Thursday, March 15, 2019
10:45 pm
Asheville, NC
Writing this in a Holiday Inn Express after a long day. Drove into Asheville from Raleigh earlier in the day and spoke to a lunchtime Republican Women’s Group at the J & S Cafeteria and to another Republican Women’s group tonight in a private room at Post 25 Kitchen and Lounge.
If you are not aware, the affiliated Republican women’s groups are the backbone of our party. We men like to meet, drink coffee, talk some politics and think we accomplished something, but the women’s groups actually do the grunt work on the party-building activities. They meet in places just like this and they feed you and are very kind and attentive. They ask a lot of questions. I enjoy my time with the women’s clubs. They are usually fairly small in number but small is a relative term.
I will drive across the state to hit up meetings like this to speak to maybe 40 to 50 women just for the chance to recruit 4 or 5 dedicated volunteers for our campaign. I have always found that if I can get at least 5 volunteers who are locked and loaded to help our campaign in any one county, we will get the majority of our work done in that county.
Collectively, we have assembled several hundreds of people around the state in this manner – one chicken dinner at a time. We have never pulled off the road since we were first elected in 2012, and I work at speaking to Republican clubs every month. It is a commitment that pays major dividends come election time, but you have to continually remind yourself of that when you are driving 4 plus hours to recruit 5 people at a time.
My drive to Asheville was long, over 4 hours and I have to get up at 4:00 am tomorrow morning to head to Winston-Salem for an 8:00 am digital taping Dan is doing with a group of people – an episode of our newly launched digital series we call “Table Talk”.
Dan is in Forsyth County tonight keynoting the Forsyth County Lincoln Reagan Day Dinner. If you are not aware of Lincoln Reagan Day Dinners, they are the annual gatherings each county Republican Party holds to raise money for their yearly activities. They always start in February and run thru April. Most all of the 100 counties hold them, so the first quarter of every year involves a lot of travel to service these gatherings.
I used to travel with Dan a lot more than I do now. We usually now travel in opposite directions so that we can force multiply and have representations in more that one place at a time. My time these days is almost exclusively aimed at recruiting people to chair our campaign in each of the 100 counties. It is amazingly time-consuming and involves hundreds of emails, texts, FB messaging, back and forth between teams of people. I love it.
We want to have the whole state organized at the grassroots level in time for the State GOP Convention in June. The convention is just like the national convention you see on television, but just smaller and focused just on your home state. When I say smaller, I mean in comparison to the national convention. It is actually not small at all, as all the activists from around the state gather for 3 to 4 days and talk politics, pass resolutions, elect officers, etc. We campaign hard at these events and this year will be no different. But we aim to enter the convention with our organization organized, trained and ready. We will get there.
My drive here was flooded with phone calls from vendors seeking our business. When you announce an exploratory committee for Governor, you basically put a target on your head for every pollster, general consultant, and digital vendor in the country to call and court your business. No disrespect to those in that profession, but it is never-ending. I told them all we had already built out our team. The reality is we do very little polling, choosing instead to use our instincts and intelligence we gather first hand from our continual travels around the state. Likewise, we really don’t use consultants – preferring to have a vendor relationship with people rather than a consulting relationship. What I mean by that, is that I have a problem paying someone to tell me what to do. If I have to pay someone, I want them to do something rather than just point out what needs to be done.
At any rate, I’m tired and going to bed.