Todd C. Frankel (@tcfrankel) is an enterprise reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

There she was, Erika Harold, in the basement meeting room of a library on a bitterly cold night in Edwardsville, hoping to convince a few more voters in this St. Louis suburb to support her insurgent campaign in the Republican primary for a congressional seat, even as her own party seems to be trying everything it can to keep her from the race.

There was the ugly email from a GOP county chairman calling Harold “a streetwalker.” The bizarre snub at the state fair. The adamant rejection when she asked to use Republican voter data. And the frequent suggestion she would be better off running for something—anything—else.


“One thing after another,” lamented Doug Ibendahl, a Chicago attorney and former state GOP general counsel who considers Harold a “top notch” candidate. “There are people in the Republican Party who are actively working against her who shouldn’t be.”

It does seem odd. Harold would appear to be exactly the kind of candidate the GOP needs: Miss America 2003. A speaker at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Harvard Law School grad. A practicing attorney interested in the Constitution. She is just 33 years old, close enough to count as one of the coveted “millennial” voters herself. The product of a mixed-race marriage—her father is white, her mother is African-American—Harold has a background that recalls that of another Illinois politician, a guy who went on to hold a pretty lofty office himself.

“Just look at me,” Harold told the crowd of about 30 in the library basement, most of them older and white as she made her pitch for why they should unseat a freshman Republican congressman in this year's March primary in favor of her. “I am definitely not the stereotypical Republican.”

Harold’s appeal is built on “the optics, the experience, the resume.” That’s according to her dad—who is also her campaign manager. “The party knows it has to broaden its base,” Bob Harold said, “and who better to do that?”

***

The Republican Party has talked plenty about the need to shed its image as the grand party of old white men—especially after its 2012 presidential defeat, as party elders took notice of a demographic curve that appears to be running away from them. The Republican National Committee knows it, too, writing in a report last March that, “Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

Erika Harold and Rodney Davis. | AP Photo; Wikimedia

And here comes Harold. The GOP has never had a black woman in Congress, and in fact its best shot at making history this election cycle might be not Harold but Mia Love, a Haitian American and former mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, who narrowly lost her congressional bid in 2012 and is running again

But the story of how Harold so far has gotten more national attention than local traction is instructive. She’s certainly gotten the media’s attention, perhaps not surprising given her Miss America credentials and compelling personal story—she recently appeared on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News show, and a poster board at her meeting with voters touted praise from The Daily Beast, Newsmax Magazine and The Weekly Standard (“A Glimmer of Hope for the Illinois GOP”).

Harold doesn’t fit neatly into the taxonomy of today’s Republican factions: She is not a middle-of-the-road Republican. Nor is she a neocon, a Tea Partier or a strict libertarian cribbing Ayn Rand quotes. She calls herself a constitutional conservative. She is anti-abortion rights, pro-gun, believes that marriage is between a man and a woman. She does not support marijuana legalization. She wants to repeal Obamacare. She also is against the death penalty, because, she says, the sentences are too dependent on the varying quality of the accused’s attorneys.

Conservative politics were part of her tour as Miss America. The official platform that year was supposed to be reducing youth violence, but Harold pushed pageant organizers into letting her also promote abstinence before marriage. In 2004, she toured the country with then-party chief Ed Gillespie as part of a GOP outreach group. She served as an Illinois delegate to that year’s Republican National Convention, where she gave a speech about faith-based initiatives. Even then, people were touting her potential as a fresh new face for the party.

Then she retreated from the limelight, finishing law school and working as an attorney in Chicago.

In April 2012, her shot at Congress popped up unexpectedly when longtime incumbent U.S. Rep. Tim Johnson, shortly after winning the Republican primary, suddenly announced that he planned to retire, citing family concerns and the partisan atmosphere in Washington. The 13th congressional district is a truly competitive one at a time when such districts are in ever shorter supply: It covers a central Illinois swath that includes Champaign-Urbana, home to the University of Illinois, and the state capital in Springfield, running south through farm fields and small towns before ending in the suburbs outside St. Louis. And while Republicans have held the seat for decades, President Obama won the district in 2008 and split it 49-49 percent with Romney in 2012.

Back in 2012, the job of deciding who would fill Johnson’s spot on the general election ballot fell to 14 Republican county chairmen. A former chief of staff to the retiring congressman, Jerry Clarke, jumped in the race. (He seemed among the few not surprised when his old boss stepped down. He’d registered his own congressional campaign website a month before the primary.) He was joined by Rodney Davis, then a top aide to Rep. John Shimkus, the Republican in the adjoining 15th district. Harold decided she’d run, too.

It came down to Davis and Harold. The county chairmen went to three ballots before deciding on Davis. He was a white man seen as a loyal party operative who had paid his dues. He won the general election, but by less than a percentage point, barely 1,000 votes.

“In the end, 14 people behind closed doors made that decision,” Harold said. “It wasn’t the voters.”

***

Early last year, Harold left Chicago and moved back to Urbana, where she grew up and her parents still lived. In June 2013, she announced she was challenging Davis in the primary. It will be a competitive race no matter what in the fall: Democrats have targeted it as one they could take from Republicans this year, early on lining up a former chief judge named Ann Callis as the likely nominee.

A few days after Harold announced, she was on the Fox & Friends morning show, where Gretchen Carlson interviewed her. Carlson herself had been Miss America, in 1989, and it was a breezy pageant-sister-to-sister talk. Harold told Carlson she hoped people would see her, this non-typical conservative, and think, “maybe the Republican Party can be a welcoming place for me as well.”

But Harold’s own welcome was short-lived. A week later, Jim Allen, a GOP county chairman in the 13th district, sent a message to an independent Republican website that began, “Rodney Davis will win and the love child of the D.N.C. will be back in Shitcago by May of 2014 working for some law firm that needs to meet their quota for minority hires.” He also wrote that Harold was being used “like a street walker.”

“That was quite an email,” Harold recalled.

The outrage—and inevitable backpedaling—was swift. Allen resigned his county chairman post. Top state GOP officials and Davis issued condemnations. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus was forced to wade in with a statement that the “astonishingly offensive views … have absolutely no place among the leaders of our party at any level.”

Still more slights were to come. Two months later, in the dead of August, Harold traveled to the Illinois State Fair for Republican Day. She hoped to get a speaking spot. But party officials told her that only incumbent members of Congress—such as her opponent Davis—would be allowed to talk.

Then Harold’s campaign asked for access to the GOP’s national data center, also known as the voter vault, which contains information on Republican voters. The state party’s central committee said no, citing a decade-old informal policy of not sharing data with candidates who challenge an incumbent. Harold pressed. And so the state Republican Party voted to formalize its rejection.

Harold called the move “political obstructionism.” The Illinois GOP chair called that “ridiculous.”

But it was getting hard not to notice the GOP’s hostility.

Davis has never complained about Harold being in the race. He has built a sizable advantage in the polls and fundraising—enjoying a 9-to-1 advantage in his campaign war chest as of the end of 2013, according to finance reports.

He also has declined to debate Harold, a common tactic for incumbents. So that’s led Harold to barnstorm across the district’s 14 counties since the start of the new year, holding small meetings with voters. Herman Cain—the quick-with-a-quip, former pizza chain CEO turned 2012 Republican presidential candidate—visited the district in early February for a Harold fundraiser and rally. Still, Harold is reluctant to discuss the size or even the names of her campaign staff because some of them have been subjected to “pressure from political outside forces.”

“There are definitely some in the Republican establishment who don’t want me in the race,” Harold told the voters at the Edwardsville meeting.

Later, after Harold had posed for pictures and shaken hands and the room emptied out, she spoke with me about how she felt pushed aside by her own party. If the GOP wanted to win over voters of diverse backgrounds, she said, it needed also to offer opportunities for people like her to be part of the process. She said she had heard from other GOP candidates who have been discouraged by what has happened in her race. She said she didn’t want preferential treatment, “but a fair playing field, yes.”

No doubt, she remains very much a longshot in the March 18 primary. But she wants state GOP officials to know that she didn’t win Miss America on her first try, either. It took some doing. Twice in a row she lost the Miss Illinois pageant before finally claiming the title and going on to capture the jeweled tiara in Atlantic City, a crown she now keeps in a closet at home. She hopes that same resilience will pay off again.

“I don’t know why they’ve treated me like this,” Harold told me. But, she added: “I’m cognizant of the stakes here. I’m not going to give up.”