With humor, Kevin McLaughlin helps carry NRSC
Politico
By Elena Schneider
January 5, 2016
Kevin McLaughlin, then the Republican National Committee’s director of broadcasting, once spent an entire day dressed as Brutus Buckeye, the giant-headed Ohio State University mascot.
In buttoned-up D.C., spying a mascot at an executive committee board meeting is a surefire surprise. It comes as less of a shock, though, for those who know McLaughlin.
"There are some inherently uncomfortable conversations you have to have in politics, but if you can bring the tension down in the room with a laugh, then that can change things," said Black Rock Group partner Brian Jones, who helped hire McLaughlin while at the RNC. "Kevin has a real gift for that."
McLaughlin, now the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s deputy executive director, had many of those hard conversations in 2013 as helped revamp the committee’s communications shop. Job number one was training candidates and campaign staffs to avoid becoming the next Todd Akin, the former Missouri congressman whose Senate campaign crashed and burned following his comments on rape and pregnancy, casting a long shadow over GOP campaigners around the country.
After a historic 2014 election in which Republicans retook control of the Senate, McLaughlin said the GOP’s incumbent-heavy slate of 2016 candidates are making things easy for him this year.
"From top to bottom, they are a really good class and they fit their states well and are in touch with their constituents," McLaughlin said in the NRSC’s headquarters earlier this year. "Some of the pitfalls we’ve had in the past, I don’t see in this group."
Old obstacles have been replaced with new ones, though. The NRSC is on defense as it prepares to back 21 incumbent senators, several from states that President Barack Obama won in 2008 and 2012. And in a presidential year with a potentially lengthy nominating process, it’ll be harder than ever for down ballot candidates to cut through the noise.
"There are so many races, there’s only so much money, so much bandwidth and there’s a massive amount of clutter," McLaughlin said. "We’re going to have to make sure our messaging and communications are extremely pointed and effective because we’re not going to have as much of a shot, as we did in 2014, to talk to a voter. We have zero room for error."
That starts with preparing to run alongside the as-yet-unknown GOP presidential nominee. McLaughlin said the NRSC staff went through the laborious process of going "through every single presidential candidate and every single Senate race," asking, "what does this candidate mean to this candidate?"
"We’re trying to figure out, if this, then what?" He added.
In spite of extensive preparation, McLaughlin said he sees some room for surprises, but not much. One place might be Florida, where crowded, bruising primaries are expected on both sides. But otherwise, McLaughlin said he doesn’t "see a lot of surprises on the map because I do think every one of these races are going to be incredibly close."
McLaughlin only started worrying about political maps a decade ago. Before politics, he was a self-described "D-List celebrity" in Minneapolis.
The Minnesota native did stints at a local bank and a window replacement company after graduating from the University of St. Thomas, but he knew it wasn’t the right fit.
"I sat down with a piece of paper and a pen and did a pro-con list of what I wanted out of my job, besides money," he said. "It came down to, for me, that I wanted a job where I could wear jeans and a baseball hat to work. That, to me, was happiness."
In radio, no one cared what he wore, so he pursued local reporting in Iowa before returning to Minneapolis, where he "fell into" a morning news show on an alternative station. Though he enjoyed it, McLaughlin ended up moving to a job at the RNC in March 2005. Moving from journalism to politics, he said, probably makes him the "only person to get into politics to make more money."
"Work doesn’t feel like work with him, which is a quality that’s nearly exclusive to him," said Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who worked alongside McLaughlin at the RNC. "It’s his sense of humor. It allows him to tackle very serious issues in a lighthearted way, and makes people feel like they have bought into the solution rather than being forced into it, under the gun."
Despite McLaughlin’s intention of making his move to D.C. temporary, he ended up sticking around with different employers: Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign, then Sen. John Cornyn’s 2008 reelection effort, and the Texas’ senator’s official office for three years.
In 2011, McLaughlin left Capitol Hill for DCI Group and went on to run his own public affairs firm. But campaigns, "like the mob," pulled him back in, McLaughlin said. After Republicans’ stinging string of losses in 2012, McLaughlin came to Rob Collins, who had been newly installed as the NRSC’s executive director, with an alarming argument.
"I laid it out: Our candidates sucked, our campaigns sucked, and if we don’t address this, we’ll be in the same boat as we were in 2012," McLaughlin said.
Along with committee communications director Brad Dayspring (now an executive at POLITICO), McLaughlin revamped the NRSC’s communications training for candidates and campaign staffers. Collins called the move "revolutionary at the time, spending an inordinate amount of time and energy training candidates."
As a campaign staffer, McLaughlin explained, "You’re out in the field, underfunded, alone 95 percent of the time, shooting live bullets to the front page of POLITICO or The New York Times. Very few people have the time, energy or care to look at what you’re saying or doing and say, ‘You’re off the rails here.’"
Rather than playing instant ombudsman to numerous campaigns, McLaughlin’s training program helped establish common standards among Republicans’ 2014 Senate efforts. And if the results didn’t speak for themselves, the NRSC’s decision to expand the program for campaign managers this election cycle does.
"One of the main reasons we won in 2014 is because the NRSC was more integral in messaging across the map and we spread best practices faster," said Ward Baker, the NRSC’s executive director. He worked with McLaughlin in 2014 as the committee’s political director. "Thanks to Kevin, success was contagious and we ended up with every campaign performing at a high level."