When Mike Duncan was tapped to chair the Republican National Committee in January, the GOP was still reeling from its loss of Congress to Democrats in the 2006 elections.
“There weren’t a lot of people who were willing to stand up and say, ‘I want this job,’ ” Duncan told The Examiner in an interview Wednesday. “I mean, we had just lost control of the Congress, and things looked really bad.”
Democrats and the media viewed the power shift on Capitol Hill as a harbinger of the 2008 presidential election, when voters could be expected to turn away from Republicans and their unpopular war in Iraq. Meanwhile, conservatives were fed up with GOP scandals and pork-barrel spending.
“The base was really downhearted for a long period of time,” Duncan acknowledged. “We went though this whole looking-at-your-navel, self-examination thing, trying to figure out what happened to us.”
But as the months passed, events began to break in the GOP’s favor.
President Bush’s “surge” of additional troops significantly reduced violence in Iraq. Bush vetoed Democratic legislation and then sustained those vetoes, thanks to the cohesiveness of the GOP caucus. Although Bush’s job approval ratings remained low, the Democratic Congress’s went lower. Republicans also won two of three governor’s races.
“We went through this period of time where we thought the cycle was going the other way, that it’s just going to get worse and worse,” Duncan said. “And now people are saying, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not the case. We can win.’
“I’m starting to see that upswing — there’s more of an enthusiasm,” he added. “I’m starting to see it in number of donors, in small donors. We’re starting to see attendance come back at grassroots events.”
In fact, the Republican National Committee was expected to announce today that it had raised $80 million in 2007, several million above expectations. Furthermore, it will end the year with about $15 million cash on hand. Comparable figures from the Democratic National Committee were not immediately available.
Earlier this year, prominent conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich were predicting that Democrat Hillary Clinton had an 80 percent chance of winning the White House in 2008. But Clinton has stumbled in recent months and seems to have lost her aura of inevitability.
There is even more volatility on the Republican side, and that could result in a longer battle for the GOP nomination.
“It’s more likely that Democrats are going to get a nominee in January and we’re going to get a nominee in February, so there’s going to be a gap,” Duncan said. “We’ve put a plan together to help make sure that they don’t do what was done to Bob Dole in 1996 and just put our candidate on his heels. We’re going to help define the Democratic candidate and defend our candidates during that period.”
