WASHINGTON — Republicans are still smarting from their loss in the 2012 presidential election, when President Obama’s campaign technology team ran circles around Mitt Romney’s. With 2016 on the horizon, the GOP wants to get even, and is starting with some grass-roots education.
From Wednesday through Friday, conservative nonprofit American Majority hosted a campaign-organizing boot camp at CPAC 2015, the conservative conference that draws scores of influential Republicans and thousands of their followers to the Washington area.
Billed as the most comprehensive training in CPAC history, the three-day blitzkrieg of seminars focused on two major goals: giving Republicans the tools to win the White House in 2016, and giving them the impetus to actually use them.
“You can’t win a political battle unless you understand what you just got done to you,” said American Majority president Matt Robbins, who worked on President George W. Bush’s 2004 and Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaigns. “We’re fools not to avail ourselves with these weapons and tools.”
More than 850 students, campaign veterans, and politicos from across the country shuffled in and out of seminars on effective community organizing, successful targeted campaigning, and how to apply union tactics to winning political campaigns.
The goal, Robbins said, is to train a sea of conservative activists equipped to lay the infrastructure for the party’s presidential candidate. The strategy is unabashedly co-opted from Obama for America’s playbook: Use comprehensive databases to efficiently target voters, and bring a friendly, empathetic volunteer to their doors repeatedly until the election is over.
This means a major shift in the way Republicans approach national elections, said Robbins. Devoted to personal responsibility and sacrifice, the party needs to project a supportive image to those in need. Instead of white papers and policy briefs, conservatives need to frame their beliefs in an approachable and personal way, he said.
It is a fundamental change for many conservative activists, said Robbins.
“Conservatives are loath to change,” he said. “That’s fine with a lot of people who want to bury their heads. We’re here to wake them up.”
So Robbins, and American Majority’s CEO, Ned Ryun, took participants of all ages through a balance of strategic seminars and political TED talks. Each 15-to-30-minute session highlights where Republicans have gone wrong, what Democrats have done right, and why it is imperative for conservatives to embrace some of the methods they have disparaged, like community organizing and personality politics.
Ryun said many campaigns invest too much in methods that put money in consultants’ bank accounts and too little in strategies that put Republicans in office. “We really need to examine how we do a better job of putting money into things that we know will win and not make people rich,” he said. “At a certain point, how many more TV ads do we need?”
Although veterans are slower to jump on board, younger members of the party give Robbins and Ryun reason for optimism. Julia Mathews, an 18-year-old ambassador for Turning Point USA, highlighted the conservative nonprofit’s efforts to engage apathetic young voters.
The group printed stickers declaring “Big Government Sucks,” and plays off popular culture, such as the TV series “House of Cards,” to make conservative policy relatable through parodied posters.
“People just want to vote for who seems to be most in tune with them and what their problems are,” said Mathews, “but I guess the Republicans have not done a good job appealing to the youth vote. [Democrats] did a far better job of doing that than Republicans, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do.”
Ross Bradley, a North Carolina State University senior and representative from libertarian Young Americans for Liberty, agreed.
“There needs to be a bigger grasp on how we can still logistically pull people, but still tug at their emotions,” he said.
With a little more than a year left before the parties pick their presidential candidates, Robbins and Ryun emphasize hitting the ground running before it is too late.
Ryun said he is not sure what the future holds for the Republican Party, nor if this push will lay a path to the White House.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do and we don’t have a whole lot of time,” he said. “Let’s focus on the things that really make change happen.”
Sylvan Lane can be reached at sylvan.lane@globe.com.