Republicans are already plotting how to harness the massive turnout operation that powered Donald Trump to victory last week and to deploy it in 2018, when a favorable map could give the party a chance to expand its Senate majority.
The Republican National Committee poured $175 million over the past four years into building a data-driven operation and this year put more than 7,000 staffers into the field — eight times more than it did in 2012.
Those resources allowed Republicans to win the White House and to keep control of the House and Senate, and to expand their number of governorships and reach an all-time high in the total of Republican attorneys general.
“If you don’t do mechanics on the ground, you can’t win,” said RNC spokesman Sean Spicer. “We were able to create a recipe for success on Tuesday that not only resonated at the top of the ticket, but came all the way down to the statehouse level, where you saw continued Republican success throughout this country.”
Mr. Trump captured nine of the 13 battleground states on which the RNC focused, including Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which had voted Democratic for decades.
Mr. Trump flipped 220 counties that voted for President Obama in 2012 and outperformed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney among black and Hispanic voters, according to exit polls.
Now, the RNC will turn its attention to another set of states — those that went Republican in the presidential election but have a Democratic senator up for re-election in 2018.
Those include Sens. Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Joe Manchin III in West Virginia and Jon Tester in Montana.
“We need to build on this program,” said Katie Walsh, RNC chief of staff.
Mr. Spicer also pushed back against the notion that Mr. Trump could hurt the party’s outreach efforts to Hispanics with a strident message on immigration. Mr. Spicer said the New York Republican gained more support from minorities than did Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor.
“He has continued to talk about being a president and an administration that moves all Americans forward,” Mr. Spicer said.
The RNC was led for the past six years by Reince Priebus, whom Mr. Trump rewarded by naming him White House chief of staff in the next administration.
Democrats, meanwhile, are searching for a new leader for the Democratic National Committee. The job is drawing interest from Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.
Mr. Dean, who has previously held the post, suggested Monday that the DNC is lagging behind the RNC when it comes to basic operations.
“What the DNC is about is mechanics,” Mr. Dean said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. “It is about being everywhere. It is about training people up. It is about having an adequate tech system, which we no longer apparently have, and it is about enfranchising people in the states to make their own decisions about who runs instead of having the DCCC or the DSCC pick candidates who can fund their own campaigns, but then can’t win because they can’t get the message across.”
“Mechanics matter,” he said.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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