Earlier this week. Chatss is part two of our with the chairs for those of you who tuned in monday night. We had the Democratic NationalCommittee Chair and tonight we are excited to continue the conversation with the republican National Committee chair. I think this is the chairwomans second time with us at gu politics, the less time on campus and we are looking forward to the next time being back on campus as well. About where tonight the Campaign Stands for campaign 2020. Its primarily against the backdrop of this global pandemic. Heres how the conversation will go we will start with the first part of the evening with the chair and i having a conversation. About halfway through, we will invite students to join into that conversation with their questions. Participatingare on zoom, you will see at the bottom of your screen, the q a button, not the chat button to leave your question. Someone from our team will get back to you and thats where you should look at your chat. They will get back to you to let you know when your time is up and then we will invite you to ask your question so make sure at that point that you are camera friendly, camera ready. We will make you famous. Feel free to begin to populate your questions now. Lets get the conversation started. Thanks for coming back to gu politics. Thanks for having me and thank you for that nice introduction and i wish i were there with you in person and hopefully, we can do that next year. We will look forward to it. Chatted in onee of these discussions was, i in the, it was early administration, very early into your tenure as chair and a lot has changed and a lot has happened since then, obviously. Now, a lot of what we talked about then was how you are all preparing for the president s reelection. We are in the middle of a campaign now and now you know who the opponent is. Could you take a couple of minutes to help frame the race for us from your perspective . How are you guys looking at the race . Obviously, weve been preparing since we met last time. From a party perspective, so much of what we do is raising the money in advance, putting the grand cayman place, registering voters, getting staff on the ground and getting ready for the ultimate voter turnout on election day. Head startve had a and raised lots of money and had the ability to work with the Trump Campaign and we are in 23 states already and we have about one million volunteers. We are in a good position. Different with the band with we have in a things we can do with data and digitalgistration and in the fundraising limits we the, we build the road to candidate can drive on it. That road takes years and years to build. We are in the best place we have ever been heading into this election. In the middle of this virus, its hard to run a campaign. Americans are just trying to see us get through this crisis. As we come out of this, you will see more and more how the campaign shapes up. , the choice night was laid out as the dnc saw it between the president and the former vice president. What is that choice as you see it . The president built an economy that was in such great shape as we headed into this unforeseen crisis. 500 thousand jobs, manufacturing jobs, this is a president that meekly understood as a candidate the threat that china posed in terms of taking on our supply chain. So much of our manufacturing has left the country. He said early on its National Security issue that we no longer have manufacturing the country. What happens if something happens if we cannot manufacture in this country . Many americans see that with the ventilators and calling on the private sector to build these things. There is the importance and vitality of our manufacturing being strong and recognizing we cannot just offload everything to china. Said he builtdent a great economy. He said i got a set of a tough spot and i can do it again. I think thats a real contrast with biden. Also some of the economic policies that put us in a tough place that the president had to deal with. The many things that the pandemic has forced political operations to deal with and adjust his messaging. That youat the fact and the Trump Campaign have been very aggressive, promoting his economic record and there is some evidence in the polling that the American People gave him a net positive on the handling of the economy. Now, you have seen all the economic gains, not just of his administration, but the obama administration, pretty much wiped out. Anxiety around Public Health as well as where the economy is. You alluded to it a little bit. Im wondering what the message is, particularly as we start to see in polling, as we start to see trust in the president s approach on this stuff on a downward trajectory. How do you address that, how do you get people to see him as the leader you want to see him as. Seeing,olling we are even against joe biden head to head, trusting the president on the economy is where they trust him. They wreck knives that we were in strong shape and they recognize this crisis and pandemic was something the president had no control over and we have literally had to shut our whole economy shutter our whole economy. Its not like there was mismanagement that led to this. It was a pandemic that hit the whole globe, all 50 states declaring emergency, we have never seen anything like this. We go to the American People and say not only did he build up ones through deregulation, whatng taxes, recognizing would stimulate the economy, energy independence, the things he has done, being tough on china and say we will not have these trade deficits, better trade deals those are things that made a robust economy and he will be better suited to bring his back when we come out of this. When it comes to the virus, thank the polling has been all over the place. We have seen high approval through this crisis for him. In put the pieces together of the steps he took and talking about the fact that he was able to harness the private sector in a way that has allowed us to surpass every other country, thats allowed us to make sure that not one person who needed a ventilator has not been able to have one in this country. You are seeing a flattening of the curve because it took the whole of america. He has done it with governors. Democrat governors, republican governors across the board and thats the bipartisanship you need to see in a crisis. Thats something in the americans want to see from their leader. For the audience, full disclosure come i think most of them know im a former spokesman for a National Party committee on the other side. Yes. I fully understand that trying to get everyone in your party on the same message is like herding cats. Its not easy thing to do. I wantcontext of this, particulart this but on the issue of reopening, youve got some republican governors pumping the brakes a little bit more aggressively than the president is in terms of wanting the messaging around reopening the economy. As the rnc chair, how does that impact your job . Maybe there is a little bit of division in the ranks there. I think it aligns with what our party stands for which is states rights and the 10th amendment and the president recognizing that there isnt a onesizefitsall solution to this. When he laid out the three phases to opening, he said it will be different not just statebystate but county by county. Wayne county michigan is one of the hardest hit counties but thats different than Ottawa County or others on the western side of my stay. Having the ability to work with state and local leaders and saying you will make the determination based on what you are seeing on the ground, what you see in terms of new cases, flattening the curve, we trust you to implement these guidelines that we are setting forward at the federal level but you are closer to the problem. You will be the ones to alternately determine how to open this up. I think you are seeing a wide variety of responses to that of different governors but they are all in different situations and we will have a chance of the country seeing whats working and whats not. There may be places where we have to pull back or states can say they are ready to open. I think the president recognizes there is no onesizefitsall and it will be done statebystate in line with what our party stands for. Lets move to some of the more mechanics of your job. Politics is a people business. Knocking on doors, talking face to face, gathering in large rallies or big phone bank rooms and all of that had to shut down. Do you, as a National Party, how have you adjusted to sort of trying to maintain the sense of community and personal connection in a socially isolated world . Different people within the rnc adjust differently. I am a social person and i love people and i love campaigning. Its been hard to be so isolated and some of our folks at the rnc love it. They say i get to not interact with people. He quickly recognized we had to shift our strategy. So much of what we built was built on doorknocking and the way you change a voters mind most often is most affected by talking to them facetoface and having that conversation with your neighbor or friend or somebody you go to church with or to school with. Having to shut that down, we looked into a virtual operation within 24 hours. Our director map that out and we had a day of action plan to knock doors across the country. When states compete its fun and we had a virtual day of action and we reached one million voters on that first day so that is exceptionally successful. We have added 300,000 new volunteers. Isrything we are doing through zoom or microsoft meetings or skype. We are connecting all over the place. I think its important that we have those connections. So they arehome responding and they want to talk more. Its an interesting change in a shift that i dont feel we lost any ground. But i am looking forward to getting back to knocking doors. I hope we get to that place where we can interact with each other socially. For someone not as familiar with some of this as you and i are, wrap your head around knocking on the door. How do you transition that to digital . What is the equivalent to knocking on a door in the neighborhood . Because of the rallies and how much data we gather at the rallies and much data we have, we knew our nonregistered voters and where they were and we know where the swing voters are so im knocking on your zoom instead of your door. Saying, hey, initially the messaging was all about coronavirus. We wanted to ask if they were doing ok because thats where the whole country was. We wanted to make it more of a check in. Not really a political message. It really wasnt political. I have shared this a couple of times, i hooked up with a woman surely who could not leave her home. She was elderly and her husband was a veteran with parkinsons. Shended up finding out needed groceries and he ended up getting the groceries and those of things one of the volunteers would make a call and we would mow peoples lawns. Those of the types of things we have seen through these connections and more relationships being built. With people answering their phones, before we were so busy, now people are connecting in a different way than the door knock. It is very impactful. All of my former colleagues in politics, as we were making this transition to genital to digital, i said i would hate to be a fundraiser in this environment. Thats the last thing on peoples minds. Everyone is worried about their health, their livelihood, the stock market, who will write these big checks . Apparently, a lot of your donors are because you just had a record month. Talk about how you are doing that . A lot of our months started off early because we shut down i remember because it was like march 12 the whole world changed. I was sick but i was getting a test march 14. T likely turned out negative air march. Fuel on the major fundraising side, we dont have events right now in the present is not interested in in that. He is focused it on the country and not talking about how to fund raise and it would not be appropriate anyway. Kimberly is doing the smaller dollar fundraising for the campaign. A strong digital operation. When i became chair, we had 11 million emails. We made a tough decision that we spend millions of dollars expanding our email list so we to 30. From 11 we are almost 40 now between emails and sms and that has become a fuel for engine and that has been incredibly strong as well as our mail fundraising. Calls on the major site or just check inside. I have not been asking for donations at this point because are laying off employees are losing their company or they have loved ones were sick and its just not the right time for me. So much of the political mystique around this president are the rallies. The guy lives for them. Anyone would say thats evident. Thathances of there being sort of level of in person gatherings anytime soon is pretty remote. Interesting as a political operative is those rallies are important, nuts is because of the messaging, not just because of the energy but its a great place to get a lot of data. You dont have any of that now. How is that impacting the campaign or making you think differently about what you do next . Clearly, we have had a lot of rallies. We have been collecting a lot of data. Thebiden just got nomination and is prevented from getting that data and having those rallies so that headstart is helping us. I hope we get to a place where we can have rallies again. Meetings,virtual zoom we will get to virtual fundraising, those are ways to connect and we will do whats right for the times. As we are opening up, we will also see more and more innovation and we will get to a place. We are already seeing more testing at 5 million. I have talked to people that sit in a couple of months, i will have a huge amount of tests available. There are things happening simultaneously as we open up on the medical front so i think it will put us in a better place but we will see. This is all wait and see because we dont know so we will adjust accordingly. Which brings us to the ultimate rally, the convention at the end of august. Dnc was supposed to go five or six weeks before the rnc in mid july and now they have pushed it back to late august so its the week right before yours is scheduled. Talk about what you are thinking and whatd a convention you do if you cannot move what we have always known them to look like. We are both planning a traditional convention. Ours is at the end of august. Cancel,it too long to we will see where we are. By the end of june early july, we will make a determination if there is something that has changed on the ground. Ready hoping to be fully to hold that convention in august. Its critical to nominate our candidate. Its hard to run a convention. The speeches, the money you have to raise, the combination of people coming into the city of charlotte which has been a great city to work with. We are excited to host this. If we have to switch to a different kind convention, it would be easier. The buildout doesnt begin until july anyway so we will be looking at the circumstances at the end of june and july. Thats when you expect to make a determination. It sounds like you can wait until the first of august. Then you can see where things stand in the middle of all this. We have may and july and we can see how we come out. Are startings that to open. I think we will have a lot of them a lot more information we have now and is no need to make a decision right now. An inpersonve convention based on our bylaws so we will not have a virtual convention. Have you given thought to what that looks like under different scenarios . In june, if because we come to that place, we will have enough time to shift that if we need to. This, last question on the state of North Carolina says its not ready to have largescale gatherings and if they say that, the president believes otherwise. How do you navigate that . To ask al of you question like that. People want to know. First of all, it needs to be a partnership and if the state of North Carolina is in the position that says we cannot all the convention, that means they are canceling every other convention in Downtown Charlotte and thats coming to the state. As weant to open as much do so we are confident and feel good that we will all be in unison as this decision is made. I totally agree. [no audio] would think North Carolina would want more than just hosting the convention. Lost a lot of revenue, these cities so they want to have it open. Just trying to make news here. We are forging ahead, no canceling of the convention, thats the news. We will move soon to the student questions themselves. Time, students, you can put in your question on theq a tab. One of the big issues that has come up reason lee recently as to how the crisis is affecting politics is how its affecting voting, not just the campaigns but how people are examplend no better than wisconsins primary couple weeks ago. Fight over big whether or not the in person primary should move forward. Rnc and dnc have been equally aggressive in their positions on how to move forward with voting and the role of a by mail. Both parties have been using the same phrase Election Integrity, which i find fascinating because you are in different places on this. Maybe you can share your position. Absolutely, every state has a combination for absentee voting, or military personnel, people who are elderly, her people who cannot every single state has that. The we have challenged and dnc went into wisconsin and started a lawsuit and we join the lawsuit and when they said take away the requirement for voter identification. Thats what got us engaged. Then they said we will leave the election open for six days so we pushed back on that. As governors change election dates, we dont get involved with that. We dont subscribe to pulling off safeguards are things they did maintain Election Integrity like the id portion of the wisconsin law. Thats where we got involved. You hear nancy pelosi and Many Democrats say we should nationalize male voting and made it and make it across the country. I really think that would leave a lot of problems. Have done a lot to safeguard their elections. Colorado has ballot tracing and they have signature requirements of theyve thought about it and put it together in a way that works for the state and took years and years to implement. I dont think National Mail in voting would work if you dont have states with voting integrity in front of them already. Some of the arguments on the one, siding, number especially in this moment, we should not be putt