When Paul Ryan agreed in October 2015 to become speaker of the House, some Republicans worried he couldn’t handle the political side of the job. Known as a policy wonk and not a political fundraiser, Ryan had insisted that one condition of his taking on the job would be that he would spend his weekends at home with his young family—unlike outgoing speaker John Boehner, who spent his weekends raising money. “I don’t think the speakership is a 9-to-5 job,” said then-congressman Tim Huelskamp of Kansas. “You’ve got to work on weekends. John Boehner worked very hard . . . and I’m very concerned if you’re not going to work weekends in this job, which is primarily fundraising, then that could hurt the Republican majority.”
So when the fundraising totals for 2017 were reported in January, Ryan and his political team had something to crow about: The speaker had raised $44 million—more than any House leader of either party had ever raised in a nonelection year. How did he do it? “I don’t golf,” Ryan told me in a recent interview, alluding to one of Boehner’s preferred time-consuming fundraising habits. “I do quick events. I do basically three-day sprints around the country when we’re in recess on the weekdays. . . . I still stick to all my weekends [at home], so it works.”
Ryan, of course, had some advantages Boehner didn’t enjoy: complete GOP control of government, interest in tax reform, and the ability to draw on a network of donors from the Romney-Ryan presidential campaign, Boehner’s network, and his own. But even in 2016, Ryan’s fundraising outpaced Boehner’s 2012 haul.
“We’ve basically broken every single fundraising record there is to break,” says Ryan. “I had a week’s notice before I became speaker. . . . I don’t think I could’ve done it if I hadn’t had that 2012 experience.” Ryan is quick to credit his political team—led by executive director Kevin Seifert, deputy director Jake Kastan, and finance chairman Spencer Zwick. Seifert ran Ryan’s congressional races and “knows me really well, knows my political instincts,” says Ryan. “Jake [Kastan] was with me in Romney-Ryan and then ran my PAC afterwards, knows my political experience really well. Spencer was Mitt’s national finance director.”
How much the money will matter in 2018 is unclear. Despite the National Republican Congressional Committee’s record-breaking off-year haul in 2017 of $85 million (of which Team Ryan supplied $32 million), energized Democrats had their own record-breaking year, raising $100 million for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The NRCC ended the year with several million more left in the bank than the DCCC, and the Republican National Committee outraised its embattled Democratic counterpart by $60 million in 2017.
“Republicans realize it will require a Herculean effort to save the House majority this year,” says David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report. “I don’t think the money matters so much unless one side has a lot more than the other” because “partisanship has become a stronger . . . cue than voters’ perceptions of candidates, which is largely shaped through ads.” A case in point, Wasserman says, is the 2017 Georgia special election Democrat Jon Ossoff and his allies lost despite spending $30 million—$10 million more than Republicans—in a race where 300,000 ballots were cast.
Still, raising money and running ads is the primary objective of a political operation and one of the few variables politicians can control. With President Trump’s approval rating hovering at 40 percent, the outlook for Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections is bleak. But with nine months to go it’s not unthinkable that Republicans could improve their standing just enough to hold on to their House majority. In December, when Republicans were trying to pass a controversial tax reform bill and had just been humiliated by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, House Republicans trailed Democrats in generic ballot polling by a catastrophic 13 points, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average. But by the end of January, after a month of positive news stories and TV ads about how businesses were responding to tax reform, the gap had been narrowed to a bad-but-not-apocalyptic 7 points. Because Democratic voters tend to cluster in urban districts and because of gerrymandering, Republicans could lose nationwide voting in House races by about 6 points, according to Wasserman, and still cling to their majority.
Ryan and his team say they can win by running hard on tax reform and the economy—what NRCC chairman Steve Stivers is billing “the great American comeback.” On tax reform, Democrats “overplayed their hand,” says Ryan. “The media amplified it, and I think people are now actually seeing enormously positive benefits, which will accrue to us not just politically but . . . help the country.” While Democrats said most Americans would get a tax hike, in reality 80 percent of households will get a tax cut and 5 percent a tax hike, according to nonpartisan analysts. Changes to tax withholding will be seen in paychecks starting in February.
“Will we win the national dialogue and convince MSNBC to say nice things? No,” says Ryan. “But can we win discrete congressional districts because we know how to raise money and how to target voters and how to motivate, and do we have good substance to do that on? Yes, we do.”
While their positive message will focus on taxes and the economy, as well as a 2018 push to reform welfare and increase defense spending, Ryan wasn’t hesitant to draw a negative contrast with Democrats when asked what the consequences of the return of Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be. “Could you imagine? It’s going to be nothing but investigations. It’s going to be nothing but political knife-fighting with the White House,” said Ryan on January 18. “Congress will come to a screeching halt. Washington would shut down because they would do everything in their power to try to destroy the Trump presidency and move the country backwards. They want to go back to the Obama progressive days, which gave us the economic malaise we were in, which hollowed out our military and questioned America’s role in the world. We’re reversing that all pretty quickly.”
Ryan’s comments about the need to defend Trump in 2018 mark a contrast with his disposition toward candidate Trump in 2016. Ryan was slow to endorse Trump after he wrapped up the presidential nomination, and after the early October revelations of the Access Hollywood video, in which Trump boasted about groping women, Ryan said he would not campaign with or defend Trump and told members: “You all need to do what’s best for you in your district.”
As speaker, Ryan has had to build a relationship with the president and recently told Fox News: “All our conversations revolve around getting the big things done. . . . We don’t really talk about what we disagree on.” Ryan is still willing to speak out at times when he thinks Trump has crossed a line. In response to the president’s recent comment about immigrants from “s—hole countries,” for example, Ryan called it “very unfortunate, unhelpful” and said a similarly discriminatory view was widely held about his Irish-American ancestors, who went on to thrive in this country.
Republicans are now tied tightly to Trump, and a party’s midterm election performance tends to correlate strongly with an incumbent president’s job approval. When asked what Trump could do to improve his standing, Ryan simply encouraged him to “amplify the successes that are occurring.” What House Republicans really need from the president, according to Cook Political Report’s Wasserman, is for him to stay “away from Twitter, which is really a euphemism for preventing the president from making inflammatory statements. His fitness for office is a chief concern among women with college degrees who have soured on the president and who will play an outsized role in the midterms.”
Beyond the money and the messaging, the biggest task for the House GOP political operation is fielding strong candidates. Ryan’s aides say they’ve been fortunate to avoid a significant number of divisive primaries. “In the Trump era, there’s been this [idea]—‘Oh my gosh, this is going to start a whole wave of rabble-rousers’—and we’re not really seeing that,” says Jake Kastan. “Many filing deadlines are fast approaching. So by this time in the cycle, if that were happening, we’d be seeing it,” says Seifert. NRCC chairman Steve Stivers met with Steve Bannon, a force behind efforts to challenge Republican incumbents (before he fell out of favor with Trump), in the spring. Stivers wouldn’t discuss the details of the meeting, but his colleagues seem to be spared the Bannonite challengers that some Senate Republicans have drawn.
Stivers’s point person on recruitment is Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, who is now serving her third term in the House. Stefanik meets multiple times a month with an ideologically and geographically diverse group of House Republicans to discuss candidates and has worked on building relationships with a network of Republicans in state legislatures. Her conversations with recruits range from cold calls to explaining to enthusiastic volunteers how to run a race to answering logistical questions of fence-sitters. “Oftentimes with women candidates, we get questions about what is the work-life balance like: ‘How do you do this if you have young children?’ ” says Stefanik. “What I’ve found useful is putting them in touch with other current members of Congress in similar circumstances.”
The task of recruitment has been made somewhat more difficult by the large number of House Republicans who have left their posts or announced retirements this year—41 to date. Ryan points out that most of these departures are from safe seats, and a significant number of retirees are chairmen who were about to lose their posts due to term limits. “It’s a fairly anti-climactic thing to be a former chairman in Congress,” says Ryan.
A big lingering question for House Republicans is whether Ryan himself will stay in Congress beyond 2018. While Ryan forcefully dismissed the idea that he ever considered immediately retiring after the passage of tax reform, he hasn’t squelched the possibility—first reported in December by Politico—that he may not run for reelection. Asked when he would announce his own intentions for 2018, Ryan simply said “before the filing deadline,” which isn’t until June 1. Asked again how certain he was about running for reelection, Ryan would only say he would make up his mind with his wife Janna later this spring: “It’s something that Janna and I always do—honestly, I just push that stuff down the road. We’ll talk about it in the spring like we always do.” Announcing retirement would, of course, undermine the fundraising juggernaut he’s built as speaker, which is one reason to believe Ryan will stick it out for one more election.
John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
