The Republican Party org chart, from your precinct to the RNC

Quick: draw the Republican Party. Most people sketch a man in a suit at a podium, and a few sketch a donkey, which we'll set aside. The picture in most heads is a company: a headquarters, a chief executive, a chain of command, and branch offices that take their orders from the top. It is a natural picture. It is also wrong, and the mistake costs conservatives a great deal, because anyone who thinks the party is a company will wait for headquarters to fix things. Headquarters cannot fix things. Headquarters does not own the branches. The branches own headquarters.

Let me explain how that works, and then let me tell you why it ought to make you optimistic.

The first thing to understand: the party is a federation

The Republican Party is not one organization. It is thousands of organizations that agree to cooperate. The bottom units are volunteer committees whose existence and rules come mainly from state law and from their own written bylaws, not from a charter handed down by Washington. The national party is a creature of those state parties, not the other way round. There is a convention that writes the national party's rules and a national committee that carries on between conventions, but both are filled from the bottom up.

That structure is not an accident. It is the American system applied to politics. Our Constitution makes the states the building blocks of the Union, and the two major parties grew up in the same shape: state organizations came first in practice, and the national bodies were built as meeting places for them. A good name for it is a federation. If you remember one word from this post, make it that one.

The ladder, rung by rung

The names vary by state, but the ladder looks like this.

Rung 1: The precinct

A precinct is the smallest voting unit, the polling place where a few hundred or a few thousand voters cast ballots. In most states a Republican from the precinct holds a seat on the party's county committee. It is called precinct committeeman or precinct chair or precinct delegate or something similar, and in some states the seat is elected on the primary ballot while in others it is filled at a meeting or by appointment. If you want the step-by-step version of how a person gets one, see how to become a precinct committeeman and take over your county party.

This is the only rung that deals directly with voters. Everything above it is built out of people who were first chosen here, or chosen by people who were.

Rung 2: The county committee and the county chairman

The precinct people together make up the county committee, sometimes called the county central committee or the county executive committee, depending on the state and the bylaws. They elect, or take part in electing, a county chairman and other officers, such as a vice chairman, a secretary and a treasurer. In many counties there is a smaller executive committee that runs the day-to-day business.

The county party does the things you can see: recruiting candidates for the local ballot, running the county headquarters or a post office box, hosting the Lincoln Day dinner or its equivalent, handing out sample ballots, staffing the booth at the county fair. It also does the things you cannot see, such as keeping the roster, choosing delegates to the next level, and writing resolutions. For how a county party fills every line on a ballot, see how a county party recruits candidates for every empty line on the ballot.

Rung 3: The congressional district and legislative district committees

In many states there is a layer between the county and the state: a congressional district committee, a legislative district committee, or both. In some states these matter a great deal. In others they exist only on paper, or only to elect delegates once every four years. The reason they exist is simple. A county does not always match a district, and a district that crosses county lines needs somebody to coordinate across them.

Why would you care? Because in many states district conventions or district committees choose delegates to the national convention. Under the usual pattern, a state sends a delegation made up of delegates chosen by congressional district and delegates chosen at large. The pieces vary by state, so look at your state party's delegate selection plan for the details.

Rung 4: The state committee, the state chairman and the state convention

At the state level, the party has a state committee, sometimes called the state central committee, and a state chairman. The state committee is usually made up of representatives from the counties or districts, plus officers, plus in some states elected officials and other members. The committee runs the state headquarters, raises money, hires staff, and chooses certain party officers.

A state convention, in the states that hold one, brings together delegates from the counties and districts. It elects members of the state committee in some states, adopts a state party platform, chooses national convention delegates, and elects the state's members of the Republican National Committee. In other states these jobs are done in different ways. Read the state party's rules, which are usually posted online.

State law also matters here, in a way that surprises people. Many states set rules for how parties organize, how nominees are chosen, who may vote in a primary and when a party must hold its convention. The state party sits in a box drawn partly by statute. Courts have held that a party has a First Amendment right of association, so the box is not unlimited, but it exists. For how nominees are chosen under that box, see Caucus, primary or convention, how Republicans actually pick a nominee.

Rung 5: The Republican National Committee

At the top of the party sits the Republican National Committee, the RNC. Here is the part that surprises people. The RNC is not made up of Washington staffers. Its members are state party people. Each state, and each territory, and the District of Columbia sends three members: the state party chairman, one national committeeman and one national committeewoman. The national committeeman and committeewoman are elected through the state party's process, which varies by state, and they serve as the state's voice on the national body.

The arithmetic is simple. There are 50 states, the District of Columbia and five territories (American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands). That is 50 plus 1 plus 5, or 56 jurisdictions. Three members each makes 56 times 3, or 168 members. Every one of those 168 seats is filled by a person chosen at home. Wyoming has the same three votes on the committee as California.

That fact has consequences. Small states have the same weight as big ones on the RNC. And it means the committee is deeply responsive to state party leaders, who are in turn responsive to county leaders, who are in turn chosen by precinct people. The staffers in the building on Capitol Hill work for a body of 168 volunteers.

The RNC elects a chairman, and the chairman presides over the committee and directs the staff. In a presidential year the nominee usually has a strong voice in who runs the committee, and the committee in practice follows the nominee's lead. That is a tradition, and a sensible one, but it is a tradition and not a command.

The top of the chart is not the RNC

Here is where the diagram gets interesting. The highest authority in the party is not the committee at all. It is the Republican National Convention. The national convention is a body of delegates that meets every four years to nominate a presidential candidate, adopt a platform and adopt the rules that govern the party, including the rules by which the next convention will be run. The committee manages the party between conventions and carries out the convention's decisions. The convention is the committee's boss. For the way delegates get there, see how delegates are chosen and what they really do at a national convention.

The cousins that are not on the ladder

There are bodies people mix up with the party committees, and they are worth separating out.

1. The congressional campaign committees. The National Republican Congressional Committee works to elect House Republicans. The National Republican Senatorial Committee does the same for the Senate. They are run by members of Congress and focus on those chambers. They are separate organizations with their own boards and budgets, not branches of the RNC.
2. The Republican Governors Association. An association of governors that supports governors' races.
3. Candidate campaigns, PACs and outside groups. Campaigns are legally separate from the party and raise money under their own rules. Outside groups cannot take orders from the party and are not part of it. The Federal Election Commission has the registration documents for those that deal in federal races.
4. Allied organizations. Clubs, auxiliaries and issue groups often have "Republican" in the name but may have no formal connection to the party.

When someone on television says "the Republican Party said," it helps to ask which of these they mean. It is a quick test for whether the person talking knows the system.

The steelman: "It is a machine, and machines serve insiders"

The strongest criticism of what I have just described goes like this. A pyramid of committees sounds democratic on paper, but in practice it is a club. The same people hold the same seats for decades. Newcomers are not told the rules. Decisions are made in rooms most voters never see. A party built like this serves the people who run it, which is why it so often disappoints the voters who vote for it.

I would not wave that away. Some county parties are clubs. Some state parties have been captured by a handful of insiders. If you have met one, you know it is not a figment.

But look at what the criticism really says. It says that the seats are held by the people who show up. It does not say that the seats are guarded by a wall. Most of the bottom rungs have no waiting list. Many precinct seats are open, and some are won by a small handful of ballots. The cure for a club is a flood of members, and the system allows exactly that. The only thing standing between a frustrated voter and a vote on who runs the county party is a form and a phone call.

What this means when the party is "out of touch"

Conservatives complain a good deal, and some of the complaints are fair, that "the Republican Party" does not listen. Fine. But the diagram tells you where to push.

• If the problem is the platform, remember that the convention adopts it, and delegates are chosen at the county and state level. Start with a resolution at your county meeting.
• If the problem is the candidates on the ballot, the county party and the primary electorate are where nominees come from. Recruit better ones, and vote in the primary. See Why every Republican owes the primary election a vote, every time.
• If the problem is the leadership, the chairmen are elected by committee members, and committee members are elected by voters and volunteers like you.
• If the problem is that nobody asks your opinion, ask whether you have ever filed for a seat.

Not every grievance can be fixed at the bottom. Washington has its own politics, and members of Congress answer to their own voters, not to a party committee. For a view of how the party and its elected members line up, the party unity page tracks how Republicans vote together in Congress. But a movement that wants to change the party and ignores the bottom of the party is like a gardener who complains about the fruit and never looks at the roots.

Four traps for newcomers

1. Looking for one boss. There is no CEO. If you wait for someone to give an order, you will wait forever.
2. Assuming your state is typical. Party structure is shaped by state law, so a guide from one state may be wrong in the next.
3. Skipping the bylaws. The rulebook decides who may vote, what a quorum is and how a vacancy gets filled. The county and state party websites often post theirs.
4. Confusing the party with the campaigns. A candidate's campaign and the party committee are different organizations. Giving to one is not giving to the other.

The bottom line

• The Republican Party is a federation of volunteer committees under state law and written bylaws, not a company with a chain of command.
• The ladder runs precinct, county, district, state, then the Republican National Committee, and the RNC is made of 168 members, three from each of 56 jurisdictions, each chosen at home.
• The highest body is the national convention, and it is filled with delegates who come up through the same ladder.
• Power sits with whoever shows up and votes at the lowest rung, because every rung above is chosen by the one below it.
• Your move is concrete: find your precinct, learn whether its party seat is open, and read your county party's bylaws. Our guide on Seven myths that keep good Republicans on the sidelines covers the excuses people use to avoid doing it.