Q:                    And you talked about working to recruit candidates, which I think might take some people by surprise, that the national party would be out there encouraging people to run.  I think maybe many of us would assume that candidates emerge spontaneously, [00:48:00] and then you wait and see how they evolve.

TIMMONS:      Well, sometimes they emerge spontaneously, and you would like to that they shouldn’t emerge spontaneously.  (laughter)

Q:                    Well, who would be a couple examples of candidates you actively recruited in ’04?

TIMMONS:      Who we actively recruited?

Q:                    I was thinking you in particular, but —

TIMMONS:      The committee, or the party, yeah.

Q:                    You, and the committee, generally.

TIMMONS:      Well, Mel Martinez is clearly one of those.  John Thune was on the fence about whether he was going to run again.  He had run two years before and lost, and we wanted him to run against Tom Daschle who was the Majority Leader — Minority Leader, I guess, during that cycle.  So we were able to recruit him.  We also helped to recruit some other candidates in states that weren’t successful, and we didn’t win those, so I won’t mention those.

Q:                    John Thune, that’s, I guess last on the race — particular races.

TIMMONS:      That was our marquis race that year.

Q:                    Pardon?

TIMMONS:      That was our marquis race that year for sure.

Q:                    Could you talk about that race at whatever length [00:49:00] you’d like to?

TIMMONS:      Yeah, so, you know it’s funny, I think when we started the race — when the race started that cycle, there are a lot of people who said he’s — you know, we love John Thune; he’s going to be able to do this.  This is an easy, easy race.  Those by-and-large were people that weren’t trying to raise money against the leader of the Democratic caucus.  (laughter)  And, I think there was a lot of expectations that were put on John’s shoulders at that point, which is really — it’s tough for a candidate to have to manage those expectations, but he did it beautifully.  And, he raised a lot of money on that race.  He ran an incredibly good race, because the man never tires.  He just never tires.  He was everywhere in that state, and we were very pleased to put a lot of money in that state.  I think it was probably four million dollars that we put into a state that is not a very expensive media state, [00:50:00] so that tells you how much we invested in that state.  We did a lot of research for the candidate, and in fact some of our research I think actually probably tipped the balance right at the end of the face.

Q:                    For example?

TIMMONS:      For example, finding a document signed by Senator Daschle, that declared that he was a full-time resident of the District of Columbia.  That was a very effective ad to use against him.  And Thune ran a largely positive race, and so he, I think, was a good alternative for folks who thought that their incumbent Senator perhaps a little bit out of touch with their state.  So he ran a good race.  He won narrowly.  He’s become an outstanding Senator that doesn’t even attract opposition anymore.

Q:                    Thirty-three million dollars spent in that one election in South Dakota.

TIMMONS:      In South Dakota, right. [00:51:00]

Q:                    Eighty-seven dollars per vote.  I mean, so your committee puts in four million, but there are over ten million more dollars, 15 million more dollars that are coming from —

TIMMONS:      All over the country, because every knew what a great senator John Thune would be, what a great leader he would be for the country.  So I think it’s pretty safe to say that if you know John Thune, you are — you’re highly impressed.  So we made sure as many people in this country knew who John Thune was as possible.

Q:                    Well, how much of this was pro-John Thune, and how much of it was defeat Tom Daschle?

TIMMONS:      I’m sure there was some of that.  But you’re not going to just defeat somebody with nobody.  I mean, you’ve got to have a good alternative.  I mean, you don’t just try to defeat a member of Congress, or a member of the United States Senate, unless you have somebody that you really believe in, and I think people really believed in John Thune, and they still do.

I’ll tell you the one factor about that race that most people [00:52:00] don’t know is we also invested a lot on ballot security, because there were questions about the security of the ballot box in the 2002 race, and a lot of folks thought that John Thune should challenge the results of that election, and to his credit, he didn’t.  So I wanted to make sure in 2004 we didn’t have those same questions.  And we had an incident of a ballot box disappearing, and an election official putting it in a station wagon, and driving off with it, and driving to some barn to open it up, and I had lawyers following him all the way, and demanding to be inside the barn, and finally they got inside the barn, and as soon as those ballots were counted, he was declared the winner.  John Thune was declared the winner, because there was no question that all of the ballots were accounted in an appropriate way.