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Harry Hope · Guest

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Grassroots_donors_dump_GOP_Republican_National_0601.html

Friday June 1, 2007

Grassroots donors dump GOP; Republican National Committee sacks its
telemarketing team

Michael Roston

Faced with significantly declining contributions from grassroots
donors, the Republican National Committee has fired its entire team of
telephone solicitors, according to a report in Friday's Washington
Times.

"Faced with an estimated 40 percent falloff in small-donor
contributions and aging phone-bank equipment that the RNC said would
cost too much to update, Anne Hathaway, the committee's chief of
staff, summoned the solicitations staff and told them they were out of
work, effective immediately, fired staff members told The Times,"
Ralph Z. Hallow wrote in the paper.

Some of the 65 telephone solicitors told the Times that grassroots
donors are particularly angry with the immigration reform compromise
that President George W. Bush and some top Republican leaders are
trumpeting.

But one of the fired RNC workers said that the White House was
deliberately ignoring these attitudes.

"We have not heard anyone in our donor calls who supported the
president on immigration....We write these comments up from each call,
and give them to a supervisor who passes them on to the finance
director or the national chairman," the former phone solicitor said in
the Washington Times.

"But when I talked with the White House, the people there told me they
got nothing but positive comments on the president's immigration
stand."

Subsequently, Massie Ritsch from the Center for Responsive Politics
noted a major dip in fund raising by the RNC and other Republican
Party institutions.

"The GOP's overall haul from its three national fundraising
committees...is down 25 percent from the equivalent period in 2005,"
he told Hallow.

The full story can be read at this link.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20070601-122909-8977r.htm

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Harry