RNC faces donor falloff, fires solicitors

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Readers react

The Republican National Committee, hit by a grass-roots donors' rebellion over President Bush's immigration policy, has fired all 65 of its telephone solicitors, The Washington Times has learned.

Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times.

Several of the solicitors fired at the May 24 meeting reported declining contributions and a donor backlash against the immigration proposals now being pushed by Mr. Bush and Senate Republicans.

"Every donor in 50 states we reached has been angry, especially in the last month and a half, and for 99 percent of them immigration is the No. 1 issue," said a fired phone bank employee who said the severance pay the RNC agreed to pay him was contingent on his not criticizing the national committee.

A spokeswoman for the committee denied any drop-off in fundraising.

"Any assertion that overall donations have gone down is patently false," RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt wrote by e-mail yesterday in response to questions sent by The Times. "We continue to out-raise our Democrat counterpart by a substantive amount (nearly double)."

Miss Schmitt said terminating the phone solicitation staff "was not an easy decision. The first and primary motivating factor was the state of the phone bank technology, which was outdated and difficult to maintain. The RNC was advised that we would soon need an entire new system to remain viable."

She also said that "the changing ways in which people choose to contribute" meant that the RNC's in-house phone bank "was simply no longer cost effective, although unfortunate."

The fired staffers said the equipment was aging and it was probably more cost effective to farm out the phone-bank operations to the eight or more private firms also handling similar solicitations for donations to the RNC. But the ex-employees said the sharp drop-off in donations "probably" hastened the end of the in-house operation.