Ward’s big GOP victory is of little consequence

I hate to be the spoilsport at the punditry party, but the election of Kelli Ward as chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party is a largely meaningless event. It says next to nothing about the state of the party, what it stands for or its prospects for the 2020 election.

The official party apparatuses, Republican and Democrat, are not important in the modern political era. They can be useful by performing discrete tasks to benefit party candidates. But if they are dysfunctional or incompatible, there are other ways for candidates to get those tasks performed.

Ward is a self-professed President Donald Trump loyalist and anti-establishment insurgent. She twice ran as such for U.S. Senate in primary challenges against establishment candidates John McCain and Martha McSally. And both times, she got thumped.

In the modern era, political parties are defined by their candidates, not their party officials. There were just 1,159 Republicans who voted in the party chairman race. In the 2018 primary, there were 672,452 Republican ballots cast. And McSally got 176,700 more votes than Ward.

Ward says that she will be a unifying force as party chairwoman, implying that her days as an anti-establishment tormentor are over. There are reasons to be skeptical about that. If that’s her true intent, she will have to do things to demonstrate that, and quickly.

Otherwise, the official party apparatus will be largely sidelined in the 2020 election. That would be inconvenient for party candidates, but not lethal.

There are political tasks that benefit all party candidates and are thus most cost-effectively done through the party, such as voter registration, voter identification and get-out-the-vote activities. And there are opportunities for joint fundraising and coordinated voter communications for particular candidates.

However, all of these activities can be done outside the party apparatus. That costs more. But it can be done. In fact, it has been done.

This is nothing new for the Arizona Republican Party. The first time I saw it was in 1976, when the party was split by the primary battle between President Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.

Most of Arizona’s GOP establishment — such as Sen. Barry Goldwater and House Minority Leader John Rhodes — were behind Ford. The Reagan forces, however, seized control of the official party apparatus and attempted to squeeze out the establishmentarians. The same kind of Republicans, however, continued to win elections.

More recently, a party chairman, Randy Pullen, decided to publicly denounce the efforts on immigration reform of the state’s two GOP senators, McCain and Jon Kyl. Campaign activities were routed around the party or conducted through the party with tight outside controls.

Now, this isn’t to say that all is copacetic in Republican land in Arizona. Republican primary voters are looking for Trump loyalists. McSally had to establish that she was enough of one to defeat Ward in the primary. And Trump was a drag on Republican candidates statewide in the general election.

But all that is true irrespective of who is the party chairman.

The party chairman is elected by precinct committeemen. These used to be the grass-roots army for Republican candidates. These days, they are more like a grass-roots platoon. Most candidates attract their own campaign workers, more loyal to the candidate than to the abstraction of a political party, to do the bulk of grass-roots politicking.

The most significant state GOP candidate on the 2020 ballot will undoubtedly be McSally. She is unlikely to attract a significant primary opponent.

Given how bitter the 2018 primary was between McSally and Ward, this will be, at a minimum, awkward.

The media loves the narrative of Republican intraparty squabbles and will amplify anything Ward chooses to say beyond its real importance, as it has her election as chairwoman.

However, an unreliable party apparatus would make McSally’s efforts somewhat more expensive, but not measurably more difficult. She’ll have plenty of money.

The first step in McSally preparing for that possibility would be recruiting a political marketing team that won’t use an immaterial-resource disadvantage as an excuse for poor messaging, as her last one did.