The National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, in existence for about 18 months, has become a fundraising powerhouse and early-primary state organizing machine as the retired neurosurgeon moves closer to a presidential run in 2016.
John Philip Sousa IV, chairman of the committee and great-grandson of the famous bandleader, said when they first started the group in August 2013, their sole objective was to convince Mr. Carson to run for president and that they had “zero idea of what this would turn into.”
Mr. Sousa says he sends between 4,000 and 6,000 petitions calling on Mr. Carson to run to the retired surgeon every week along with a personal note.
The group also spent more than $400,000 on radio ads in African-American markets in North Carolina and Louisiana to boost Republican Senate candidates in 2014 — and possibly nudge Mr. Carson, who had said he was eyeing the results of the midterms.
“Now, Carson has said from the get-go if God wants me to run I will run. Well, our people pray an awful lot, but that’s about all the control we have over that one,” Mr. Sousa said. “We believe that in the next week or two, he’ll announce his exploratory committee, and in between May 1st and 15th he’ll probably announce his formal candidacy.”
For his part, Mr. Carson said Sunday he would not run “if I found there really was no support for it” — but said things are looking positive for him right now.
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“I’m seeing a very substantial amount of support across the country in red states, blue states, north, south, east, west,” he said on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”
Mr. Carson, who writes a column for The Washington Times, delivered a well-received speech kicking off the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend, and finished fourth in The Washington Times/CPAC presidential straw poll, dropping a rung from his third-place finish third last year.
“He’s really a beloved figure,” said American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp. “I’m from Kansas, and I know someone who flew out here just to hear him speak. He really motivates conservatives and he should be proud with how he finished.”
Vernon Robinson, campaign director for the Draft Carson committee, said the doctor is uniquely positioned to broaden the Republican base in 2016, given his backstory of growing up in poverty in Detroit before rising to become director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins. He then rose to national attention when he confronted President Obama at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast.
“There was a whole generation of — little younger than I am — a generation of kids whose parents wanted them to grow up to be Dr. Carson if they were boys and marry Dr. Carson if they were girls,” Mr. Robinson said.
The group is working to make sure the political neophyte will have a financial backstop in place if he does jump in. The $12 million in raised in 2014 outpaced similar groups for other potential candidates.
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A top priority for the group, Mr. Sousa said, will be to make sure Mr. Carson is included in presidential debates.
And because super PACs like his group are not allowed to coordinate with candidates, he said they’ll try to anticipate what the would-be campaign might do try to fill in the gaps around that.
“We’ve developed a game plan that we don’t think his campaign will take on, and that is [kind of] stealing a page out of Obama’s playbook where Obama, say, in Iowa said okay, if we go to our base for caucus voters, that will get us x number of votes,” he said. “So we need to find a way to get to x number of votes, plus.”
He listed three legitimate groups not normally targeted that could make the difference on the margins: medical professionals, home-schoolers and Seventh day Adventists.
“We believe that if the Carson people do the job we think they will do, which is go after the base, and we bring in this other group, it will be the margin of victory, and we’ll replicate that early state after early state after early state,” Mr. Sousa said.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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