The Republican National Committee has wooed Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and other prominent conservative talk radio hosts to prevent the party breaking apart.
It has failed so far to win over any high-profile converts from the anti-Trump and Never Trump Republican factions, but party bosses still hope their efforts can build a winning infrastructure by the general election, in November.
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The party brass took those conservative voices for granted in the past, but when Republicans headed to Florida for their spring meeting in late April, RNC bigwigs took a detour to visit Limbaugh.
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The Priebus-Limbaugh meeting, scheduled to last 30 minutes, went on for an hour-and-a-half, Bateman said. Half of it was about the business of the GOP, and the rest was the two men getting to know each other.
Shortly afterwards, Limbaugh went on air and pushed the party line that the primary process wasn’t rigged by the establishment.
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“Reince Priebus wanted to spend the day with us and … do television, do radio, and then have some conversations off-air because he was courting our listeners,” Beck said to Cruz on May 10. “Since you dropped out, the guy won’t even return our phone calls. This is the week it was supposed to happen. He was going to do Hannity, us, and Rush Limbaugh. Yesterday was Hannity. Now he’s saying we never planned on coming down. I mean it’s incredible what’s happened. And so how do we get behind a group of people that don’t have any interest in asking conservatives for their vote?”
Bateman says Beck and the GOP have patched things up and Priebus will meet Beck when the Texas-based media figure next visits the East Coast. The on-air phone call with Limbaugh, however, has not worked out.
Since Cruz’s exit, Limbaugh has publicly spurned the GOP. Limbaugh refused to endorse Trump and rejected the idea that he would speak at the Republican convention in Cleveland.
While the RNC maintains close contact with Limbaugh’s producer, James Golden, aka “Bo Snerdley,” the party has taken aim at a different target, Mark Levin.
Richard Sementa, an executive producer for Levin’s radio show, told the Washington Examiner that the RNC spoke with Levin at a recent talk radio convention in New York, hoping Levin would meet with Priebus. Nothing had resulted from the encounter, Sementa said.
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Facepalm. "These top talkers, they're principled guys, they're not going to sell out their audience for anybody," https://t.co/mEYZCnPe1U
— Charles Sykes (@SykesCharlie) June 3, 2016
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