When the Republican Governors Association gathered in Miami for its annual conference after the 2008 election, nearly the entire roster of GOP chief executives managed to crowd onto a small stage behind Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas and the group's chairman, for a press conference.

If the GOP governors want to try the same trick at their 2015 conference in Las Vegas this week, they'll need a bigger stage.


The group's sheer size highlights how it became one of the most successful organizations in politics in the past seven years. While Democrats have reshaped the federal government under President Barack Obama, Republicans have methodically taken over state after state around the country, swelling the number of GOP governors from 19 to 31 and enacting conservative priorities from budget cuts to new restrictions on unions and abortion to blocking the implementation of Obamacare.

Behind each of those policy and political victories was the RGA, planning, funding, and executing the GOP's state-based resurgence.

The unlimited-money organization helped GOP governors win and then keep their jobs in swing states Obama carried twice, including Ohio, Michigan, Florida and Wisconsin. It invaded solidly blue territory, committing millions of dollars to backing successful Republicans in Illinois, Maine, Maryland and Massachusetts. It built the backbone of the GOP's national bench: Three Obama-era governors — New Jersey's Chris Christie, Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich — launched bids for president this year.

The RGA conference comes on the heels of another major victory for the group — electing a flawed candidate, Matt Bevin, to Kentucky's governorship with a last-minute burst of spending — but just ahead of a difficult test. While Republicans have been on the march throughout the South, they may see the governor's mansion in Louisiana slip from their grasp if Democrat John Bel Edwards' polling lead holds and he defeats scandal-tarred GOP Sen. David Vitter in a Nov. 21 runoff.

Phil Musser, a former executive director of the RGA who consulted on the Kentucky race, said the RGA's recent successes are a result of combination of "financial fortitude and political discipline." The Kentucky win is "part of what's been a sustained effort at the RGA over the past several election cycles to gather superior resources and deploy them in really smart independent efforts," Musser said. "And they've reshaped the political landscape of the country."

Incredibly, Republicans go into 2016 with a good chance of further expanding their ranks of chief executives. Democratic-controlled states like West Virginia, Missouri, and Montana will be major pick-up opportunities for the GOP next year, though the party also has to defend two unpopular incumbents in Indiana and North Carolina, Govs. Mike Pence and Pat McCrory.

Republicans owe part of their gubernatorial success this decade to the political environment, when perfectly timed backlashes against Obama aligned with the last two midterm elections. But the RGA also took full advantage of those opportunities by creating an outside-money juggernaut that Democrats couldn't match.

“Republicans were feeling pretty boxed out of the power structure, and they realized the way they could climb back was through investing in the states, and they’ve done a remarkably good job of that," Democratic Governors Association Executive Director Elisabeth Pearson said in a June interview. She added: "No matter what issue you care about, the agenda that is being driven at the state level is a Republican agenda. And that’s what we want to change.”

Republicans have also made major gains in the House and Senate over the past five years. But the battle to take back the Senate proved a slog, with unfocused and alienating candidates like Todd Akin and Christine O'Donnell helping delay the GOP's takeover of the chamber. The historic Republican majority in the House, meanwhile, has proved ungovernable up to this point. Meanwhile, not only did Republican governors win a raft of states in 2010, it kept nearly all of them in 2014.

The RGA has avoided congressional Republicans' problems, especially in hard-to-win blue states, by playing a relentless but "quiet" role in recruiting candidates that fit their states, Musser said.

Moderate Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker started going to RGA conferences years before he first ran for the office in 2010. After losing to then-Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick in a three-way race, Baker was reluctant to try again four years later.

The RGA responded by organizing a barrage of phone calls from GOP governors and major donors to convince Baker another run would be worth it.

"He needed folks to come to him and say: 'We'll have your back,'" said Phil Cox, who served as the RGA's executive director when Baker won in 2014. "And we were all over him."

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner was a RGA donor for years before a similar recruiting pitch helped convince him to run for office himself in 2013. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey started attending RGA conferences four years before he ran and won last year.

Then there's the money. While the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee often outraise their Republican counterparts, the RGA swamps the Democratic Governors Association in fundraising, sometimes by a two-to-one margin. That's partly thanks to a major effort to harness wealthy contributors.

Between Obama's election and the 2014 midterms, the RGA raised nearly $363 million to the DGA's $204 million. Multiple Republicans attributed the fundraising advantage to the creation of the group's "executive roundtable."

While a large company might feel obliged to give equally (and often do) to Democratic and Republican governors, a corporation's conservative CEO might not feel the same way. Offering enticements like "salons" with the likes of former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the RGA won the engagement and loyalty of corporate executives and conservative philanthropists who hadn't previously been involved with the group. The roundtable, which requires a minimum $25,000 yearly donation, started at 15 members but has since expanded to more than 450.

"Many of them give many multiples of that" minimum donation, said Fred Malek, the RGA's finance chair. The result: a more than two-to-one financial advantage over the DGA in 2010 and 2012, and a 50 percent edge in 2014. "Just look at the numbers," Malek said. "The advantage the RGA has over the DGA is individual donations."

The group also benefits from unity among donors, something outside groups often struggle with. Virtually all of the GOP outside spending in governor's races comes from the RGA. While multiple super PACs compete to back House and Senate Republicans, the RGA is the only game in town when it comes to electing Republican governors.

"The donor class understands: Why would I set up my own super PAC when I could give money to the RGA?" Cox said.

Barbour, the former Mississippi governor and RGA chairman, said Republican success at the gubernatorial level was breeding more success and helping the GOP capture two-thirds of the nation's state legislative chambers.

"Republicans have done very well in state races for six years," he said, noting a majority of Americans were unhappy with the direction of the country but many more were happy with the direction of their state. "And I think it's because citizens in GOP states see results from Republican state governments."

The DGA has worked to put the Democratic coalition's disparate parts, from environmental groups to labor unions, on the same page by sharing polling, messaging, and consultants in its races. In this year's Kentucky gubernatorial race, the DGA, major unions and wealthy liberal donors all poured money into a single super PAC, Kentucky Family Values.

“The best way to win back the House is to elect a Democratic governors,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said. “Governors are the last backstop to have fair and balanced lines.”

Democrats argue most of the RGA's success came in 2010 and 2014, two midterm election years with whiter and older electorates when most states happen to hold their gubernatorial elections. From 2011 to 2013, the DGA saw more successes: Democrats held Kentucky in 2011, earned victories in Missouri and West Virginia in 2012 and won Virginia in 2013. In the latter race, Republican Ken Cucinnelli's campaign heavily criticized the RGA for pulling out weeks before the election. Polls showed McAuliffe winning easily, but he eventually only eked out a three-point victory.

And while it's still not the size of the RGA, the DGA has seen "exponential" growth in recent years, Pearson noted. The group has added research and digital teams and had an in-house data firm for the first time in the last election.

“The numbers haven’t changed much over the past four years," Pearson said. "But I think over the next four years, we have the capacity, if we do our job right and we build this organization right, to make a lot of gains and to win in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada and Maine and New Mexico."

But as the University of Minnesota's Smart Politics blog recently noted in an analysis, Democrats are turning in their worst set of performances in gubernatorial races in 100 years.

Democrats readily admit they have a long way to go before matching the GOP's state-based efforts. Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe conceded in a recent interview the GOP was "way ahead of us" in realizing the importance of state-level races. McAuliffe and EMILY's List President Stephanie Schriock are leading an effort to raise money for the DGA by linking Democratic gubernatorial wins to the revitalization of the party as a whole.

