Last week, while one tea party winner in North Carolina should have been celebrating the final vote tally, she instead found herself at the center of one more battle between insurgent conservatives and elements of the Republican establishment. The National Republican Congressional Committee — which reportedly had a hand in a devastating video this summer of a Democratic congressman physically confronting college-age men — is now at apparent odds with the Republican candidate who benefited from the video’s fallout. And the NRCC has drawn the ire of tea partiers and big-name conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh.
Renee Ellmers, a registered nurse and first-time candidate, squeaked past Rep. Bob Etheridge (D) last Tuesday night, a result that is not yet set in political stone. Both sides are gearing up for a recount, a costly and potentially long process that has publicly pitted Ellmers against the National Republican Congressional Committee and eventually led Palin and Limbaugh — who spent much of the year taking on establishment groups — to attack the NRCC yet again. Now, the Republicans swear everyone has made up, but not before a nasty couple of days that played out like a mini 2010.
Etheridge is a long-time Democratic Congressman best known on the national stage for what undid him: an embarrassing video of Etheridge physically confronting what was sold at the time as an anonymous group of college students. They were later revealed to be Republican trackers. When the video first broke, the NRCC swore they had nothing to do with it.
The video became a minor sensation when it came out in June, less than a month after Ellmers won the nomination. And that’s when the problems started, according to Ellmers’ campaign. According to her senior adviser, Carter Wrenn, Ellmers at first told local reporters exactly what Wrenn says the NRCC told her: that the video did not come from DC Republicans. It didn’t take long, Wrenn said at the time, for the campaign to determine that she had been duped by the NRCC. Shortly after the video started making the rounds, Wrenn held a press conference and said the NRCC knew who was in the video, despite the committee’s public statements to the contrary.
Six months later, Wrenn has been proven right. A national Republican source I talked to said the word around town here in DC is that the video was made by the NRCC (though the committee is still not responding to questions about it.) Last week Wrenn was talking again, telling the tale of how the NRCC all but abandoned Ellmers after her campaign spilled the beans (or tried to) about the real origins of the video.
“We talked to the people at [the NRCC] and we told them, ‘You know, you’ve told the press you don’t know and you really ought to set that straight,'” Wrenn told Durham, NC conservative AM host Bill LuMaye on Friday. “They didn’t agree.”
“We never had much relationship with them after that,” Wrenn told the radio host.
On Election Day, Ellmers (who ran a fairly classic tea party campaign, with an anti-Park51 ads and endorsement from Sarah Palin) emerged from the first count less than 2,000 votes ahead of Etheridge. In North Carolina, a margin of less than 1% triggers an automatic recount, and Etheridge called for one Nov. 4.
Recounts are expensive, with sources in North Carolina telling me Ellmers could count on spending upwards of $60,000 on lawyers during the process. As any Republican on the upside of a recount fight might, Ellmers says she went to national party officials for help. The RNC immediately cut her a check for $10,000 (the branch of the GOP establishment run by Michael Steele also dropped direct mail for Ellmers during the election, while the NRCC stayed out of it.)
The NRCC, on the other hand, dragged its feet on recount assistance.
“Many people have expressed their disappointment that the National Republican Congressional Committee refused to help,” Ellmers wrote in a letter to her supporters last week.
Palin jumped in, offering to help raise money for Ellmers right away. Rush Limbaugh called out the NRCC on Ellmers’ behalf on his show on Nov. 5. He said the NRCC’s response was tantamount to the committee “telling Renee Ellmers to go to hell.” Tea party bloggers reacted as you’d expect to a call from Rush and Palin to take on the establishment — the went after the NRCC, hard.
The committee is now helping Ellmers with her recount, and the committee says the whole thing was “miscommunication” between Ellmers and the NRCC team in Washington. It’s clear Ellmers doesn’t see it that way, however.
“Whether it is due to Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh or all the bloggers helping us, the NRCC has seen the light,” she wrote.
It’s unclear how the recount, should it go forward, will turn out. But the NRCC has already found itself on the losing end of tea party vitriol despite a Republican coming out ahead in an election few thought the Republicans would win. The biggest irony, of course, is that it was the NRCC’s own video tracking operation as much as it was Ellmer’s tea party bona fides that led to Etheridge’s seeming defeat Tuesday night. But with the committee refusing to take public credit for the video, it’s clear that the Ellmer’s campaign won’t let the NRCC take credit for the win, either.
