Do we still need the RNC?

One thing we’ve already seen is the development of shadow party structures, like Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund, that allow ideologically committed donors to do an end-run around the RNC. It’s very easy to imagine this trend accelerating as more organizational talent and resources flow to other shadow parties, like American Crossroads, a new 527 group backed by former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie and Karl Rove. As National Journal’s Under the Influence blog notes, the idea for the group was hatched well before the RNC’s recent woes. But it’s clear that it will profit from the RNC’s decline. With a slew of Republican heavy-hitters, including a former executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the role of chief executive, it’s easy to imagine American Crossroads having more gravitas than the RNC itself. American Crossroads is only one of a constellation of similar groups that will play an outsized role in the midterm elections.

It doesn’t hurt that the energy on the right is coming from the Tea Party movement, which, as The Winston Group finds in a new survey, doesn’t always line up with traditional Republican priorities. Indeed, while 57 percent of self-identified Tea Partiers call themselves Republicans, 28 percent are independents and a surprisingly large 13 percent are Democrats. They’re overwhelmingly older and middle class, and the issues that drives them to distraction is the deficit, not unlike the Perot voters who transformed the political landscape in the 1990s. Building structures that maintain distance from the Republican brand might resonate with voters bitterly opposed to politics as usual.