Steele has held onto a core of backers, many from small states like Idaho and Montana. Majority of RNC against Steele

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele faces an all-but-impossible path to reelection this month, as a majority of the RNC’s 168 members indicate that they will not support the controversial chairman for another term.

A weeklong canvass of the party’s governing board by POLITICO revealed 88 members who have decided not to vote for Steele, either opting to support one of his opponents or simply ruling out Steele as a choice in the race.


Fifty-five members, some of whom have endorsed one of Steele’s challengers, have signaled that they will not support the chairman under any circumstances. An additional 33 pledged their support elsewhere.

Just as telling, not a single member of the committee said that Steele was their second choice in the race — a grave indicator in a contest likely to be decided in multiple ballots.

Further, whip counts kept by several of the chairman's opponents suggest the Anybody-but-Steele bloc could be even larger, including as many as 90 to 100 members.

A winning candidate must gain the support of 85 members of the RNC.

The RNC chairman’s race, like many congressional leadership battles and student government elections, is a byzantine affair that involves secret commitments and multiple rounds of balloting.

Some endorsements are only good for one or two ballots. Personal loyalties often reign supreme. And committee members are often reluctant to make their endorsements public because of the risk of backing a losing candidate.

In order to capture a detailed picture of the chairman's contest, POLITICO contacted each of the 168 members of the RNC, asking for their first and second choices in the race and whether they would consider supporting Steele.

Members who wanted to share their choices anonymously were permitted to do so. They were contacted as many as four times via e-mail, and some were sought out by telephone. Nearly all the members counted in the anti-Steele camp confirmed their opposition directly, while a handful were determined by their public remarks or by two or more sources who spoke to those members directly.

Some in the anti-Steele camp have not decided whom to support. Among the 88 members opposed to the incumbent, 23 have not settled on a pick.

That’s more than the 16 members of the committee who indicated support for Steele in the POLITICO canvass, but others who are widely seen as sympathetic to the chairman did not respond to repeated inquiries. Steele’s challengers say their tallies show him with just over 30 commitments in their whip counts.

While Steele supporters insist that he is still viable — and that vigorous efforts to oust him may even have provoked a backlash among some committee members — his support seems to have hit a ceiling.

He has held onto a core of backers, many of them from small states like Idaho and Montana, and territories such as the Virgin Islands. But he has added few public supporters since declaring his re-election bid a week before Christmas.

So while it is now highly unlikely that the former Maryland lieutenant governor — and the RNC’s first black chairman — can win another two-year term the race to succeed Steele is far less clear. Just over a week before the RNC gathers in suburban Washington to pick its chairman for the 2012 cycle, none of Steele’s challengers is close to having the support of a majority of the committee.

Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus has emerged as the front-runner in the contest. He is the first choice right now of 32 members and the second choice of three more, according to the canvass. That could put him in a position to best Steele on the first ballot but still fall well short of the 85 votes needed to win.

After Priebus are former Missouri Republican Party Chair Ann Wagner, who clocked 13 supporters in the canvass, and Michigan RNC Committeeman Saul Anuzis with 11. Five members gave Wagner their second-choice endorsement. Four members, three of whom are currently supporting Steele, said they would back Anuzis as a second choice. The Michigander has sought to avoid criticizing Steele too much in hopes of picking up some of the incumbent’s loyalists in later rounds of voting.

Trailing behind were two Republican operatives: former Deputy RNC Chairwoman and current Pfizer lobbyist Maria Cino, who has six commitments and second-choice support from four more members, and former RNC political director Gentry Collins, who had three endorsements.

Collins dropped out of the race Sunday evening, saying in a statement that there were “several qualified candidates” in the race.

Collins’s supporters are unlikely to consider backing Steele, given Collins’s status as a prominent critic of the chairman. He entered the race after resigning as political director in a letter that harshly attacked Steele’s tenure.

More than a third of the committee remains a question mark in the chairman’s race: 41 members did not respond to the survey and were not counted, and 12 declined to comment. Many members insisted that they had no second choice beyond their top preference. Eleven said they were completely undecided.

Several committee members voiced dissatisfaction with the choices before them in the race, and one lamented the absence of “a guy in a white hat galloping in on a very impressive stallion.”

Another who does not plan to support Steele expressed concern about the appearance of kicking out the party’s first black leader: “If you're going replace an African-American chairman, you better look for something more unique than a white man from the Midwest.”

It’s unlikely that the unease with the field of candidates will shift many votes back in Steele’s direction, however. Even RNC members who hold no particular animus toward Steele said they want a new person in charge.

When Steele was elected in 2009, one committee member recalled, “We were looking for someone who could be out there, who could be speaking without us having the White House. We really needed someone who could excite the grass roots.

“He did that but he’s not a strong fundraiser,” the member said. “I know he raised a lot of money with small donors and that’s wonderful and that’s to be commended. But we also have to raise money from large donors.”

Steele has kept a low public profile since announcing last month that he would go forward with a reelection bid, but his supporters on the committee have released the names of two backers since Christmas and put out word that he will appear at a debate Monday.

Steele’s only apparent hope for hanging onto his job would be through a long, drawn-out balloting process in which he'd keep his group of loyalists intact while finding a way to win over some of his skeptics who are supporting or sympathetic to his rivals.

But even some of the chairman’s closest backers have abandoned him in recent days. California Committeeman Shawn Steel, perhaps the stoutest Steele defender over the past two years, came out for Priebus over the holidays.

And other allies, including some members Steele has appointed to plum committee posts, stayed mum in the canvass.