During the latter half of the twentieth century, at a time when most observers thought that they were in decline in the US, parties were in fact undergoing a transformation. At the center of this change, notes a growing body of research, was the development of a new “service” model of party organization.Footnote 1 Such a trend, which was characterized by the appearance of a more professionally oriented party structure geared toward “servicing” the needs of candidates, is widely believed to have been pioneered by the Republican Party at the national level in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 2 What the emphasis on the national party obscures, however, is the important role that state parties also played in the development of the “service” party model in the postwar period. Nowhere was this more evident than in postwar Ohio, where the state Republican Party experimented with a service-type party organization in the 1950s that subsequently informed much of the national Republican party-building in the 1960s and 1970s.
As would be the case with the national party, the postwar Ohio Republican Party (ORP) first began to develop a service-oriented state party structure in the wake of the party's state and national losses in 1948. The defeat signaled to party leaders the need for a change of strategy in the face of both the Democrats' continued strength nationally and a growing labor and urban vote in the state, and led to the appointment of an innovative new party chair named Ray Bliss. Bliss's leadership in Ohio was characterized by the development of a more centrally integrated, full-time state party organization, which specialized in providing candidates with strategic campaign services. Reflecting the state's changing demographics, as well as the party's conservative, but more pragmatic than ideological, orientation, Bliss eschewed the need for any broad change in policy after the defeat, emphasizing instead the need to rebuild the party organizationally as part of the professional goal of making the ORP more electorally competitive. Rather than depend on partisan appeals, which might have alienated the state's many conservative but otherwise Democratic or independent voters, Bliss believed that developing a “sound organization,” and electing Republicans, offered the most reliable means of ensuring that the party and its conservative policies remained viable in a changing Ohio.Footnote 3 The result was not only a resurgence of the Republican Party and its political influence in the state, but also the development of a new model of party organization. As such, Bliss's party-building work in Ohio provides an early and well-developed example of the service concept, as well as a historically significant one given its subsequent influence at the national level where sBliss' service approach helped a similarly beleaguered national Republican party rebound from defeat after the 1964 election.
Though Bliss's emphasis on organization over issues worked well for Republicans in postwar Ohio, the service approach did face opposition in the state, most significantly in the late 1950s from more ideologically motivated groups that objected to the practice of subordinating issues to the strategic demands of electoral competitiveness. Such challenges to the idea that the party was most competitive when it avoided issues would only escalate in the 1960s as the weakening of the Democrats nationally and the rise of a more polarized electorate paved the way for the successful use of a more openly conservative and ideological Republican message at the state and national level. Nonetheless, the service concept, with its emphasis on building a strong organization, played a vital role in Republican recovery first in Ohio and then in Washington. Examining the service party organization that developed in Ohio in the 1950s, then, offers a unique opportunity to explore the genesis of many of the service-related programs and policies that would later transform the Republican Party nationally in the 1960s and 1970s.
It is the objective of this article to examine the service party organization Bliss and the ORP erected in postwar Ohio. I begin by examining the service party concept in order both to highlight the ideas that shaped the party-building process in postwar Ohio and to place the ORP's organizational development in comparative terms. I then turn to a more detailed analysis of the service structure Bliss and the ORP leadership developed, particularly in the areas of fieldwork and fundraising. This is followed by a historical analysis of the party's performance in several key state elections between 1950 and 1964. I conclude with an assessment of the longer-term impact of the service model in Ohio.
THE SERVICE PARTY
Scholars have pointed to a number of factors to account for the emergence of the service party, including the spread of presidential primaries, the rise of candidate-centered campaigns, advances in communication technology, and increased electoral competition.Footnote 4 While parties had traditionally controlled the selection and nomination processes, primaries, together with the expanding availability of television, radio, and print advertising, began to offer candidates a means of seeking office without the support or endorsement of party leaders. But rather than experiencing a decline in the face of such challenges to their traditional authority, parties have in many ways adapted to the changes, notably by shifting their focus from the management of candidates to the types of support “services” – voter lists, polling data, logistical support, and fundraising – they can provide candidates.Footnote 5 In the process, party leaders began to remake what parties do, and ironically gave otherwise candidate-run campaigns clear logistical and financial incentives to remain at least aligned with parties.Footnote 6
What emerged was a party structure that was essentially “in service” to candidates, as John Aldrich argues, rather than being in charge of them.Footnote 7 Rather than focus on the selection and management of candidates, as they traditionally had, party leaders instead began to turn their attention to providing the resources needed by both party nominees and party officials to remain competitive in the face of a changing electoral environment. In this way, the primary goal or orientation of the service party, as John Green and others have argued, was “professional” in the sense that the objectives of the political leaders who embraced the service concept were not necessarily to change party policy, but to ensure that the party was competitive, regardless of its policies.Footnote 8 Many of these services provided were the same as those which parties had traditionally provided candidates, namely organizational and financial assistance. But as parties stepped back from the nominating process, they also began to complement the field and financial support they provided candidates with services that were more informational and strategic in nature, including polling data, opposition research, and other message-targeting information. As John Bibby notes, service-oriented parties not only continued to engage in “large-scale voter mobilization activities … including registration drives, voter identification and … phone banks,” they also increasingly offered candidates help with “polling, fundraising assistance, media consulting, and campaign seminars.”Footnote 9
By the 1960s, the party had “lost its effective monopoly,” as Aldrich describes it, over the procedures through which candidates contested nominations and won elections.Footnote 10 But they nonetheless continued to control many of the resources critical to running a competitive campaign. As such, candidates could and did create their own organizations, with their own staff, budgets, and professional consultants. There were, however, clear benefits to remaining aligned with a party, especially a party capable of sharing the organizational and informational costs of running for office. “Some candidates were able to run a viable campaign using their own funds or talent,” Paul Herrnson explains, “others turned to political consultants … for help.” But, he continues, “many candidates found it difficult to assemble the money and expertise needed to compete in a modern election,” and consequently turned back to the party for assistance.Footnote 11 In effect, “the increased needs of candidates for greater access to technical expertise, political information, and money created an opportunity,” Herrnson writes, “for national and some state party organizations to become the repositories of these resources.”Footnote 12 Hence, by refining the services the party provided, party leaders found a way to adapt to the rise of candidate-centered campaigns.
The transition from the mass party to the service party became quite pronounced by the late 1960s, especially within the Republican Party nationally.Footnote 13 But, again, the emphasis on the national level obscures important precursors, particularly at the state level. The characteristic features of the “service” party at the state level, in keeping with development at the national level, were, as John Bibby notes, the appearance of a more “permanent party headquarters; a professionalized leadership and staffs; adequate financial resources; and programs to maintain the state party structure, assist local party units, and support candidates and officeholders.”Footnote 14 The service party in Ohio, developed in response to many of the same conditions thought to facilitate the rise of the model nationally, offers one of the earliest state-level examples of the service party structure.
For Bliss and the ORP leadership, institutionalizing a service structure in Ohio offered the Republicans a means of promoting the professional goal of making the party, and its policies, more competitive in a changing state. Competitiveness over time, in Bliss's view, especially given the rise of candidate-centered campaigning, necessitated the creation of a more service-oriented party capable of supporting candidates amid changing electoral conditions. In politics, Bliss argued, you have “got to operate effectively, know your case, know your areas of strength and weaknesses, know whether we're moving up or down with the candidate, project what we should be doing to win.”Footnote 15 Such circumstances favored, in Bliss's analysis, an approach to party organization that emphasized the importance of strategically supporting candidates.
To be sure, neither the challenges Bliss and the ORP faced nor the appeal to organization at the state level were new in 1950. What did set the ORP apart was its ability to successfully institutionalize a service structure at the state level at such an early date. Several innovative state chairs had embraced organization at various points earlier in the century as a means of recovering from defeat.Footnote 16 However, none of these earlier political leaders was able to erect a party structure with the organizational scope and sustainability of the service party in Ohio. The party organization Bliss constructed in Ohio in the 1950s represented one of the most fully developed examples of the emerging “service” trend, and subsequently served as the framework for the institutionalization of a service organization within the national Republican Party beginning in the 1960s.
The outcome in Ohio was a state party largely unprecedented in its scope and institutional durability over time. There were other strong parties in the immediate postwar years – the Republican Party in Indiana, the labor-backed Democratic Party in Michigan, and the Republican Party in Connecticut, for example. But few state parties at the time exhibited the organizational sophistication of the ORP. In the early 1960s, the “average state party office had three divisions,” note Gibson et al., and only “a bare majority … employed an executive director; fewer (42%) had a comptroller; and only a small percentage employed a public relations director (29%), research staff (27%) and a field staff (15%).”Footnote 17 Taken together, fewer than 20 percent of state parties nationwide “hired more than one full-time professional” in the late 1950s, reports David Price.Footnote 18 In Ohio, by contrast, the ORP maintained between thirteen and fourteen separate divisions throughout Bliss's tenure in office.Footnote 19 After Bliss's appointment, each of the new headquarters divisions had at least one full-time staffer, and some had many more. The Publicity Division, for example, had ten full-time employees, and the Research Division had two staffers. By 1960, the ORP field division had ten fulltime staffers, who were active in seventy-eight different counties, covering thirteen separate Congressional districts.Footnote 20 Between these years we see both a steady increase in, and retention of, permanent staff, even during off years.Footnote 21
BLISS AND ORP HEADQUARTERS
When Bliss took over the ORP in 1949, he immediately set about implementing his vision of a more professionally oriented, service-based state party organization. At the center of his plan was the development of a more centrally integrated party structure organized around a more permanent and self-financed headquarters operation based in Columbus. Reflecting Bliss's belief that electing Republicans, more than anything else, would keep the party's conservative politics viable in postwar Ohio, the goal of this new party structure was to assist, rather than directly manage, Republican candidates through the provision of key services, including direct field support, financial assistance, specialized trainings and expert research and polling information.
According to the plan developed by Bliss, ORP headquarters in Columbus would serve as the organizational “hub” of the rebuilt state party. Internally, party headquarters would be reorganized around a series of divisions, each responsible for a unique “spoke” or “particular segment of the organization,” Bliss explained. By centrally integrating core ORP operations, Bliss hoped to erect a statewide party infrastructure capable of providing strategic, candidate-centered resources on a year-round basis. “A political organization must be a continuous thing,” Bliss asserted. “It must always be an alive, alert, and aggressive operation,” and managed “on a year-round basis by an experienced staff.”Footnote 22 Bliss's objective as the new state chair was not to personally dominate Ohio Republican politics from his perch in Columbus, though the absence of a Republican governor at the time afforded him wide latitude. Rather, his aim was to make party operations more cohesive and permanent statewide. “In a state like Ohio – a big agricultural, a big industrial state, you simply can't set up a statewide campaign that is going to be suitable everywhere,” Bliss explained. On their own, state officials could not be expected to have an understanding of the political dynamics in each area. “The local chairmen must do that for you,” Bliss contended. “You can tell them on a broad general level what your campaign effort is going to be, but they must modify it so it will be applicable locally.”Footnote 23
Such statewide integration was not always welcome in every area. But the ORP's outreach helped the party become, in the long run, a more integral part of Republican life in the state. A closer look at the direct field and fundraising support the ORP offered candidates and local officials reveals just how the service approach was implemented.
ORP FIELD AND FUNDRAISING OPERATIONS
In the rebuilt ORP, the field staff was the principal organizational link between the candidates, county affiliates, and the state headquarters. It was the field organizers who facilitated the reciprocal exchange of information, ideas, and directives between Columbus, candidates, and local officials. The ORP had few other mechanisms at its disposal to coordinate Republican activities across jurisdictional lines. State officials were consequently very careful to deploy field staff as strategically as possible, placing them only where they were needed most and would thus have the greatest impact. They also made sure the field staff understood that their role was, as Bliss frequently remarked, “to supplement, but not supplant,” local authority. “None of these local politicos could be compelled by Bliss to do anything,” explains Frederick Wirt.Footnote 24 All the state chair could do was try “to persuade them that State Headquarters was concerned only with the success of the party, in getting all of its candidates elected, and in respecting their legal and political authority,” Wirt continues.Footnote 25
Bliss and the ORP leadership were able to walk this line due in large part to the quality of their field organizers. Staff development was at the heart of the service party concept. Bliss and his division heads spent a considerable amount of time selecting and training party personnel. This was especially true with field staff. Their efforts reached a zenith in 1960, when Bliss and John Andrews, who ran ORP field operations at the time, prepared a detailed manual for ORP field personnel.Footnote 26
Of course, none of this work was possible without adequate funding. Maintaining a year-round statewide “service” organization required, as Bliss noted, “a sound organization … and money.”Footnote 27 It required, in other words, ongoing fundraising efforts. Though more subject to the electoral cycle than staffing levels, ORP fundraising also showed an identifiable trend not only toward growth, but also toward stability between the elections examined.
Throughout the 1940s, the ORP had intermittently explored the idea of consolidating all party fundraising into annual county-specific requests administered by the Ohio Republican Finance Committee (ORFC).Footnote 28 But the strategy had met with only limited success. When Bliss took over, he revived the idea as part of his effort to further integrate statewide party activities. Doing so proved to be remarkably successful. The program dramatically expanded the Republicans' ability to raise money. In 1950 alone, the ORFC raised a record $1.3 million.Footnote 29 It was an unprecedented amount that redefined the party's fundraising goals. Though fundraising amounts would continue to spike during each election year throughout the decade, varying at its high points between $600,000 and $700,000 in 1952 and 1956 respectively, the party also achieved a new fundraising baseline of slightly over $400,000 during off-year elections.Footnote 30
Bliss's organizing efforts, in terms of developing a full service party organization, were inherently long-term in nature, as illustrated by the party's permanent staffing and ongoing field and fundraising efforts. Nonetheless, it was during elections that the strategic orientation of the service concept became most visible.
BLISS AND THE 1950 ELECTION
Supporting candidates in competitive races was central to the concept of the service party. “A party without competent, appealing candidates is pretty much like a large automobile agency without cars to sell,” Bliss explained.Footnote 31 As such, elections tested the strength of the connections that Bliss and his staff sought to create with candidates, as well as with each level of the state party. They also showcased the ways in which the “service” approach to party organizing was based on not only providing the candidates field and fundraising support, but also various research-intensive resources, notably sophisticated polling data. But, most importantly, elections highlighted the fundamentally professional, and electoral, rather than ideological, nature of Bliss's service party organization. For Bliss, refining the ORP's ability to elect Republicans, rather than clarifying its policy positions, was critical to advancing the party's agenda in postwar Ohio, where, as he understood, stressing party differences could limit the Republicans' reach among the state's increasingly Democratic, but also generally conservative, voters. In this way, Bliss's service approach largely reinforced the ORP's traditionally conservative, but pragmatic, “Old Guard” Republicanism, which balanced an abiding faith in the virtues of personal liberty and limited government with the goal of electoral competitiveness and party unity.Footnote 32 This was clear, for example, from Bliss's extensive use of polls, the purpose of which was not simply to promote the Republican message, but also to develop a “party image,” as Bliss described it, that would appeal to Republicans as well as conservative Democratic and independent voters. “Surveys … enable the party and its candidates to crystallize the party's image,” Bliss contended. They did so “by concentrating the campaign on the important issues,” as Bliss explained it.Footnote 33
Ohio was still solidly Republican in 1950. But it was being gradually transformed in the early postwar period, both demographically and politically, by the growth of heavy industry and a corresponding expansion of the state's urban, and more Democratically inclined, union workforce. “During part of this period, Ohio had more new plants than any state,” writes George Knepper, and “its great industrial cities reached their peak populations.”Footnote 34 As such, the challenge of electing Republicans in postwar Ohio increasingly meant, as John Fenton contended, maximizing the vote in areas of traditional Republican strength, mainly the state's many rural counties, as well as the smaller southern cities, while working to keep the turnout low in the more Democratic industrial northeast.Footnote 35
This was precisely the challenge facing Bliss in 1950: topping the Republican ticket that year was Senator Robert Taft's reelection campaign. As the ranking Ohio senator, and son of former President William Howard Taft, Taft was the nominal head of the national Republican Party. But he was also one of the party's most controversial figures owing to his support of an “isolationist” US foreign policy and his co-sponsorship of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. Taft's reelection was being fiercely contested by organized labor, a growing power in the state, which had thrown its support behind his Democratic opponent, state auditor Joseph Ferguson. Bliss's response, which was crafted in close collaboration with Taft's publicists and campaign staff, was to deemphasize Taft's policy positions, stressing instead his status as an elder statesman.Footnote 36 This was complemented by a coordinated field plan, centered on a voter registration and mobilization drive in areas of flagging Republican strength. Bliss's goal was to divert attention from Taft's combative senatorial record, which could mobilize the state's growing union and Democratic vote, while working to maximize Republican turnout.
The party's field strategy drew heavily on the findings of a series of polls Bliss commissioned after the 1948 race. Bliss learned from the polls that large numbers of registered Republicans in rural areas of the state had failed to vote and that an equally high number of Republican-leaning individuals in the cities were not even registered. “County-by-county studies by the headquarters staff showed that there were about 140,000 Republicans, mostly in rural areas, who did not vote in 1948,” writes John Kessel. “The same studies suggested that there were about 150,000 potential Republican voters in metropolitan areas who were not registered.”Footnote 37 The problem appeared to be both motivational and organizational in nature. Participation levels had declined among Republican voters, and at the same time the party had failed either to mobilize known party supporters or effectively to reach out to new Republican voters.
In addition to their effort to recruit Republicans, the ORP turned to a series of party auxiliaries and supplemental campaign organizations to reach out to conservative independent and Democratic voters as well as to help project an image of Taft as a national leader with bipartisan appeal. The Ohio Federation of Republican Women, for example, aided the statewide voter registration effort by distributing a pamphlet entitled “The Rudiments of Political Organization” to new voters. The Taft campaign also created dozens of supplemental or volunteer organizations, including Doctors for Taft, Farmers for Taft and Teachers for Taft. There was even a “Labor League for Taft.” In addition to attracting independent and Democratic voters, these groups worked to counter labor's portrayal of Taft as antiquated, reactionary, and anti-union.Footnote 38
Many of the party's service-oriented programs in 1950 were new and largely untested, including Bliss's heavy reliance on polling data; his attempt to further integrate federal, state, and local races; and his outreach to supplemental organizations as a means of depoliticizing Taft and other leading Republican candidates. Despite their novelty, the benefits of such an approach in postwar Ohio soon became clear. Taft, for instance, handily defeated Ferguson by 400,000 votes. On top of that, the Republicans were able to elect four new Congressmen, giving the party a solid fifteen-person majority in the twenty-three-member state Congressional delegation. The party also seized control of the state legislature, and the offices of the secretary of state, attorney general, and treasurer, though it again lost the race for governor.Footnote 39
BLISS'S LEGACY OF SUCCESS
The ORP experienced similar success in 1952, 1954 and 1956. Indeed, between 1950 and 1958, Republicans won and held every statewide seat, save for the governor's office. And, in 1952, Republican John Brown edged out George Nye for lieutenant governor. Afterwards, the sole remaining Democratic constitutional officer in Columbus was the perennial Republican foe, Governor Frank Lausche, whose conservative but nonideological approach in many ways mimicked Bliss's strategy.Footnote 40 The party would win the governorship in 1956, but only after Lausche was elected to the US Senate. In addition to the gains at the state and local levels, Eisenhower carried the state by comfortable margins in 1952 and 1956.Footnote 41
But it was in 1956, with Eisenhower and Nixon up for reelection and Lausche vacating the governor's office, that Republican leaders mounted what one newspaper called “the most intensive over-all political campaign ever staged in the state.”Footnote 42 Bliss had been inspired by a recent summer conference of state leaders he attended in Washington to expand the party's use of print, radio, and even television advertising during the campaign.Footnote 43 Both in Washington and in Columbus, Republican officials stressed the need to elect a Republican governor in Ohio. But Bliss also reiterated the importance of fielding a “candidate for every office – down to coroner.”
The 1956 results once again pointed to the success of Bliss's emphasis on organization over issues as a means of winning races for Republicans in postwar Ohio. Not only did Eisenhower carry the state by more than 800,000 votes, but William O'Neill was elected governor, Paul Herbert lieutenant governor, Ted Brown secretary of state, Roger Tracey treasurer and William Saxbe attorney general. In fact, the only Republican to be defeated for statewide office was George Bender, who lost his US Senate seat to Lausche.
However, Bliss's nonideological, service approach to party organizing did not always sit well with the party rank and file. One clear example of the limits of Bliss's appeal to organization and strategy over issues came in 1958 when a group of conservative business leaders successfully campaigned to place a Right-to-Work question on the November ballot. The goal of the ballot question was to outlaw so-called “closed” union shops, where workers are contractually obligated to join the union. The resurgence of the issue, a favorite of the Republican right since the late 1930s, reflected the growing divide within the Republican Party at the state and national levels in the late 1950s that increasingly pitted conservative, but more pragmatic and professionally oriented, party officials like Bliss against more “fundamentalist,” or ideologically motivated, party conservatives.Footnote 44 Bliss, for instance, had studied the issue in Ohio and his polling indicated that if a Right-to-Work question was placed on the ballot in November it would lose and that any number of Republican candidates would lose with it. The success of a Right-to-Work law in neighboring Indiana in 1957, together with a deepening recession in Ohio, had “galvanized,” as Marc Nixon asserts, the state's large union membership against the idea of adopting Right-to-Work regulations in the state.Footnote 45 As an ORP staffer commented at the time, “all our polls showed us in good shape.” Every Republican incumbent appeared safe. However, if “this amendment goes on the ballot … nothing is certain anymore,” the staffer concluded.Footnote 46
To Bliss's dismay, William O'Neill, the state's Republican governor, came out in support of the measure in the final weeks of his reelection campaign against the Democrat, Michael DiSalle. O'Neill had initially refrained from taking a strong public stand on the Right-to-Work issue, but he had been pressured to change course by business leaders who made their financial support of his campaign contingent on his endorsement of the measure.Footnote 47 For his part, Bliss, accompanied by Republican US senator John Bricker, met with and tried to dissuade the business leaders who were sponsoring the ballot initiative from moving forward with their plans. Bliss “did his best to explain why this was bad politics,” explains John Kessel, “and Bricker told them that if they went ahead, they would defeat every Republican, including himself.”Footnote 48 Bliss's message was characteristic: in Ohio, where certain conservative values like the ideals of small government and personal responsibility cut across party lines, the Republicans had gained and maintained their power by keeping “issues out of elections” and thus not provoking the state's growing Democratic opposition.Footnote 49 Bliss and Bricker were right. The measure was soundly defeated, 63 to 36 percent. The consequences for the party were devastating: in addition to Bricker and three seats in the House, O'Neill, Herbert, Tracey, and Saxbe were defeated at the state level. After almost a decade out of power, the Democrats also managed to seize control of the state legislature.
Bliss used the loss to reiterate the importance of the service-based approach to party organizing, specifically the practice of weighing the use of ideological appeals against the need to be competitive. Bliss's position was strengthened by the state party's follow-up success in 1960, when his service organization not only helped the Republicans regain control of the state legislature, but played a significant role in Nixon's victory in Ohio during the presidential election.
THE 1960 ELECTION
Though Nixon had campaigned hard in Ohio in 1952 and 1956 as vice president, and was generally well liked in the state, Ohio was still considered competitive in 1960 given its sizable union and urban Democratic vote. As late as mid-October 1960, for example, just two weeks before the election, an Associated Press poll classified Ohio as a “toss-up,” while an election-eve report in the New York Times predicted a Kennedy win.Footnote 50 Polling conducted by Bliss just after the Republican Convention in July in eleven congressional districts where Republican candidates narrowly lost in 1958 revealed that Nixon was in fact trailing Kennedy.Footnote 51 Much as he had done in 1950, Bliss's instinct was again to deemphasize issues, and to focus the state party's resources on a massive field and media campaign intended to help elect Republicans up and down the ballot.Footnote 52
In October 1960, Bliss conducted another poll. What he found attested to, among other things, the intensity of the party's voter mobilization efforts. “Nixon and Kennedy [had] reversed their positions” in several targeted districts, Bliss recounted. The poll, which sought to gauge voter “feelings” along a spectrum from strong to weak support, revealed that “around 15 or 16 percent … of the Kennedy support was in the weak category, while only 8 or 9 percent of the Nixon support was in that category.” Bliss believed he had found the “soft spot in the Kennedy support” that the Nixon campaign had been looking for.Footnote 53
Despite losing the election, Nixon defeated Kennedy in Ohio by 273,363 votes. It was a significant achievement. Ohio had gone from a “toss-up” to a solid Republican victory, and had done so without the help of a Republican governor. It was also only the second time in the century Ohio did not go the way of the national vote. Moreover, toward the end of the campaign several leading Republicans, most notably Governor Rockefeller, began to doubt whether Nixon would carry any of the big northern industrial states, owing to what they viewed as the campaign's misguided attempted to win some of the southern states.Footnote 54 Nixon did win several southern states, including Florida and Virginia, but carried only Ohio and California among the so-called “Big Seven” populous states. Ohio was Nixon's standout victory in the industrial north.Footnote 55
The Republicans scored another important victory in 1962, winning the governor's office, two new seats in Congress, and a solid majority in the state house. The party was also able to hold onto the state legislature in 1964 despite a sweeping loss in the presidential election that year. Despite his deliberately low profile, the ORP's success brought Bliss to the attention of both the national party and the media.Footnote 56 When Bliss finally became Republican National Committee chair after the 1964 Goldwater loss, he rebuilt a debilitated national party largely based on the service model he had developed in Ohio.Footnote 57
AN INSTITUTIONAL LEGACY
The influence and success of the service approach in Ohio would fluctuate in the years following Bliss's departure. Predictably, the principal challenge to the service approach came from party leaders, who either came to question the need to avoid partisan issues, or were more focussed on building their own organization than on strengthening the party. The latter was particularly true in Ohio after the 1962 election of James Rhodes as governor. The party's decline, however, was neither immediate nor permanent. John Andrews, who had worked closely with Bliss, became party chair in 1965. Under his leadership, and in close collaboration with Rhodes, the party scored its most decisive victory to date in 1966. Though, as Andrew explains, Rhodes “campaigned for everyone” in 1966, the governor's interest in the party was short-lived.Footnote 58 Rhodes had worked his way up to the governorship by a winning a series of lower offices as a loyal Republican. But as he rose in prominence in state government his relationship with the state party became more distant, while his own leadership style became more personal than partisan. Rhodes, for example, maintained a “polite but not friendly relationship” with Bliss, write Michael Curtin and Julia Barry Bell.Footnote 59 In Bliss's mind, once he became governor, Rhodes “was more concerned with preventing potential rivals from rising within the Republican Party than helping with party-building.”Footnote 60 After his 1966 reelection, the break became more complete, and the governor spent most of his second term building an organization independent of the state party. “After 1966,” explains Charles Kurfess, who served as the Republican speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives between 1967 and 1972, “it was all Rhodes's game.”Footnote 61 The result, for the party, was a gradual decline in strength. But the party did begin to rebuild in the 1980s, primarily at the behest of ORP chair Robert Bennett, and before that Republican state senator James Tilling. It did so, John Green and Daniel Shea note, based largely on Bliss's service model.Footnote 62
CONCLUSION
As the limits of the party-decline thesis have come into view over the last two decades, scholars have begun to turn their attention to the task of explaining why political parties remain a defining feature of American electoral politics. Among the most significant work in this area focusses on the process by which a “service” model of party organization has been institutionalized, particularly within the Republican Party at the national level beginning in the mid-1960s. What has received less attention, however, is the role state parties and leaders played in the development of the service party model. For the Republicans, postwar Ohio offers arguably the most significant example of the link between state- and national-level innovation, given the scale and sophistication of the service-oriented party structure Ray Bliss and the Ohio Republicans built in the immediate postwar years and the leading role Bliss personally played in the institutionalization of a service model nationally in the 1960s.
Under Bliss's leadership, the ORP took on many of the organizational characteristics that scholars commonly associate with a “service”-oriented political party. This was clear from the ORP's overall organizational design, which was characterized by a highly trained and permanent headquarters operation committed to providing candidates with professional campaign support. It was also clear from the emphasis the ORP placed on organizational development over issues as a means of remaining competitive in a changing postwar Ohio. Though implicitly conservative, the ORP exhibited the classic Republican belief that electoral victory was the surest way of promoting party policy. The result was a party organization that grew, and achieved a measurable degree of institutional continuity, in terms of both staffing and fundraising levels, between on- and off-year elections.
Despite there being few other examples at the state level, the service model proved to be remarkably successful in Ohio. By emphasizing the importance of providing candidates with professional campaign services rather than simply issue advocacy, the ORP quickly became the dominant force in the state after Taft's 1950 reelection to the Senate. By 1952, Ohio Republicans were able to capture every statewide office save for the coroner's office. They consolidated their power in 1956, when William O'Neill defeated Michael Disalle for governor. Of course, not all Ohio Republicans embraced Bliss's nonideological service approach, as became evident in 1958 when a group of conservative business leaders placed a Right-to-Work question the ballot. The scope of the Republicans' defeat that year, led by the defeat of the ballot question, as well as the party's prominent role in Nixon's 1960 victory, helped Bliss reestablish the service approach in Ohio. But the incident did forecast growing opposition in the late 1950s among Republicans in Ohio and beyond to the principle of organization over issues.
When Bliss accepted the ORP chair in February 1949, he told a beleaguered State Committee that if “there is a formula for Republican victory” in Ohio, then “we shall find it.” And find it he did.Footnote 63 Though it would prove difficult to sustain in Bliss's absence, the service organization would have a defining impact on both the state and the national Republican Party's subsequent development.
