In Data We Trust

The announcement on May 1 by the Republican National Committee that it had awarded a multimillion-dollar contract for data management and collection services to Liberty Works, a firm run by Richard Boyce, an associate of Karl Rove, has driven a new wedge between establishment and conservative forces battling for control of the party.

The extensive involvement of Rove, not only with Liberty Works, but also with all aspects of Republican efforts to build a technologically advanced, integrated voter list, has provoked new charges that Rove is acquiring unprecedented control over the Republican electioneering machine: over the aggregation of tactically valuable data and sharing it; over fund-raising; over candidate selection; over voter mobilization; and finally over issue prioritization.

Rove and Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, have angered the right wing of the Republican Party, which views them as focused on marginalizing the Tea Party movement. Centrist Republicans like Rove and Priebus see the hard right as having cost the party five Senate seats over the past two elections. They are determined to put an end to the dominant role of the Tea Party and its supporters in primary contests.

Rove’s ally, Boyce, is a partner in TPG Capital, a private equity firm based in Fort Worth and San Francisco. He is also a major Republican donor. During the 2011-12 election cycle, Boyce contributed $300,000 to Mitt Romney’s “super PAC,” Restore Our Future, and $100,000 to Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads. According to both his own aides and the R.N.C., Rove does not have a financial stake in Liberty Works.

The burst of criticism among hard-core conservatives was incited by a Politico story headlined “Karl Rove-Linked Company Gets G.O.P. Data Deal.” The mere fact of Rove’s association with Boyce produced a strong negative reaction in the conservative blogosphere, reflecting the volatility of ideological tensions between the right and center factions of the Republican Party.

Rove’s fingerprints are all over the Liberty Works voter list project, which is estimated to cost $20 million.

A company created by the R.N.C., Data Trust, will exercise control of the list. Mike Duncan, who was the chairman of the R.N.C. at the end of George W. Bush’s second term, will be the trust’s chairman. Duncan is now the chairman of Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads.

Throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, liberals and progressives saw Rove as the incarnation of evil. Now many on the conservative right describe him in similar terms.

People who commented on the Liberty Works contract at the conservative Web site FreeRepublic voiced their disapproval of Rove with their customary vehemence:

“Rove is making the moves to be the Big Political Machine Boss,” wrote “yongin,” who, in turn, provoked this reply from “fieldmarshaldj”: “Anybody that trusts anything that Tokyo Rove does is an imbecile.” Not to be outdone, “Cringing Negativism Network” wrote: “Rove is wrong for America. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Everything about Rove is wrong.”

The influential right-wing blogger Erick Erickson wrote on May 2 that “the GOP motto for fixing itself seems to be ‘incest is best.’”  Erickson warned that strengthening the Rove-Priebus wing of the party further empowers the Republican establishment in its battle against far-right insurgents:

They’ll plant stories about you in The New York Times, make sure the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal attacks you, threaten donors and demand they withhold money from you, take away your committee positions, shut down all your legislative initiatives, etc. That’s why the G.O.P. should not put data in Karl Rove’s hands. The establishment has a worse track record on candidates than those who’d side with Rush Limbaugh. They have an even worse track record on policy (how’d steel tariffs in Pennsylvania work out?). And if you do not toe their line that often loses, they will punish you in ways Rush Limbaugh never would or even could.

Erickson is right to be worried. Brian Fung of The National Journal makes a strong point:

Here’s why data ownership is a big deal. To paraphrase the geographer Halford Mackinder: Who controls the data controls the candidates; who controls the candidates controls the party.

The conflict between Rove and the hard right has deep roots. During the 2000 campaign, many traditional conservatives were critical of Rove’s strategy of presenting George W. Bush as a “compassionate conservative.” They viewed compassionate conservatism as a stalking horse for big government Republicanism.

The concerns on the far right were magnified by the Bush administration initiative that created a new, expensive entitlement: partial federal coverage of prescription drug costs for Medicare recipients.

Perhaps most important, conservatives attacked Bush and Rove for failing to control the growth of government, allowing federal red ink to increase exponentially: from a surplus of $86.4 billion in 2000, and a modest $32.4 billion deficit in 2001, to a $434.2 billion deficit in 2006 (and that was before the financial collapse of 2008).

Since the 2012 election, which was a major setback for the Republican Party, two developments have resulted in an intensification of intraparty conflict.

The first was the announcement on Feb. 3 that Rove planned to raise millions of dollars to finance a new organization, the Conservative Victory Project. The clear purpose of the project is to undermine extremely conservative candidates in Republican primaries who, if nominated, stand little chance of winning a general election. The Republican right immediately recognized the C.V.P. as an effort by the party establishment to weed out Tea Party candidates.

The second development was the release on March 18 of the 97-page R.N.C. analysis of the problems facing the party, the Growth and Opportunity Project Report, better known as the Priebus report. The report accused the party of ideological rigidity, of preferring the rich to workers, of alienating minorities and of scaring off young voters, gay and straight, with its opposition to same-sex marriage.

Much of the more radical right saw the Priebus report as a direct assault on traditional values. Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, for example, said, “If the R.N.C. abandons marriage, evangelicals will either sit the elections out completely — or move to create a third party.” Either development, Perkins warned, would put “Republicans on the path to a permanent minority.”

A factor further exacerbating the center-right Republican controversy over Liberty Works is the lack of transparency in the $20 million development of the new, more sophisticated national voter file.

Priebus and the R.N.C., according to sources in the party who insisted on anonymity in order to speak freely, are determined to maintain control over voter lists. But their desire is complicated because the addition of commercial data to party files requires an information technology infrastructure — and expertise — beyond the scope of a party budget constrained by campaign-finance laws.

Because Data Trust, under campaign finance law, must ostensibly have an arms-length relationship with the R.N.C., the R.N.C. cannot publicly reveal that it has created the Data Trust, even though, in fact, it did, according to a high-level official of the R.N.C. who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The opaque nature of the relationship among the R.N.C., Data Trust and Liberty Works is reflected in the fact that it was the R.N.C. that announced the awarding of the contract to Liberty Works, even though the contract is technically between Data Trust and Liberty Works.

Asked if the award was granted on the basis of competitive bidding, Sean Spicer, communications director for the R.N.C., said, “I am not going to discuss that,” and referred questions to Chad Kolton, who handles public relations for Data Trust.

I asked a number of people involved in the project a series of questions by e-mail:

Could you explain to me what Data Trust is? Is it a profit-making corporation? Was it created by the R.N.C.? Who are the board members? Who is the president or C.E.O.? Does it have a Web site? Is there someone who can speak for the trust? What is the relationship between the trust and the R.N.C.? If it is independent, why did the R.N.C. announce the contract award to Liberty Works to Roll Call? Is there a dollar figure for the award to Liberty Works? What does it mean that Liberty Works will create the “platform” for Data Trust? Did Data Trust award the contract to Liberty Works on a competitive basis? Were there competitors?

It took more than two days of repeated e-mails and phone calls to get even the most elliptical and fragmentary answers, and all the replies were given on a background or off-the-record basis.  One source, for example, replied in an e-mail:

Background, no quotes. Data Trust is third party group that will manage the open platform that will be built using RNC data. Data Trust manages RNC data and Liberty Works builds the platform.  Liberty Works is data trust vendor. I think you’ve talked to Chad Kolton — he’s with Data Trust. We are one of three entities in the agreement: RNC, Data Trust, Liberty Works. The project will cost 10-20 million. One of the Growth and Opportunity Project recommendations was more access and more innovation. This is redesigned to give more people access to our data and have more people feeding in.

Two highly placed sources at the R.N.C. said they did not know the address of Data Trust. No mailing or Internet address for Data Trust could be found through a Web search. Another highly knowledgeable source familiar with the company, however, was willing to say on background that Data Trust subleases space from a Republican polling firm on Capitol Hill.

Chad Kolton, spokesman for Data Trust, did not reply to repeated e-mail and phone requests for detailed information about Data Trust, except for the following e-mail:

DT (Data Trust) headed by former RNC chair Mike Duncan.  Spokesman is yours truly @ this email.  Website is done but hasn’t been made public yet … which probably doesn’t help you.

Kolton adds another Rove connection to the project. He held a variety of public relations jobs during the Bush administration, including press spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget and director of public affairs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In Bush’s first campaign, Kolton was deputy communications director for the R.N.C.’s Victory 2000 program.

Rove is crucial to the drive to steer the Republican Party back to majority status — a position it enjoyed for much of the period from 1969 to 2006. His role since the 1970s cannot be overstated. In the 2011-12 election cycle, for example, the single largest R.N.C. vendor at $42.7 million was FLS Connect, a 350-employee firm specializing in fund-raising, voter and constituent contact, and data management. FLS was founded by Tony Feather, a Rove protégé who first met his mentor  in 1974 as a student in a course on campaign management that Rove taught. Rove picked Feather to be political director of the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign. The Romney campaign paid FLS another $20.3 million.  Another FLS founder, Jeff Larson, served as chief of staff at the R.N.C. in 2011 and 2012.

I sent an e-mail to Rove to see if he would explain what his current relationship to the Republican Party is:

All the fuss over the award of the contract to Liberty Works, the creation of the Conservative Victory Project, etc. has, as you know, provoked a lot of debate over your agenda and the role you want to play in the Republican Party. Could you describe what your ambitions and goals are?

Rove declined my request. But looking at his role in creating American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS and the Conservative Victory Project, at the selection of his allies to run Data Trust and at the award of the recent data management contract to Liberty Works, it is self-evident that as “yongin,” the commenter on the Free Republic Web site, noted, “Rove is making the moves to be the Big Political Machine Boss.”