"In the pitiful early hours of Election Night [it] was the only credible resource Trump advisors had." That's CBS News' Major Garrett's description of the Republican National Committee's data and analytics apparatus, which was loaned out to the Trump campaign in the latter half of 2016. Newt Gingrich says Trump, who had no serious campaign of his own, would not have won without it. The work of building the RNC's data and ground game began four years earlier, and was overseen by Mike Shields, the chief of staff from 2013 to 2014. But Shields says that as he did that job, he realized he was doing more than trying to help the GOP beat the Democrats. He was trying to save the RNC from total irrelevance.

My conversations with Shields in 2013 and 2014 were some of the first steps in my journey of beginning to think about political parties in a new light. We talk about what a party is, what a party committee should do, and how President Trump has stopped talking about a "red wave" because he finally listened to operatives who told him he was going to depress Republican turnout.

I interviewed Shields in October 2013 and wrote about it here.

I wrote about the RNC's efforts in April of 2014 at this link.

Here's my piece on election night in 2016 on how the RNC's data operation helped Trump.

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