““It is completely, thoroughly ironic that Trump, who ran [in 2016] against anything to do with the R.N.C. and the establishment, is the guy who is breathing new life into the party,” said WinRed’s chairman, Henry Barbour….Mr. Barbour is also chairman of the other central pillar of the Republican machine, Data Trust.”…An RNC official since 2005, Barbour is also a lobbyist for Capitol Resources LLC.
3/9/20, 12/24/20, “How the Trump Campaign Took Over the G.O.P.," NY Times, Danny Hakim, Glenn Thrush, Washington
“Working under the aegis of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, with the cooperation of…the Republican National Committee, the
operatives have consolidated power–and made money–in a way not possible
in an earlier, more transparent analog era…[WinRed logo via WinRed.com]
A fierce pressure campaign to centralize fund-raising on the new platform, a for-profit company that Mr. Trump branded WinRed, brought dissent from candidates initially reluctant to sign on, as well as competitors who believed they were being pushed aside without a fair hearing….
“It is completely, thoroughly ironic that Trump, who ran against anything to do with the R.N.C. and the establishment, is the guy who is breathing new life into the party,” said WinRed’s chairman, Henry Barbour. Perhaps no one better represents the new outside-in reality than Mr. Barbour-nephew of the former Republican Party chairman Haley Barbour-who once said it would be “very hard” to vote for Mr. Trump.
The younger Mr. Barbour is also chairman of the other central pillar of the Republican machine, Data Trust…
a private company controlled by a board of Republican grandees,…
a storehouse of personal, commercial and
demographic voter data collected from state parties and voter files or
bought from data brokers (or from WinRed, itself a vital source of donor
information)….
[7/15/2020, “Jared Kushner was the campaign manager yesterday, is the campaign manager today and will be the campaign manager tomorrow.” Peter Alexander@PeterAlexander, NBC News. Brad Parscale merely carries out Jared’s orders].
(continuing): “Mr. Parscale…and his associates have said that [for-profit] private companies give them greater operational flexibility, given the constraints of campaign-finance laws. (ActBlue, by contrast, is a nonprofit. Both entities, though, are required to disclose individual donors.)…
[Above image: 9/27/2020, Ft. Lauderdale, Brad Parscale pinned on ground by police. “Body Camera Captures Take Down Of Former Trump Campaign Manager Brad Parscale,” CBS Miami….CBS “reports Parscale was hospitalized for a mental health evaluation following the incident”]
The Trump family looms over the whole operation, starting with Mr. Kushner. While his White House portfolio has variously encompassed everything from immigration to the Middle East, his
most consistent assignment has been informal campaign chairman,
The R.N.C. moved to rebuild around Data Trust, which it had recently helped establish. The idea was compelling: If state and national party committees and campaigns fed information into one place…outside the party,
fund-raising limits would not apply.
Contractors were fired, and much of the R.N.C.’s data staff was moved into Data Trust, which effectively became an off-campus arm of the party….
Karl Rove, campaign manager and confidant to President George W. Bush, was an early backer of Data Trust and has been informally advising [Jared’s assistant] Mr. Parscale. He wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that technology had played a critical role in battleground states, adding, “Data Trust was a big reason why Donald Trump won the 2016 election.”
Building a Cash Machine…
Republicans had fund-raising tools, but by coalescing around a single vendor...candidates could raise money jointly and more easily share data on contributors....
To Mr. Kushner…only one vendor was acceptable, according to several people with knowledge of the deliberations: a company called Revv which had already been processing payments for the [2020 Trump] campaign.
By the summer of 2019, WinRed was created atop Revv’s platform….The new company was a joint venture between Revv and Data Trust, with 60 percent of profits going to Revv.
(WinRed charges campaigns 3.8 percent, plus 30 cents per credit card transaction.)…
WinRed became ascendant, and this time the Trump team and Senate Republicans joined in a pressure campaign to convert holdouts. Mr. McConnell told colleagues at a lunch in mid-2019 that his personal goal was
to “shut down all the competitors,”
according to one senator who was surprised at the majority leader’s directness. The party even sent a cease-and-desist letter to one of the losing contenders, Anedot, instructing it to remove G.O.P. logos from solicitations.
With or without a stake in WinRed, key aides have positioned themselves at the center of a formidable political machine. Ms. Walsh-Shields’s consulting firm receives a $25,000-a-month R.N.C. retainer and 1 to 5 percent of money it raises for the party’s 2020 convention. Mr. Shields’s firm, Convergence Media, represents clients ranging from the National Republican Congressional Committee to Representative Devin Nunes of California….
Most Republican officeholders have succumbed to the WinRed pressure campaign.
One late convert was [Establishment]
Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who learned the power of
being linked to Mr. Trump’s money machine when
WinRed unexpectedly sent out a joint fund-raising appeal that
brought in a “six-figure sum in a single day, which is huge in a down-ballot race,” said Tim Cameron, a Tillis adviser and former digital director at the Republican senatorial committee.
Without Mr. Trump’s [2016] victory,
“there’d be nothing at the scale of WinRed,” he said.
“All of a sudden, it’s one election, and we have the upper hand.””
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