GOP moves against Hillary Clinton

The GOP Thursday is set to launch an organized campaign to derail the presidential aspirations of President Obama’s former secretary of state and the likely Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. The effort will corral in one war room inside the Republican National Committee’s Washington headquarters operatives from across all RNC departments, including communications, digital, finance, political, and opposition research.

Their mission is to sink Clinton.

The campaign, dubbed simply “Stop Hillary,” is to be unveiled to party activists and top Republican media surrogates Thursday during an afternoon conference call. The RNC is coordinating the program with paid GOP staff on ground in battleground states and intends it as a tool to recruit volunteers. The effort is scheduled to proceed the moment Clinton makes her White House bid official.

“Revealing Hillary Clinton’s support for failed policies simply requires us to tell the truth about her record, something her campaign would rather delete,” GOP Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement.

Priebus has deputized his chief of staff, Katie Walsh, and RNC communications director Sean Spicer to manage “Stop Hillary” on a daily basis. Committee officials shared plans for “Stop Hillary” on Wednesday in interview with the Washington Examiner. The uproar surrounding how Clinton handled government emails while serving as secretary of state is sure to figure into their attack strategy.

Clinton has been hiring campaign staff and is expected to announce her 2016 candidacy at some point this year. But she has thus far kept a low profile and limited her political communication to a few tweets. Her most recent Twitter posts were critical of a religious freedom law enacted in Indiana, joining opponents who charged that it discriminates against gays and lesbians.

That the RNC would target the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination months in advance is nothing new. That’s one of the national committee’s main functions — particularly as the Republican Party slugs its way through what appears to be a deep, competitive primary that could last well into next spring. It could be at least a year before there is a de facto Republican nominee who can focus on defeating Clinton.

But RNC officials said the party has never prosecuted a campaign like this, of this magnitude.

Previous efforts leaned heavily on press outreach and paid media. And, while a range of television, radio and digital advertising are on the table as components of “Stop Hillary,” the RNC emphasized that innovations in how the committee operates since the 2012 elections sets this program apart. At the outset of the 2012 campaign, for example — and certainly in 2008, the RNC was relying on antiquated methods for connecting with voters.

“Stop Hillary,” by contrast, could benefit from a robust digital operation that has only existed since the middle of the last election cycle following a more than $100 million investment by the RNC. The committee plans an aggressive social media push as part of its effort to diminish the political standing of the ex-New York senator and wife of former President Bill Clinton.

The project could also receive a boost from RNC ground troops. In previous presidential campaigns, the committee waited until the election year, when it had crowned a nominee or was close to doing so, to staff up in the states. But following Obama’s defeat of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney three years ago, the party overhauled its ground operation, placing permanent paid staff in Electoral College battlegrounds.

In addition to using staff in the states to carry the anti-Hillary message neighbor-to-neighbor, the RNC is using the campaign to jumpstart volunteer recruitment. That ground force that will end up a part of the eventual GOP nominee’s political operation. The hope is that by building out the operation this early, it will be well-oiled and ready to go by the time the generation election gets underway sometime in 2016.

“The RNC will continue leading the efforts to ensure voters are well aware of Hillary Clinton’s decades-long record of secrecy and scandal,” Priebus said.