Casting about for ways to rebuild the Republican party, a group of GOP stalwarts have sought to replicate a 10-year-old Democratic organization founded by former Clinton strategist James Carville.
Former GOP chairman and counselor to President George W. Bush, Ed Gillespie and GOP pollster Whit Ayres will head the new GOP group, called Resurgent Republic.
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the co-founders is Mary Matalin, the Republican strategist married to Carville. Others are Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former New York Rep. Bill Paxton and former Virginia Sen. George Allen.
The group plans to use polling, focus groups and reports to “shape the debate over the proper role of government,” in much the same way that Carville’s Democracy Corps, founded in the late 1990s, became a resource for labor unions, public interest organizations, and party and congressional leaders.
Within a day of announcing the startup - and not coincidentally, on President Obama’s 100th day in office - the group released its first poll headlined, “Independents Side with Republicans on Obama Budget and More.”
While acknowledging that Obama remains popular with independents and Democrats, the group’s survey of 1,000 registered voters found that “Republicans are on favorable ground [with independents in] resisting the amount of spending, taxing, and borrowing in the President’s proposed budget and will draw independents away from Mr. Obama’s camp by doing so.”
Gillespie told Politico that the idea is help GOP leaders articulate ideas in ways that will resonate most with voters.
“The Republican Party has been declared dead at least three times already in my lifetime - in 1964 after Goldwater lost in a landslide, in 1974 after Watergate and in 1992 after Clinton won with a Democratic House and Senate,” he said.
“In every case, we came back, and that will be the same in this fourth instance. But we have real challenges as a party, and we need to be thoughtful in addressing them.”
Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who co-founded Democracy Corps with Carville, praised the group’s concept, but said that so far, it has not done credible research. “Given your goal, I am perplexed that your first poll would be so outside the mainstream,” he said in a May 4th letter to Gillespie posted on his own site.
“Your [first] poll gives the Democrats just a 2-point party identification advantage in the country, but other public polls in this period fell between +7 and +16 points – giving the Democrats an average advantage of 11 points.”
Resurgent Republic has only one full-time staffer so far, but has put together an academic board, including Gary Andres at American University and James W. Ceaser at the University of Virginia, to analyze public opinion. Gillespie said the group has also recruited six pollsters.
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1 Comments
#1. lilkunta 05.04.2009
Is James Carville a Dem or Rep? He created this idea in teh 90s for Clinto to help him win.
No 19yrs later his wife is using his idea….intersting.
I wonder if it will work ?
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