Townhall’s Matt Lewis writes that the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) has been far outshining its senatorial countepart in new media outreach.
The NRCC has gathered conservative bloggers on multiple occasions for informational sessions on 2010.
I’ve been inside the NRCC twice in the past week. Prior to that, it had been more than a year since I stepped foot inside the RNC/NRCC building (the last time, it was to interview former RNC Deputy Chairman Frank Donatelli).
Last week, a handful of us attended an “around the world” session–a detailed PowerPoint briefing on the state of hundreds of Congressional races around the country.
This week, forty-plus center-right bloggers gathered at the NRCC to hear Chairman Pete Sessions and Executive Director Guy Harrison host a discussion and Q&A session. The occasion was the launch of their new “Patriot Program“–but what was said was less important than that the invitation was extended.
Meanwhile, the National Republican SENATORIAL Committee (NRSC) has been taking a schallacking from conservative bloggers, who are upset that the committee is backing moderate Charlie Crist in the Florida primary. RedState.com, while praising the NRCC, has all but declared war on the NRSC, called for a donation boycott.
Lewis laments:
While the NRCC is stepping up efforts, the RNC and NRSC don’t seem to be interested. Since popular New Media guru Liz Mair left the RNC, I have no idea who is supposed to be doing outreach to conservative bloggers (in fairness, I think after their tenth email in one night, I did ask to be removed from their list). I’m also not sure whether or not the NRSC even has someone tasked with reaching out to bloggers.
To be fair, the ideological problems conservative bloggers have with the NRSC are somewhat structural: The kind of candidate who can win statewide in Florida is a lot different than the candidate who can win in a single Republican district, and so conservatives will understanably have more bones to pick with a committee tasked with winning statewide campaigns.
But from the sound of Lewis’s post, it seems like the outreach is lacking to. Paging (tweeting?) John Cornyn…