Just weeks into his tenure as head of the Colorado Republican Party, former gubernatorial candidate Steve House says he’s shaking up the way the party runs things.

In his first public appearance since winning the chairmanship, House told a group of Douglas County Republicans last Friday that he’s forging ahead with one of his campaign promises, organizing the GOP to run like a business, with key positions operating under a “team of rivals” principle.

House, who unseated two-term Republican chair Ryan Call at the GOP’s state central committee meeting on March 14, contrasted the way he’s planning to structure the party with the way it’s been handled under his predecessors.

When Dick Wadhams, who had managed multiple state-level campaigns, was the two-term state chair, he ran the office like a political consultant, House noted. Call, an elections attorney, handled it like a lawyer. “What I’m doing is setting up the office very much like a businessman would,” House told a meeting of the Highlands Ranch GOP Breakfast Club.

Over of the past two weeks, House said, Call had been in the office five days. “The transition’s been great, he’s been really, really great,” House said.

In the meantime, House said he has been inundated with questions and advice about staffing — he received more than 4,000 emails in the 36 hours after he won the party leadership race — and one of the top questions involves who is going to run the party on a day-to-day basis.

“People have been asking over and over who’s going to be the executive director,” House told the group. “I say to people, you know what, there isn’t going to be one. When we reorganize the state party, I can’t for the life of me as a business person imagine an environment where you have a chairman where one person reports to him and everyone else reports to the executive director.”

Instead, he said, he’s planning to reorganize how the state party is structured, establishing four departments “that cross boundaries and work together.” Those departments will handle communications, finance, political issues and operations, directing the state party and “building the county parties.”

While House said at the Highlands Ranch meeting he planned to unveil the directors and other staffing decisions early this week, on Wednesday he told The Colorado Statesman that it was too early to make any announcements. “We’re not hiring anybody right away,” he said, adding that executive director Shana Kohn is going to continue in her position for the time being. The party’s finance director, on the other hand, has decided to move on, he said, noting that it’s a high-pressure job and that the decision had more to do with career timing than any differences with the new party leadership.

But as staffing prospects coalesce, House said, he’s planning on making sure the operatives represent the range of Republican approaches.

“I’ve taken on the challenge of making it a team of rivals,” House said last Friday. “They’re very, very diverse. They’re from what you would call the establishment part of the party all the way to the most activist part of the party, and across that spectrum. I think that’s important.”

He added that he’s striving to hire Republicans representing different interests and wings of the party. “You get more ideas, you don’t get an echo chamber,” he said. “I don’t want an echo chamber, I want to run it like a board of directors where you get a lot of feedback, a lot of innovation, a lot of challenge.”

House said that one of the most frequent question he’s heard from party activists is, “You’re not going to have a complete, right-wing extreme governing body in the executive committee and staff, are you?” He said he answered, “‘No, if we’re going to unify the party, you have to accept the principle that we need everyone at the table.’”

But that diversity only goes so far, he said, answering a question from the group whether anyone working for the state party needs to be fully on board with the state Republican platform.

“If you’re going to work for a body, you have to follow whatever the policies, procedures and platform of that body is,” House said. “Absolutely, the directors of the committee will be asked the question, ‘Are you fully supportive of our platform?’ If you’re not, then it’s not the right role for you.”

House also put to rest lingering rumors that former state Sen. Ted Harvey, a conservative firebrand and one-time candidate for state chair, will be running the show, as some blogs and social media posts have speculated.

“Ted Harvey will not speak for the chair, he will not run the party, and he will not take my job,” House said. Instead, he suggested that the new team might include a campaign operative, “two business people you might have never have heard of,” and a fundraiser from the Western Slope.

Ramping up fundraising — with a different approach than the party has taken — is critical, House said. When he took over a couple weeks ago, he said, he determined that the state party “has some serious financial challenges” and had taken on more debt than he’d anticipated. It’s going to take some time to pay off the debt, he said, adding that it isn’t an unusual situation for a state party in the wake of a major election.

In the first 10 days since he took over, House said, the state Republican Party raised more than $35,000 but, most significantly, received more online donations than the party had secured in the previous six months. The point is getting “more people invested in the party,” House said. It’s equally important to raise money for county party operations, he said, pointing to a new program that sets up ties between county parties and local business people rather than funneling all those kind of relationships through the state GOP.

The state party’s fundraising plan “has to be far more diverse,” he said, pointing out that just 1,000 donors consistently contribute to the state party. The challenge, he said, is “getting people to believe we’re going to do what we say we’re going to do if we’re in control of a majority. We don’t have a great track record of that, going back to George W. Bush’s second term, of doing the things a conservative should do. I think if we do that, stand on basic principals, people will come back.”

Looming on the horizon, he told the group, is a critical presidential election and the chance to challenge U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, pegged by some as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the country.

“The RNC keeps telling me over and over again that we’re the No. 4 swing state in the country,” House said. National Republicans are forecasting the presidential election to be as close as any in memory, he said.

Key to winning races in the swing state, he said, is building a data infrastructure to better understand voters. “We have to get a lot better at data. We don’t really know voters that well, compared with what the Democrats do,” he said.

Toward that end, the RNC plans to parachute in workers and analysts to get involved this year in the Thornton mayoral election — of all things — in order to better understand what’s going on with voters in critical Adams County precincts, where the battle for the majority in the Legislature might play out next year.

The way things look, he reported, the 2016 cycle is more likely to be a turnout election than a persuasion election.

“I can tell you, victory in ‘16 probably won’t come because we get a lot more Millennials to vote for us or a lot more Hispanics to vote for us. It’s going to come because the base Republican voters and the people who are truly conservative have got to come out more than we have in the past. The transition to the youth is coming, it just isn’t probably going to be in ‘16,” he said, adding that “it’s people like the people sitting in this room that are going to decide the next election.”

As for Bennet’s seat, House said that talk about the Democrat’s precarious position is well founded. In the last month, he noted, three 527 political organizations have emerged, tasked with doing “nothing more than take shots at Michael Bennet. People want to get rid of Michael Bennet.”

But it won’t be up to state GOP leadership to determine which Republican gets the chance to try.

“I will not get involved in any primary for the U.S. Senate, but every Republican should be looking out for a great candidate for the U.S. Senate and persuade them to get into that race,” House said.

— ernest@coloradostatesman.com