Wisconsin Republican Party chairman Reince Priebus is the clear front-runner in the race to replace Michael Steele, but that doesn’t mean Priebus will waltz to victory. Instead, history shows the front-runner in the race to chair the Republican National Committee doesn’t always win.

Priebus has at least 33 public endorsements, according to our latest whip count, well on his way to the 85 out of 168 votes he needs to win the chairmanship outright. He has nearly twice the number of public supporters as Steele, his closest rival.

But the election itself is a complicated affair. A candidate must get a majority to win, and there are no requirements that anyone drop out of the race, meaning the contest can continue ad infinitum. The complicated calculus candidates must solve involves asking voters for second-place commitments if and when a voter’s preferred candidate drops out. A candidate with few first-place votes can speed ahead when others drop out, while a candidate with a large number of first-place votes can stagnate if there are no second-place votes waiting in the wings.

In two of the three most recent elections for RNC chairman, the candidate who has won the most votes on the first ballot has fallen short on subsequent ballots. In 2009, incumbent chairman Mike Duncan led Steele out of the gate, taking 52 votes on the first ballot to Steele’s 46. But Steele steadily grew, picking up support from other candidates and eventually winning on the sixth ballot.

And in 1997, both former New Hampshire Gov. Steve Merrill and New Jersey national committeeman David Norcross led the pack on the first ballot, with 42 votes for Merrill and 41 votes for Norcross. Colorado national committeeman Jim Nicholson finished third on the first ballot, at 23 votes, mired amid a four-candidate second tier. Yet that second tier consolidated around Nicholson, who won when Norcross and Merrill pulled out after the fifth ballot.

“The most important variable in determining the winner of the race is not who has an early block of support, but rather who is most acceptable to the greatest number of voters,” wrote Rhode Island GOP chairman Giovanni Cicione in a memo to committee members earlier this week. That factor, Cicione argued, bodes well for his preferred candidate — former Michigan Republican Party chairman Saul Anuzis.

Anuzis has run before, and a central, if unspoken, selling point of his campaign is that he’s friendly with a large number of committee members. Anuzis and other candidates in the race are moving to portray Priebus as the front-runner — and, by the way, as the clear heir to the Steele legacy. Priebus was close to Steele in the 2009 race, and served as his top attorney for nearly two years before quitting to launch his own bid. Tying Priebus to Steele, the other candidates believe, weakens Priebus’s chances.

Priebus backers pointed to the other case — the race for chairman in 1993 — to counter Cicione’s argument. That year, Haley Barbour took 60 votes on the first ballot, 13 ahead of the second place finisher and well ahead of three others. Barbour won on the third ballot, taking 90 votes, compared with 57 for Spence Abraham and 18 for ex-Rep. Bo Callaway (John Ashcroft finished in fourth place in 1993).

In an email to the committee, Mississippi national committeeman Henry Barbour, one of Priebus’s biggest supporters, said Cicione had cherry-picked facts that backed up his candidate’s points while overlooking obvious ones that give credence to Priebus.

Cicione’s “analysis belongs at Disney World. You take so many leaps of faith that your valid points are just lost in the dizzying logic,” Barbour wrote. Priebus “will stay on message. He will manage. He can unite the Committee and the Party. And we will win under his leadership,” he added.

Still, momentum is important in the race, and with just a week to go, Anuzis is getting a much-needed boost. On Thursday, Anuzis was publicly endorsed by three state party chairmen — Connecticut’s Chris Healy, South Carolina’s Karen Floyd and Matt Strawn of Iowa — and South Carolina national committeeman Glenn McCall. The new support gives Anuzis 14 publicly committed votes; private estimates of member support put Anuzis between 25 and 30 votes.

That virtually assures Anuzis will not finish in first place on the first ballot. Priebus is widely expected to have many more votes on the first ballot. If Priebus starts the first ballot with 60 votes or more, according to several committee members watching the race, he may appear inevitable.

But a rule of thumb in politics is that the incumbent is never anyone’s second choice. Anuzis’s hope is to paint Priebus as the Steele-tied front-runner, the virtual incumbent. Doing so has its risks — if Priebus is seen as the consensus pick, he could cruise to an early victory. But it has a big potential payoff, too, in limiting Priebus’s vote total and in focusing other candidates against him.

If Priebus falls short of expectations on the first ballot — and, to be clear, expectations are far from set — candidates Anuzis, former RNC co-chairman Ann Wagner and former RNC convention director Maria Cino could all benefit. (In his email backing Priebus, Barbour said he expects Steele to lead after the first ballot; informal counts peg Steele’s support between 40 and 50 voters).

Priebus “has gained a number of first ballot commitments because he and his supporters have effectively convinced ‘anti-Steele’ members that they need to unite behind Reince in order to defeat Steele,” Cicione wrote to members in his pro-Anuzis memo. “As it becomes clear that Steele is no longer a viable candidate, that “anti-Steele” rationale is no longer valid. Furthermore, those members who recognize that Priebus was an integral part of the Steele administration (and therefore presumably ‘part of the problem’) will chose another candidate as well.”

Anuzis’s strategy is risky, but the history of RNC elections and this year’s individual dynamics — including the deep antipathy toward Steele among many RNC members and the formerly close relationship between Steele and Priebus — means the race for chairman remains wide open in the final week.

See numbers here: http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2011/01/an-unorthodox-p.php

Politico

Speaker-designate John Boehner is calling members of the Republican National Committee this week on behalf of Maria Cino, the veteran GOP operative running for party chair.

A state chair who talked to Boehner today said the Ohioan gently made the case for Cino.

“He put in a plug for Cino [but] not a hard push,” said the state chair, who requested anonymity.  

Aides to Boehner declined to comment and Cino didn’t immediately return an email asking if she had requested the outreach by the Speaker. 

Boehner’s Chief of Staff Barry Jackson is close to Cino and was one of her earliest advocates for party chair.  Both worked in different capacities for the Bush administration. 

While he’s generally popular with GOP activists, Boehner does not have extensive relationships on the committee and outside endorsements don’t typically carry much weight in the insiders’ game that is the chairman’s contest.

Cino knows this well.  She picked up the backing early on of both former RNC chair Ed Gillespie and Dick Cheney but has little show for it.  She has six public supporters — the least of any of the five candidates running — and three of those are in her home state (New York) or from Boehner’s Ohio.  

And as the news, first reported by CNN’s Peter Hamby, got out that Boehner was calling committee members, some allies of Cino’s rivals moved to portray it as big-footing.

“The RNC members don’t want to be dictated to by anyone from DC, including the Speaker,” said one supporter of a Cino opponent.  “And we like the Speaker.”

With just over a week until the vote, though, the RNC hopefuls need all the help they can get and a personal phone call from the incoming Speaker will at least prompt members to consider his message.

As the state chair who talked to Boehner recalled: “[I] said I was thinking about it and flattered he called.”

A group of conservatives on the Republican National Committee’s governing board has launched an “Anybody but Steele” campaign and are gathering pledges from other committee members not to back the beleaguered RNC chairman, POLITICO has learned.

Members of the Republican National Conservative Caucus held a conference call and sent e-mails last week in an attempt to build support for what they’re calling a “Resolution of Commitment.”

The same group is also working on a similar, but far more targeted, campaign to persuade the five Republicans challenging Steele not to strike an agreement with him that might improve his prospects — what they call a “No Deal With Steele Pledge.”

James Bopp, RNC member from Indiana and a leader of the RNCC, declined to offer specifics about how many pledges the group had received for either effort, directing inquiries to Oregon RNC member Solomon Yue, another RNCC leader. Yue wouldn’t respond to an e-mail.

But the conservatives’ Dump Steele effort has caught the attention of the incumbent’s loyalists and just before Christmas touched off an angry, racially tinged e-mail exchange between Bopp, a supporter of Wisconsin GOP Chairman Reince Priebus’s bid to lead the RNC, and Idaho GOP Chairman — and Steele backer — Norm Semanko.

In a Thursday e-mail to Bopp and Yue that he copied to the 168 members of the RNC, Semanko complained that an e-mail had been forwarded to him about the conference call that was aimed at garnering signatures for the anti-Steele efforts.

“The e-mail was only sent to 26 RNC members … far less than the 90-plus RNC members that belong to the Conservative Caucus,” Semanko, the party’s new general counsel, wrote in the e-mail, obtained by POLITICO.

Ostentibly, Semanko’s gripe was that Bopp and Yue failed to notify other RNC members. He suggested that they were abusing their role atop the conservative bloc of RNC members in what was plainly an attempt to expose their efforts. But he also touched on what he thought the impact might be of their underlying campaign to rally opposition to Steele

“Concern has been expressed among members of the Caucus that these two anti-Steele pledges/resolutions could be viewed as hateful toward Chairman Steele — regardless of what benign names they may be given,” Semanko wrote. “They are also considered arbitrary in that they, quite literally, purport to support anyone but Chairman Steele, without consideration of any particular candidate’s qualifications.”

To this, Bopp responded with seeming fury.

“Norm, are you some liberal professor at some liberal arts college enforcing their ‘hate speech’ prohibition?” he demanded of the Idaho GOP chairman. “Is our brand-spanking-new general counsel now the self-appointed speech police? Or were you asked by Chairman Steele to assume this role?”

Continuing, Bopp inferred that by “hateful” Semanko was alluding to perceptions about how the party was treating its first black national chairman. 

“I know that liberals view any criticism of someone’s conduct to be ‘hateful,’ if the person happens to be black, etc,, but I was unaware that we at the RNC had adopted such a political speech code,” he wrote. “In my view, it is not ‘hateful’ to decide not to vote for Steele because one views his conduct in office to be detrimental to the interests of the Republican Party and the country, even though he happens to be black. To suggest otherwise is playing the race card, again, and it would seem that your considerable legal talents could better be used mounting a substantive defense of Steele, rather than trying to enforce some non-existent and destructive censorship regime on the RNC.”

By “again,” Bopp was referring to Steele’s comment, in declaring his reelection bid, that the party’s willingness to reelect him would “speak volumes about our willingness to truly be the party of Lincoln.”

An aggrieved Semanko responded that he was merely asking “some simple procedural questions” about the conservative caucus.

“Rather than acknowledging my concerns and answering my questions directly, you have chosen to level a personal attack on me — a fellow member of the RNC and the Conservative Caucus,” he wrote, adding, “That is unfortunate, but I accept it for what it is; just more angry and negative than anything I could have imagined from a fellow conservative Republican.”

Semanko concluded: “I’m sorry to have taken up your time today. Blessings for a wonderful Christmas season and a happy New Year.” 

It’s not clear that the RNCC’s anti-Steele campaign will even be necessary. Since announcing his reelection bid, the embattled chairman has won little additional support beyond his small band of loyalists on the committee.  He suffered another blow Sunday night when Priebus announced that he had picked up the backing of California committeeman Shawn Steel, previously a staunch backer of the incumbent.

Boston Globe

Tuesday, December 28, 2010 | 11:49 a.m.

I do not believe in candidate endorsements.  I have notified the Central Committee and Executive Committee of the state GOP as of 12-27-2010 that I plan to vote for Maria Cino barring some unexpected craziness given all the other drama we as a national party have experience[d].  Both of the women [Cino and Ann Wagner] are the most qualified in this race and I will not vote for Steele or his Lt Anuzis, Collins and Gentry who put us in precarious positions.