The Iowa Republican Party’s new chairman has exceeded the fundraising goal he set when he was elected June 28.
“The threshold has been crossed. We’re announcing today that we raised more than $315,000 in just over a month,” says Jeff Patch, a spokesman for the Iowa GOP. “We’re setting the bar higher. We plan to raise even more than that in the next 90 or so days leading up to the election.”
The Republican Party of Iowa had a little more than $11,000 left in the bank when Jeff Kaufmann was elected chairman of the party on Saturday, June 28. Kaufmann immediately announced he planned to raise $300,000 within 90 days. He assembled a finance team led by Mark Jacobs, the retired business executive who finished third in the GOP’s U.S. Senate primary. Jeff Patch, the party spokesman, says a “broad cross-section” of people who gave regularly to the party in the past have started sending checks again.
“We are running on all cylinders and for the first time in recent history we’ll be expending significant resources on get-out-the-vote efforts through the party,” Patch says. “We’ve gone from two to 11 ‘victory offices’ and the wind is at our back.”
The party’s new chairman told the GOP’s governing board in late June that Iowa Republicans were behind Democrats in planning for the fall election and it was “time to roll.” The party has undergone a series of upheavals since the 2012 Iowa Caucuses. Matt Strawn resigned as the party’s leader shortly after announcing the certified results showed Rick Santorum won the Caucuses, not Mitt Romney, who had been declared the winner on Caucus Night. The party’s next chairman was A.J. Spiker, a staffer on Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. Spiker resigned this past March to go to work for Rand Paul and Danny Carroll, a former legislator who is a leader in Iowa’s Christian conservative movement, was elected party chairman. Carroll was voted out by the newly-elected state central committee on June 28, the same day Kaufmann, a former legislator and frequent emcee at Branstad campaign rallies, was elected chairman.