Inside RNC’s stealth push for talk radio to save GOP

It has failed so far to win over any high-profile converts from the anti-Trump and Never Trump Republican factions, but party bosses still hope their efforts can build a winning infrastructure by the general election, in November.

The party began reaching out to powerful conservative voices months ago, when the prospect of a contested convention, and grassroots confusion and anger about the primary process, became a gathering storm over Republican chances of taking the White House.

The party brass took those conservative voices for granted in the past, but when Republicans headed to Florida for their spring meeting in late April, RNC bigwigs took a detour to visit Limbaugh.

While the media spotlight was on battles over convention rules and delegate selection, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, and chief strategist and communications director Sean Spicer, were among top Republicans who met Limbaugh at his studio.

While there, Spicer and RNC spokesman Marlon Bateman waited behind the glass for the final 30 minutes of Limbaugh’s show, listening while a caller ripped the RNC as “the most pathetic group” who wanted only power and did not care about voters.

Bateman said Limbaugh’s producer told him “you guys haven’t reached out in ten years” and accused them of previously disregarding his opinion. [See editor’s note below.]

The Priebus-Limbaugh meeting, scheduled to last 30 minutes, went on for an hour-and-a-half, Bateman said. Half of it was about the business of the GOP, and the rest was the two men getting to know each other.

Shortly afterwards, Limbaugh went on air and pushed the party line that the primary process wasn’t rigged by the establishment.

“There is nothing happening this year that has not happened before in terms of delegate selection, allocation, or what have you,” Limbaugh told his listeners fewer than seven days after meeting. “I’m really trying to get you to not think that this particular system is being rigged or you’re being cheated.”

The GOP’s effort appeared to have paid off for all sides. Bateman, who is heavily involved in the party’s effort to marshal talk radio, said Priebus gave talk radio high priority as part of his daily media diet. Bateman is a former producer of Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.

“These top talkers, they’re principled guys, they’re not going to sell out their audience for anybody,” Bateman said. “They’ve done it their way. And especially people like Levin, Hewitt, Rush, [Sean] Hannity, they’re not changing for anybody. It’s what they do. And all we can do is engage with them and answer their questions.”

Ted Cruz’s exit from the 2016 presidential race exposed some of talk radio’s lingering resentment toward the GOP. Beck, a Cruz supporter, revealed on-air during a post-campaign interview with Cruz, that Priebus failed to follow through on a plan to spend a day with Beck on radio and on television and to call into Limbaugh’s show.

“Reince Priebus wanted to spend the day with us and … do television, do radio, and then have some conversations off-air because he was courting our listeners,” Beck said to Cruz on May 10. “Since you dropped out, the guy won’t even return our phone calls. This is the week it was supposed to happen. He was going to do Hannity, us, and Rush Limbaugh. Yesterday was Hannity. Now he’s saying we never planned on coming down. I mean it’s incredible what’s happened. And so how do we get behind a group of people that don’t have any interest in asking conservatives for their vote?”

Bateman says Beck and the GOP have patched things up and Priebus will meet Beck when the Texas-based media figure next visits the East Coast. The on-air phone call with Limbaugh, however, has not worked out.

Since Cruz’s exit, Limbaugh has publicly spurned the GOP. Limbaugh refused to endorse Trump and rejected the idea that he would speak at the Republican convention in Cleveland.

While the RNC maintains close contact with Limbaugh’s producer, James Golden, aka “Bo Snerdley,” the party has taken aim at a different target, Mark Levin.

Richard Sementa, an executive producer for Levin’s radio show, told the Washington Examiner that the RNC spoke with Levin at a recent talk radio convention in New York, hoping Levin would meet with Priebus. Nothing had resulted from the encounter, Sementa said.

Asked whether Levin would consider meeting Priebus, on air or off, Sementa said, “I don’t know … I don’t know what would happen between them.”

Still, the RNC is now more optimistic about its chances of success with radio hosts skeptical of Trump, the GOP, and Washington, D.C.

“We should have an open line of communication because these guys are, they connect directly with the base of our voters and we have an obligation to talk with those guys and answer the questions,” Bateman said. “And that’s why we’re reaching out to people like Rush [Limbaugh] and Mark [Levin].”

Rick Tyler, a former communications director for Cruz’s presidential campaign, spoke of the benefit of having talkers such as Limbaugh and Levin praising the candidate.

“Sometimes we wondered if [Limbaugh] actually said the things he said so they could be used in an advertisement, they were just so good,” Tyler said. “Rush had this line where he said, ‘if you’re looking for someone who is anti-liberal, someone who fights against liberalism everyday, it’s Ted Cruz.’ And it’s just like that’s, he’s as explicit and as clear and as unequivocal as he could possibly be. And we used that. We used a lot of soundbites from Rush and I think they were very effective.”

Tyler said he never expected Limbaugh would endorse a candidate, and thinks Levin, who supported Cruz, would find it difficult to back Trump because Trump appears “ignorant or apathetic” about the Constitution.

“I don’t think there’s going to be any collusion or coordination between the party and talk radio. They’re natural, they have a natural tension,” Tyler said. “I don’t see any talk radio as a handmaiden for the Republican Party.”

But talk radio will continue to be invaluable to GOP. Its omnipresence among potential voters can hardly be overstated. Conservative talk radio is often thought of as preaching to the choir, but radio is ubiquitous in many undecided voters’ lives.

Radio leads all other media in reaching “opportunity voters,” defined as those undecided about who to support and whether to vote, in Colorado, Texas and Virginia, according to a Nielsen survey commissioned by the Katz Radio Group.

The survey polled 1,007 adults spread across Colorado, Texas and Virginia, from January 25 through February 5, and found that one-third of “opportunity voters” spent more time listening to radio than watching television.

This may explain why the RNC has sought Never Trump voices of all different stripes to broaden its reach. The GOP said it has reached out to Joe Madison, a Never Trump progressive radio host who is known as one of talk radio’s most prominent black voices, and Steve Deace, a Never Trump conservative radio host in Iowa who helped Cruz win the Hawkeye State’s caucus.

Deace has no interest in talking with the RNC and said, “I’m not really sure what could possibly be said.”

“There’s not enough lipstick in the world to put on this pig,” Deace said of Trump as the GOP’s likely nominee.

Michael Harrison, publisher of Talkers, the top trade publication covering the radio industry, said he thinks talk radio on whole is more interested in maintaining a relationship with their audience than cultivating political influence or taking a specific perspective because of its potential benefit for business. But Harrison also described talk radio as an “entertainment medium with the ultimate reality show that deals in political reality” that has seen an extraordinary boom from the political turmoil.

“The best thing this [campaign season] has done for talk radio is what it’s done for most of the news-oriented media and that is it’s created a hell of a story,” Harrison said. “Whether you’re for Trump, against Trump, whatever, it’s a good story. The problem is that it’s not about entertainment, it’s about our lives and we tend to lose sight of that in the media.”

[Editor’s note: In an earlier version of this story, the quote “you guys haven’t reached out in ten years” was misattributed to Rush Limbaugh. After publication, Bateman called to say he misspoke and that the quote should actually be attributed to Limbaugh’s producer. The story has been corrected to reflect this fact and we regret the initial error.]