Leaving Steele in place is the lesser of two evils

First, replacing a sitting chairman before his or her term expires isn’t easy. National party committees, for all the grandness of their name, are more like small clubs — often impervious to outside opinions. And it takes a two-thirds majority of the RNC’s 168 voting members to dump a chairman.

Like his predecessors, Steele has cultivated that membership and has a core of loyalists who will protect him. Nobody believes the votes are there today to get rid of Steele.

The second reason Steele appears secure is that ousting him seven months before an important midterm election would be massively disruptive to the operations of the committee and harmful to the party. Republicans believe it is far easier to work around an embarrassing chairman and a weak national committee than to blow up the organization at this point.

Still, Steele’s travails appear to have reached a tipping point. Conversations the past few days with Republicans suggest that whatever confidence remained in Steele’s capacity to be an effective chairman has eroded significantly. “It’s tipped over his ability to be relevant and helpful,” said Scott Reed, a former chief of staff at the RNC and Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign manager.