All the candidates are all popular, young conservatives doing outreach for their firms. | AP Photos RNC thinks big in tech officer search

The GOP’s own deadline for picking a chief technology officer came and went Wednesday, but the party is zeroing in on candidates who hail from the Beltway offices of major tech firms, POLITICO has learned.

Multiple sources within the Republican National Committee and the GOP establishment in Washington say three who are receiving serious consideration are Katie Harbath of Facebook, Rob Saliterman of Google and Mindy Finn of Twitter.


All are popular young D.C.-based conservatives now doing outreach to candidates and lawmakers for their tech companies, including doling out advice on how to effectively use their respective mediums for campaigning and governing.

RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said party officials have “talked to a lot of good people and we’re in the negotiation process” but wouldn’t go further than that.

“We understand that the digital and data conversation is very important to what we’re doing, which is why we’re making it a huge priority,” she said. “We’ll be announcing that shortly.”

The shape of the GOP’s new technology plan did begin to come into view on Wednesday as Kukowski confirmed the RNC had inked a deal with a data-management company for which Karl Rove has solicited money from donors. The move is a critical step to building the infrastructure to compete with the vaunted technological machine that helped Democrats win big in 2012.

Yet the Republican National Committee’s exhaustive Growth and Opportunity Report analyzing its 2012 failures, dubbed an “autopsy” by Chairman Reince Priebus, specified that a “chief technology and digital officer” would be hired by May 1.

Kukowski said the recommendation is being followed even though the RNC missed the deadline.

“Are we reading [the report] down to the i and the t? No,” she said.

Few inside or outside of the party dispute Priebus and his new chief of staff, Mike Shields, are serious about an overhaul that involves a drastic reconfiguration of how the party manages voter information as well as its online outreach and advertising approaches.

Still, some are concerned that the promise of casting a wide net that extends to Silicon Valley isn’t being met because the finalists, by several accounts, are figures of the Beltway. In addition, it appears even Priebus and Shields remain undecided on whether the person will be the RNC’s chief technology officer — a title that in Silicon Valley usually denotes a head engineer — or something else.

Of the candidates mentioned to POLITICO, Harbath, the former chief digital strategist for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, was the name that most often surfaced. She declined to comment on Wednesday, but her pick has support from some Silicon Valley Republicans, depending on the details of the post.

“If the person is going to hire and oversee engineers, then that’s a CTO and that person needs to be an engineer, but if it’s going to be someone who advances the digital cause, they don’t have to be technical,” said Aaron Ginn, a former Mitt Romney digital staffer who has formed the Republican Stealth Mob, a group of Bay Area techies willing to work on election-related software for the RNC. “Katie can definitely fill the role of being an advocate for technology in the party.”

Saliterman joined Google in September 2011 after stints as spokesman for former President George W. Bush and gigs in the Bush White House, the Bush-Cheney reelection committee and the RNC. Finn has done digital work for Bush, Romney and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and co-founded Engage, a GOP digital campaign consultancy headed up by Patrick Ruffini. She moved on to Twitter in 2011.

Neither responded to requests for comment.

That shortlist is disappointing to those hoping for a serious infusion of outside-the-Beltway thinking and serious tech know-how.

“The party has to decide — do they want a CTO who is empowered to be transformative or do they want someone who will conform to party orthodox and ideology and is accustomed to the RNC culture,” said Garrett Johnson, co-chair of the Bay Area’s chapter of the Maverick PAC, a conservative PAC co-founded by George P. Bush. “The RNC culture does not work. It’s broken. It has failed miserably.”

Party insiders insist the net was cast across the country and several names from Silicon Valley and elsewhere have been considered but that the blend of skills required to succeed included a figure who understands politics and Washington.

“There’s not a lot of people who can do this job,” said Gerrit Lansing, digital director for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “The amount of people who can accomplish this turnaround I’d measure in the single digits. And none of those people are from Silicon Valley.”

Wesley Donehue, a South Carolina-based digital political strategist whose clients have included Rep. Joe Wilson and former Sen. Jim DeMint, agreed with Lansing.

“It’s one of those jobs that only a few people in the world can do and you have to find a person that can do it,” Donehue said. “This must be someone who has the knowledge of both tech and politics to mold these two worlds. And they have to have someone willing to leave the comforts of the tech world to go and work in Washington, D.C.”

While Donehue and Lansing said it’s more important that the RNC make the right pick rather than a quick one, time is nonetheless of the essence. The new tech chief will need to hire coders and engineers at a time when both the NRSC and the National Republican Campaign Committee have already staffed up.

The autopsy report recommended that the party “build a structure that can eventually be deployed during the 2014 midterm elections and the 2016 presidential race to provide a 21st-century digital, data and tech operation for our candidates.”

The midterms are now just 18 months away and the new figurehead needs time to assemble a team and test out products, said a prominent GOP digital strategist who asked not to be named because he said Shields warned strategists and vendors not to speak negatively about the party’s tech operation to the media.

The undoing of the Romney team was largely that it did not have time to build and test its systems, not to mention train staff and volunteers on how to use it, he said.

“That was the Romney team’s biggest mistake,” the strategist said. “The new leadership will need as much time as possible to make sure not to repeat it.”

Tarini Parti contributed to this report.