At a downtown D.C. hotel this week, Republicans are training a volunteer force of women to run grassroots operations this fall.
The training session, known as Blackboard 2 Blacktop, was in the works months before a public fight for the women’s vote had both sides arguing over contraception and motherhood, organizers say. But a visit to the closed-door meeting Monday found Republican women in the crowd eager to push back against Democratic suggestions that the GOP is anti-woman. The Republican leaders behind the event, however, were not as eager to talk about what even Mitt Romney has admitted is a failure to connect with women.
The RNC event was cosponsored by the National Federation of Republican Women, a group that represents 80,000 women in GOP women’s clubs across the country. The women involved are already political activists — the few TPM talked to outside one of the Blackboard 2 Blacktop sessions were savvy and plugged-in — but they said they haven’t been able to use their grassroots army to push back on Democratic rhetoric about women thanks to a GOP primary season that went on longer than anyone expected.
“Remember, we’ve not had a candidate,” said Carol Hadley, president of the California Federation of Republican Women. “We haven’t been able to roll that red carpet out yet, and we’re just waiting. You’ll see big differences [in GOP women activism] once the nominee’s official.”
Reporters weren’t allowed inside the actual training sessions at Blackboard 2 Blacktop, named “because the training starts in the classroom and follows each woman as she engages grassroots in their precincts, districts and parishes around the country.” But the event drew RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, and organizers told TPM the two days of sessions focus on building a force of women activists that can run the party’s grassroots operations in 2012 and establish a base for future political engagement down the road.
“We’re not doing this for an election cycle,” said RNC Co-Chairwoman Sharon Day, former women’s outreach leader for John McCain in 2008 and the mastermind behind the Blackboard 2 Blacktop training. She said women who graduate from the session should have the “confidence” to turn their activism into political action, including by running for office. The short-term goal is to put these women at the head of RNC Victory Centers across the country, grassroots activism units that will be used to drive messaging and turnout in 2012.
“All of these things fit together. If you can do one of these things, you can do all of these things,” Day said. “That’s the importance of what these women are here for, that’s what they’ve come here for.”
Democrats, too, are working to mobilize women activists behind behind the scenes. Last week, President Obama addressed a two-day fundraiser and training session for Democratic female activists. His speech was open to the press; the training sessions and surrogate speeches connected with the event were not. In his address, Obama amped up the messaging about the GOP and women that has been a driving force of his reelection bid of late.
“I’m always puzzled by this,” Obama said. “This is a party that says it prides itself on being rabidly anti-regulation. These are folks who claim to believe in freedom from government influence and meddling. But it doesn’t seem bother them when it comes to women’s health.”
Day insisted the GOP event was not concerned with winning the “war on women.”
“I think Obama’s record has shown that he’s been a failure for women,” she said. “I don’t agree with the premise that he or his supporters have come up with the relationship between women and the Republican Party. It’s nonsensical and it’s a real farce on his part.”
Day said that women at the training session hadn’t asked many questions about how to push back on Democratic claims the GOP is at war with women, and insisted the women participants weren’t concerned about public perception of the GOP these days. But attendees at the conference signaled that some were, in fact, smarting from the Democratic attacks.
“Eighty-two thousand women lost jobs in March. That’s huge. That not something that sounds like ‘the war on women being won by Democrats,’ if there is such a thing,” said LaDonna Ryggs, a Republican women’s group leader from South Carolina. “I think at the end of the day, is contraception the No. 1 issue? It might be for a girl who’s 19 to 24. But probably for those of us who have jobs and have families, it’s way down on the radar.”
Day, like other Republican leaders, said her party will win back women voters by refusing to single them out.
“We’re going to continue to empower women, to educate women,” she said. “At the RNC, we don’t look at women as a coalition, we don’t look at them as a gender, we look at them as a strategic partner.”
