During his successful campaign for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus touted his record of helping elect a spate of Republicans in Wisconsin as one reason why he should be given the responsibility of overseeing the party’s national efforts in the 2012 campaign.
In the 2010 cycle, Wisconsin underwent one of the largest partisan shifts of any state as the GOP captured a Senate seat, two House seats, the governor’s mansion, plus both houses of the state legislature. While one can certainly debate how much of a role Priebus himself (or any other state party head across the country) actually played in the 2010 landslide, what isn’t mistakable is the importance of Wisconsin and other midwestern battleground states to the Republicans’ hope of recapturing the White House and increasing their numbers in Congress.
