THE RNC’S GROUND GAME
In some sense, it was predictable that my search for any information about one of the Republican National Committee’s two dozen community centers would lead me back to Facebook. Years had passed since I’d vacated my account, a period during which the site had been annexed as the primary digital station for conservative messaging. If the party’s newest grassroots outreach initiative existed anywhere online, it had to be here. I was in search of a contact or a programming schedule at the RNC’s Native American Community Center in Pembroke,
North Carolina, in the largely rural, poverty-addled county of Robeson, in the state’s southeast corner. Pembroke marked the 21st community center opened by the RNC of the 2022 election cycle, as part of an overt racial minority outreach program. At that point, in March, it was one of the party’s newest outposts, and the first specifically targeting Native Americans, hazy facts that I found out only because of some scattered local news coverage about its unveiling in late January. Since then, there’d been almost nothing written about it, not in sanguine
RNC press releases or small-bore local coverage. If it weren’t for Facebook, I wouldn’t have been entirely sure it even existed. Even then, I couldn’t find much. That the RNC Pembroke center had an infrequently updated Facebook page made it an exception; I couldn’t find active Facebook properties for the majority of the other RNC community centers that now dot the country, from Southern California to the Midwest to the South. Nor could I find the centers on Twitter or Instagram. A Google search yielded mostly local news coverage of ribbon-cuttings and noth-
Inside the secretive, dubious, and extremely offline attempt to convert minorities into Republicans By Alexander Sammon
24 PROSPECT.ORG JUNE 2022
