. Chairman Pat Mullins is no exception. In an email today Pat announced that he will resign effective January 31, 2015 to enjoy his retirement years with his children and grandchildren.[read_more]The State Central Committee will meet at The Advance on December 5th to establish the rules for the election of the new chair. Chairman Mullins’ letter is below.
We are very grateful for Chairman Mullins’ service to our party and our state. He has dedicated much of his life to advancing the Republican causes of liberty and freedom. He is a fine man, a fine husband and father, a party leader, and a principled Conservative. We’ve been blessed to have him for so many years of service to our party..
Now the speculation begins as to who will replace him as chair. There are many names being floated but no one has officially thrown their hat into the ring. When that happens we will report it.
Statement of RPV Chairman Pat MullinsRPV Chairman Pat Mullins sent the following letter to Republicans around the Commonwealth of Virginia earlier today:Friends,Congratulations to our two new Republican members of Congress. Dave Brat and Barbara Comstock. I’m proud that we’re able to send two new conservative Republicans to represent Virginia in the U.S House of Representatives.
And I’m particularly happy that the Republican Party now controls the U.S. Senate. This was a great Election Day for America.
Serving as Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia since 2009 has been one of the greatest honors and privileges I’ve had in my life. I’ll be forever thankful to the Republicans across Virginia who have placed their trust and support in me.
I’ve worked with thousands of dedicated Republican and conservative activists across the Commonwealth for our shared principles.
We’ve had our highs and lows — winning elections and losing elections — and regardless of the outcome, I’m more convinced than ever, and validated by the election results last night, that the people of Virginia and the citizens of the United States are desperately seeking consistent conservative governance. Government has gotten too big, too intrusive, and unelected bureaucrats are having more and more negative impact on all of our lives.
But the time comes when retirement is at hand. I’m 77 years old, and it’s time to turn the reigns over to someone else. I have served as Party Chairman in Fairfax County, in Louisa County, and now with the RPV for 13 of the past 24 years.
I have been blessed with good health and now want to spend more time with my children and grandchildren and spend more time traveling and seeing friends across the country.
I will be resigning the office of Chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia. The resignation will take effect upon the election of a new Chairman. We will follow the required procedures laid out in our Republican Party plan for selection of my replacement which entails giving 30 day notice of the vacancy.
I will set a meeting of the Republican Party State Central Committee for January 31, 2015which will give anyone interested plenty of time to campaign for the position. I look forward to seeing my fellow Republicans at our Advance in December. Our State Central Committee meeting on December 5, 2014 will establish the requirements for this election. I will continue to serve as your State Republican Party Chairman and fulfill the duties until the new Chairman is elected.
Thank you fellow Republicans for the opportunity to serve. I also want to say a special thank you to Shaun Kenney, Garren Shipley, and the rest of the staff at RPV. They’re a top notch group of committed and dedicated professionals that I have been proud every single day to work with.
18 comments
What about Pete Synder? I’ve only met him once, but he struck me as a guy more focused on making things work than carrying ideological torches. I’m not suggesting the party abandon its Creed, just echoing someone else about the benefits of leadership staying out of policy fights.
Along those lines, we really need to clean house. Mike Thomas’ attempts to disenfranchise Virginia Republicans festers like a rotting sore. Bob Fitzsimmonds’ outbursts have shown he lacks emotional discipline when it comes to politics. Shaun Kenney’s telling illegal immigrants that some people in his party were bigots should have ended his tenure.
Time to trade in the quirky, unreliable and sometimes downright treacherous model for something that will get us to our destination without requiring numerous pit stops. Pat Mullins probably drove the old jalopy as well as anyone could have.
I know someone who has been thinking about running and I hope they do. We need to have more victory parties rather than pity parties.
Chris Stearns, Chairman of the 3rd District, should be Chair. As the GOP base ages, we will need to embrace the more libertarian-leaning millennials if we ever want to compete with the dems. Why not elect one as chairman?
If Starnes was chairman, who would the RPV raise money from? The current chair couldn’t raise any money to help Gillespie and focused on infighting instead of electing Republicans – as witnessed by the fact that the GOP has not won a statewide election since 2009. If Starnes is chair, it would be worse, he would alienate even more people than Mullins and drive donors from the party.
Go eat a bowl of dicks.
Well, that escalated quickly…
Stearns isn’t ready to be State Party Chair. Running the most inconsequential district committee in perhaps the entire country does not make you ready to run the entire party. We need someone with the expertise and personality traits to keep the warring factions in line and focus almost exclusively on building the RPV into a logistical powerhouse. Democrats have near perfect vertical integration of their data and targeting systems within a free market eco-system of vendors that can all interface with their technology. All of their data from every campaign at every level is integrated, anonymized, analyzed, and then re-assigned to voters in the form of 1-100 scores on dozens of issues and aspects of their personality. The GOP has basically caught up on the raw modeling and analytics technology, but we are a long ways away from the Dems level of data integration. The next chair needs to focus on those kinds of things and not on anything remotely approaching policy or supporting certain candidate over others in nominating contests.
The Democrats may be “data integrated” but it didn’t save them from the worst butt kicking in my lifetime as a Republican (wasn’t around for Truman). Technology is useful but it doesn’t win elections, IDEAS win elections. I sincerely hope the RPV realizes that mindlessly following the Democratic model of data mining your positions off of vast data bases of entitlement consumers is the last thing the Republican’s need. Tools don’t provide leadership, a hammer doesn’t tell you how to build a house, a smart architect and detailed plans do that. The next chair needs leadership skills and the ability to communicate new ideas to the party rank and file in a clear positive manner, he or she doesn’t need to be the RPV IT expert that can be purchased off the street as consultancy.
You clearly have no idea that the GOP copying the Democrats model and then making it cheaper and better played a huge part in Tuesday’s victory and Gillespie’s near win. Ideas only get you so far. You can have the best ideas and message in the world, but if you don’t get it in front of the right people, it doesn’t matter. Advances in data and targeting make it faster and cheaper to get the right message to the right voters at the right time. On top of that, RPV should not play a role in messaging and policy, that role is reserved for the people who’s names are on the ballot. RPV as a corporate entity should be, and pretty much always has been, a logistical framework and nothing more. It should always be the candidates communicating the message to the voters. They are the ones on the ballot and they are the ones people will be voting for. Its always disastrous when party leaders get ahead of or conflict with the candidates they are supposed to be supporting.
lol, right I’m confused it was copying the Dem’s data mining models that drove Tueday national victories had nothing to do with that guy Obama.
Yes, it was copying and improving on the Dem’s models that allowed us to target and turn out those voters angry at Obama that normally don’t turn out in midterm elections. Look at the numbers. Republicans had some of the smallest drops in turnout from Presidential to Mid-Term year elections that anyone has ever seen. In Virginia, Cuccinelli’s teams tarted the trend and just barely lost to McAuliffe who’s vote total was almost identical to McDonnell’s 2009 blowout victory. Ed Gillespie continued the work and was able to almost knock off Warner by substantially shrinking the turnout drop from 2012 in key areas while Democratic turnout drops were substantially larger.
Also I’m not talking about simple data-mining from consumer information. I’m talking about aggregating and normalizing all of the data from every Republican campaign at every level from now on and going back as far as possible. Democrats can see the raw data from every door knock to a specific voter from every campaign, national, state, and local, going back 10 years. It’s that data that provides the basis for their issue scoring models. Republicans are doing the same thing but on a much smaller scale, as far as I know they’ve yet to dip down into the state legislative races for the data from those campaigns. That should be RPV’s next priority. We need to make sure that from a targeting and analytics perspective state legislative campaigns have the same tools as a Congressional or US Senate election. The economy of scale is already here, its now all about proliferation.
Thank you, Max. You seem to know what you’re talking about.
Lawrence; no one said that our victories “had nothing to do with that guy Obama” so that ‘s a straw man argument.
You need the right ideas, the right strategy, lots of money, good data to win. My experience is that most activists love to talk ideas and strategy, but dismiss the data side. Once you get higher up into a campaign, however, the realization dawns that without money you don’t have a means to effectively communicate your ideas, and without data you aren’t communicating them to the right people.
Think I’ll buy this midterm analysis over yours.
Guy Cecil is the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the driving force behind the vaunted $60 million Bannock Street project that fizzled on election day. On Thursday, at the CQ Roll Call Election Impact Conference, he said, “This was not a turnout election in the sense that another door knock would have mattered or another half-million would have mattered. It was a wave election.”
According to Cecil, comparative technological capabilities were irrelevant to the outcome of the 2014 wave election. “Republicans could have carried a Commodore 64 on a wagon going door-to-door… it wasn’t going to change the fundamental dynamics of the election,” he added.
https://twitter.com/BreitbartNews
Sure, take the word of the guy who lost. He was on a CSPAN panel claiming their ground game was the reason Hagan just barely lost to Tillis and Warner just barely lost to Gillespie. Had they won, it would have been all about the ground game in his opinion.
Lawrence — FWIW, I ***think*** this sobering article further elucidates Max’s thesis.
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/09/17/obamas-catalist-database/
Very good article, although it doesn’t do a very good job of explaining that Catalist is really the backend for what the Democrats call VAN, or the Voter Activation Network. VAN is the front end that everyone logs into, Catalist is the central database and modeling platform. The real beauty of Catalist is its ability to grant varying levels of access to some data while still giving the user the benefit of the underlying information. This is especially powerful in nomination contests. A challenger won’t get access to a list of his opponents identified supporters, but they will still get access to the same scoring models that are based on the data the incumbent collected in that district.
Glad to know that my district is inconsequential
I’ve known Stearns since early 2009, I love the guy, but as 3rd district chair, he basically has one job: recruit a challenger to Bobby Scott. He’s never done that. In fact I’m sure he’s the done the opposite and discouraged people to run. We are never going to beat Bobby Scott. Being the Republican 3rd District Chair is like being the Democratic 9th District Chair. It just doesn’t matter in the larger electoral scheme of things.