“Organization and personal appearances by the candidate - those are the lessons learned for any presidential hopeful in Montana that wants to compete in future presidential caucuses,” said state Republican chairman Erik Iverson.
As Woody Allen said, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.”
On Tuesday night, Romney won 38 percent of the statewide caucus vote, although it was a different pool of voters in many cases from the 2007 convention. Romney captured all 25 Montana delegates in the winner-take-all event.
His family also showed up in Montana more than anyone else's family.
And Romney's campaign hired the state Republican Party's former executive director, Chuck Denowh, to run his campaign here. No one knows the local Republican insiders, who would be likely to participate in the new caucus system, better than Denowh. He has GOP ties in every county and it paid off big dividends.
Grass-roots organizing is grubby, not glamorous, work. It involves trying to find people to run for hundreds of precinct captain seats in all 56 counties and trying to persuade all precinct people to back a candidate. But in particular, an organizer wants to win the key urban counties in the caucus. It entails working with the national campaign to arrange for direct mail sent to caucus participants and to arrange for recorded calls to the right phone numbers.
Romney won 25 of the 56 counties and tied in four others Tuesday. He racked up huge wins in the GOP county caucuses with the most participants, including 36 votes in Flathead, 47 in Gallatin, 36 in Lewis and Clark, 32 in Ravalli and 47 in Yellowstone counties.
His campaign also early on lined up the patriarch of the Montana Republican Party, former Gov. Tim Babcock, and one of the party's two statewide officeholders, Secretary of State Brad Johnson, to head Romney's presidential campaign in Montana.
Denowh said the Romney campaign took nothing for granted, adding, “We worked here really hard to win Montana.”
“Montana's a big state geographically, but when it comes to politics, we are a small state,” Iverson said. “Mitt Romney was the only candidate to come here. His two sons made numerous trips. He had a good message. He talked about Montana-specific issues like energy development. They had the best organization on the ground, and they sustained it the longest, and at the end of the day, it won out.”
Agreeing was Steve Daines, the Bozeman businessman who ran former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's campaign here.
“Romney had a great organization,” Daines said. “Give the credit to Chuck Denowh. They deserved to win.”
Grass-roots organization also really paid off for the backers of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who finished second with 25 percent of the caucuses' vote. Paul won 11 county caucuses, including Missoula, and tied in two others.
Paul's showing certainly didn't surprise his enthusiastic backers, even though it may have other Republicans.
“What a tremendous success we had throughout the state,” said Paul's state coordinator, David Hart. “Last night, I was initially disappointed.”
But after studying the national results, Hart said it was Paul's strongest state showing so far.
“It's a battle of ideologies to win the hearts and minds of the people to constitutional government again and to the message of freedom,” Hart said. “We accomplished that and opened a lot of people's eyes.”
“We expected Ron Paul to do well,” Iverson said. “There were a lot of first time, new fresh faces energized about getting involved. I'm happy to have them aboard.”
U.S. Sen. John McCain had the weakest grass-roots organization here, and it showed. Although McCain has kicked his campaign into gear nationally, his Montana effort lagged months behind. His Montana campaign didn't really start in earnest until the Republican Winter Kickoff in Billings in late January. By then, many local Republican caucus participants had aligned with other candidates.
McCain finished third with 22 percent of the vote, winning eight counties and tying in five others.
Finishing fourth without much of a grass-roots organization either was former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, with 15 percent of the votes. He won six counties and tied for first in one other.
Former Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Alan Keyes finished a distant last place with only two votes, or 0.12 percent of the total votes. No Keyes campaign surfaced in Montana.
“The strength of our Montana Republican Party is our diversity,” Iverson said. “We have a lot of factions, but that is a strength.”
Huckabee represents the social conservatives, while Paul appeals to the libertarian-leaning Republicans, Iverson said. McCain draws support from those wanting a strong national defense, he said, while Romney is attractive to the fiscally conservative wing.
“These were four separate candidates who really brought four separate factions together,” Iverson said.
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