State Parties

• The RNC serves as the national organization for the Republican Party. It is important to realize that all elected officials in the United States, including members of Congress, are elected at the state level or lower. The president of the United States is the sole national elected official elected on a national basis. That makes each Republican state party significant to Republican politicians, both in fundraising and in formulating policy beyond the level of the city, county or state. Therefore the RNC is a collective body of the state parties, rather than the state parties being local branches of the RNC.
  
  

Structure

• Every state sends a committeeman, committeewoman and its state party chair as its delegation. The RNC is led by a chairman, who is supported by eight vice chairmen, two from each of the party's four regions. Those regions are the Western, Southern, Northern, and Midwestern. In 2009, the RNC chairman was Michael Steele of Maryland. His predecessor was Mike Duncan of Kentucky.
  
  

Leadership

• Michael Steele
  
  Underscoring the role of the RNC and its chairman in coordinating, rather than leading the party, is that the RNC chairman is in no way the leader of the Republican Party. That role always goes to the party's most prominent elected official. During the tenure of his predecessor, Mike Duncan, the leader was President George W. Bush; after that it was the party's presidential nominee, John McCain.
  
  

Activities

• An important function of the RNC is in the coordination of election activities. It works to establish a common political platform for the party, and to try to keep the different state parties and their candidates within that platform. An important tool for doing this is in distributing funds. Individual candidates and state parties do their own fundraising, but so does the RNC, and it has only one national candidate to support every four years. The rest of the time, it has money that can be used to bolster the prospects of promising, orthodox Republicans. It also assists in individual or state fundraising activities by providing access to national political donor resources.
  
  

The Convention

• The 2008 Convention
  
  The most visible job of the RNC is to organize the Republican National Convention. This convention used to play the key role in selecting the party's presidential nominee, but that is now down at the state level via primary elections and caucuses. The convention is now a major public spectacle where both the presidential nominee and the party try to define and sell their positions to the voting public. According to Minneapolis tourism statistics, the 2008 convention cost $82 million, of which only $15 million was paid for by the Federal Election Commission.