Q: Are there ever tensions — this occurs to me when you’re doing polling in a state and making some judgments about how to invest resources, it makes me wonder if there aren’t, maybe more than occasionally, tensions between a candidate and his staff wanting to get his resources, and you making judgments about their viability that are in conflict with their own self-perception. And they’ll say, “Well, I’ve got a poll that shows,” you know, such-and-such.
TIMMONS: Tensions in politics? I’ve never heard of such a thing.
Q: (laughter) Well, I wonder, how do you —
TIMMONS: There are definite differences of opinion; there’s no question. I can give you two examples of that, and for very different reasons. South Carolina, where Jim DeMint was clearly the favorite, clearly. I don’t think that there was any prognosticator that did not say that Jim DeMint was [00:40:00] not going to win, and win handily. They — Jim DeMint, however, very much wanted his coordinated dollars to come into the state. And that point, you know, we could spend —
Q: What is that — I’m sorry, coordinat–
TIMMONS: Well, the coordinated dollars, he wanted money that — which I believe is probably about $800,000. That’s a number that’s set by the Federal Election Committee — Commission, on how much money you can actually coordinate with the candidate about where you want the money to be spent. Everything else is an independent expenditure.
Q: You, meaning the NRSC?
TIMMONS: Correct, sorry. Or the political — or the party itself, so that money could have come, I think, from the RNC, or wherever. But it was coming through us. Now we could have spent that $800,000 on say, Colorado at the end. But he was insistent, and lobbied some Senators and some others to put pressure on us to work with him to [00:41:00] run ads in South Carolina. Ultimately, that benefitted him, right? I mean that’s — I don’t blame him for doing it. There could have been much better uses for that money than spending it on somebody who’s definitely going to win.
Then you look somewhere else, and actually this would be a great example of where to spend that money, Washington State. And this was my — this was my heart candidate, George Nethercutt, who was one of the finest examples of a human being I’d ever met. He happened to be running against Patty Murray at the time.
Q: Incumbent Democrat.
TIMMONS: Incumbent Democrat, and he had beaten Tom Foley, Speaker of the House back in —
Q: Eighty.
TIMMONS: — ninety-four.
Q: Oh, ’94, I’m sorry.
TIMMONS: Ninety-four. And, he didn’t have the resources, and he needed the resources. So we invested a little bit at the beginning of that race. We did some coordinated with him. His numbers just did not take off, and it was pretty obvious, it was the flipside of South Carolina. We saw that there was no way [00:42:00] we were going to be able to save — or to help him get to a better place, or get toward victory. So we had to pull out of that state. That became very public. My counterpart at the Democratic Senatorial Committee trumpeted very quickly, “The NRSC pulls out of Washington,” when we very quietly just pulled down our ads. Again, I don’t blame them for doing that. Pretty smart strategy on their part. But it was a pretty difficult decision, because I just thought George was a tremendous guy; would have been a tremendous senator.
Q: Were there ever candidates, in your experience who, at the outset, you didn’t think were going to merit the support you could give them with limited resources, but who surprised you and came on strong, and persuaded you, yeah?
TIMMONS: In the ’04 cycle — it was more the opposite, folks that you thought were strong that you had to help. Jim Bunning was a really good example of that. [00:43:00] I can’t really say that, again, we found ourselves with a bounty of riches at the end. (laughter) And no money to help, so no, not in that cycle. There were not any surprises; they just all were good from the start and merited support.
Q: You mentioned South Carolina and the general election there, but that was one of those states where there was a pretty intense primary —
TIMMONS: Yeah.
Q: — within — for the Republican nomination.
TIMMONS: Right. It was assumed — I mean, it was assumed that whoever won the primary, whether it was Charlie Condon, or David Beasley —
Q: Ravenel.
TIMMONS: Arthur Ravenel was in there as well. We — that was a pretty competitive primary, and we assumed it was either going to be Beasley or DeMint, and either of those candidates we thought would be very strong for the general election against Inez Tenenbaum. It’s ironic when you look at, kind of how you set the table for the future. You have Jim DeMint, who’s [00:44:00] now the head of the Heritage Foundation, and you had Inez Tenenbaum, who is the head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, that’s two very different worlds.
Q: Absolutely. A race we haven’t really talked about, another Republican incumbent retires, Don Nickles in Oklahoma. Was there any doubt there how that was going to play out, even as an open seat?
TIMMONS: Not initially. Initially, we assumed that it was a strong seat, although I think we probably rated it “Likely Republican,” not “Safe Republican.” Brad Carson was a very moderate Democrat, very well-liked. Tom Coburn obviously was well-liked as well. But the race got a little dicey as it unfolded. I think there were some things that the Coburn campaign did that became controversial; I can’t [00:45:00] even remember what they were. So I remember, we had to look at that as a place that we needed to invest, which I didn’t think we wanted to do right at the — as I recall, that was not a state we thought we’d have to play in very much at the beginning of the cycle, but we did end up having to go into.
Q: Can we talk about your activities over the course of the year, what is it that the executive director of the NRSC is doing, from — maybe not day-to-day, but week-to-week, month-to-month? Are you traveling, are you —
TIMMONS: You’re doing a lot of traveling, because you’re raising money for the committee, obviously. You are making sure that the chairman is being used effectively. The chairman has to be a United States Senator full time, and in his off time, he gets to be Chairman of the Republican Senate Committee, and raise money, and get on the phone for candidates. You’re also helping to set the direction for the political operations to ensure that in the beginning, you’re recruiting — you’re doing [00:46:00] heavy recruiting in the first year. I can remember spending a lot of time in Illinois, for instance, at the beginning of the process. The other states you spend a lot of time in, you spend a lot of time on the phone trying to recruit, in addition to raising money and helping set that fundraising strategy at the beginning.
And the one thing that I was working on, and I know that Andy Grossman, who was my initial counterpart at the Democratic committee was working on, was figuring out how to deal with McCain-Feingold. I mean, we spent a lot of time with lawyers, and it took me probably three months to find my attorney that I wanted to work with there. We were working with our outside attorneys, Ben Ginsburg, and others. And it was — there were a lot of briefings on how we had to deal with McCain-Feingold, what we could do, what we couldn’t do to stay within the bounds of the law.
As you move on later in the cycle, and you have candidates that you’ve helped recruit, you’re [00:47:00] helping them develop their campaign plans; you’re looking — at times, you’re looking for campaign managers for them. You are — you’re managing expectations in the media, or talking about some of the things that the media may not know that you want them to know. You’re also working with campaigns on their ground game to make sure that they’re not just raising money, which is a very easy thing to do, again, particularly post-McCain-Feingold, but they’ve got to really focus on ensuring that they have a very strong farm team throughout their state to get the vote out and get folks registered and out to vote.