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Blaise Hazelwood (born 1972), a Republican strategist and consultant in the United States, is the owner of Grassroots Targeting, LLC, one of the nation’s premier microtargeting companies, and iWeb Strategies, LLC, which provides campaigns and other organizations with a comprehensive online program.

Hazelwood first came to prominence as the driver behind the “72-Hour Task Force” in 2001, the party’s last major revision to its tactical campaign playbook which is credited with revolutionizing the Get Out the Vote efforts. Hazelwood has led and managed political operations, high-profile grassroots programs and political campaigns. She received a lot of praise for her work as Political Director at the Republican National Committee in 2002 and 2004, spearheading their successful online Team Leader program and the construction of Voter Vault, the RNC’s voter file database. She went on to serve as the Director of Media and Political operations for the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 2006 cycle under Senator Elizabeth Dole.

Beginning in November 2008, Hazelwood managed Michael Steele's campaign for Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Steele was elected as the new RNC Chairman on January 30, 2009. Hazelwood followed the new Chairman to the RNC and served as his Chief of Staff through the transition until March 2009. She then returned full-time to her companies in Alexandria, Virginia but continues consulting as a top advisor to Chairman Steele and the RNC.

Early Years
Hazelwood's whole life has been politics. She is a fifth-generation Arizonan whose grandfather was close to former senator Barry M. Goldwater. She was president of Teen Republicans in Arizona as well as an intern on Capitol Hill and at the White House.

Despite her Arizona lineage, however, she was born in Washington because her father was working at the Interior Department during the Nixon administration. She was named for St. Blaise. The name was chosen by her mother, who wrote a dissertation on the Roman Catholic saint while studying for a doctorate in early Christian art at Georgetown University. Hazelwood has admitted that being named after a little-known male saint caused confusion when she was younger.

Arizona Campaigning
Hazelwood began door-to-door canvassing as a 10-year-old in Arizona when her father was running for precinct committeeman, and she learned firsthand the value of human contact, meticulous organization and volunteer muscle in political campaigns. Her grandmother was a campaign volunteer in the days before computers, when voter files were kept on index cards. She told the Washington Post in 2003, "I always heard stories about my grandmother. It was all personal contact, and it obviously worked."

Early Career
After graduation from Vassar College, Hazelwood's first job was staff assistant at the RNC, but shortly after the 1994 GOP landslide, her days appeared numbered. The new political director, Curt Anderson, was planning to clean house, and told Hazelwood and others they should start looking for work somewhere else.

"I didn't like that answer," she told the Washington Post. "I decided that I wanted to stay here, that I wasn't done at the RNC, so I started getting there at like six o'clock in the morning. He was a very early person, too. I would read the papers and brief him as he came in, do whatever I could to get his attention, and so he finally decided to keep me."

Her career since has been a succession of campaigns and grassroots organizing across the country, often anchored by positions at the Republican National Committee. She worked for Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign and for James S. Gilmore III's successful 1997 gubernatorial campaign in Virginia.

After those campaigns, she joined Curt Anderson's political consulting firm. Then, in the summer of 2000, moved back to the RNC to help the Bush team manage its outreach to parts of the conservative coalition.

Republican National Committee
"Blaise Hazelwood is credited with bringing back the culture of grassroots campaigns into the Republican Party."

Hazelwood worked as Political Director at the RNC in 2002 & 2004. Matthew Dowd, Senior Advisor at the time said, "She's got good intuition, and she's exceptionally well organized. She'll do whatever it takes to get the job finished. She's not concerned about being the last person to leave the office or getting on an airplane to get the job done."

72 Hour Program
"When the history of the Republican Party's midterm election victories of 2002 is written, President Bush will get the headline and much of the credit, but a large footnote will go to a young political operative named Blaise Hazelwood." -The Washington Post, 2003

Hazelwood, only 31 at the time, was serving as political director of the Republican National Committee (RNC), and it was her responsibility to coordinate the party's "72-Hour Program," an 18-month effort designed to put shoe leather back into politics and beat the Democrats in turning out the vote, especially in the final three days, 72 hours, of the campaign. The 72-Hour Project was born of necessity after the 2000 election, when Republicans discovered that Democrats had done a better job of getting their voters to the polls in one of the tightest presidential races in history.

With prodding from White House senior adviser Karl Rove, White House political director Ken Mehlman and RNC Deputy Chairman Jack Oliver, the party undertook a top-to-bottom review of its get-out-the-vote operation, poured more than $1 million into more than 50 experiments to test how best to reach out to voters and then methodically set about implementing their findings in the midterm campaigns.

"I'm confident from the testing and from human life experience that making a volunteer telephone call or knocking on someone's door makes much more impact than just doing it paid," Hazelwood said.

Her weekend routine was a mind-numbing series of conference calls consuming as much as 16 hours in which she updated her checklists state by state: how many volunteers signed up; how many people on the streets; how much literature distributed; how many voters identified. The overall goal was to flood precincts in competitive states with GOP volunteers going door to door in the final 72 hours of the campaign. Three weeks before the election all the planning and execution began to converge. She told the Washington Post, "All of a sudden this one weekend, everything started clicking. All of the work that everyone had put into this for the past year and a half started happening."

Her work paid big dividends on Election Day, when a surge of Republican voters in states such as Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Missouri overwhelmed the Democrats and turned what many had called one of the most competitive midterm campaigns in history into a substantial Republican victory.

Voter Vault
In addition to implementing the 72 hour program, Hazelwood is also credited with creating Voter Vault, the Republican Party's voter file database which is used by campaigns all over the country.

National Republican Senatorial Committee
In 2005, Hazelwood moved over to become Elizabeth Dole's right-hand-woman, serving as campaign and media director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) through the 2006 election cycle.

Grassroots Targeting
Hazelwood founded Grassroots Targeting in 2005, turning her expertise in the practice of microtargeting into a business. In 2004, few top campaign staff knew what to do with raw microtargeting data. The young staffers who had time to play with the data were the ones in the remote field offices. In 2008, they’re now running the show and want to be able to get their hands on the data. Grassroots Targeting is the first firm to create its own software, called GT InAction, so campaigns can do just that. It lets a campaign manager select the voters he’d like to reach, such as married men who are regular churchgoers who make above $100,000. Since the software is web-enabled, direct mail and phone vendors can go in and use the data as well. Hazelwood believes, “if you’re spending this much time and money to put this together, people should actually use the data." She also adds that she tries "to empower the campaigns as much as possible, because they know their campaigns the best.”

With respect to the 2008 Presidential race, she recently explained, "With Bush, our targeting efforts focused on turning out the base. Now with McCain, it's about convincing the swing voters. It's a different audience we're going after, and we're able to find those swing universes much better than we would have in the past. But sometimes microtargeting isn't user-friendly enough -- a lot of campaigns get a book that explains it, and then that book goes on the shelf. I've built software that allows campaigns to understand their microtargeting data more easily. They can pull their own email and phone universes. The software will tell you, 'These are the swing groups, these are the people who are most likely to turn out.' All the end users have to do is pick what groups they want to target. If you have the budget to mail to only 40,000 people, you can decide which group you want and enter into the calculator exactly what you want your numbers to be."

Microtargeting for Bobby Jindal
One of Grassroots Targeting's most notable clients is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal who has been talked about as a future presidential candidate. Most microtargeting models focus on issues and likelihood to vote Democrat or Republican. However, that wasn’t necessarily going to help Bobby Jindal win his 2007 gubernatorial race in Louisiana, where most voters are registered Dems who typically vote Republican. Strategists realized that to avoid a run-off, Jindal needed 42 percent of culturally conservative Democrats to vote for him on Election Day.

Hazelwood built her model around that core group. She said, “usually when you build models, you are building them on everyone [in a district], but the cultural conservatives were our target universe. We actually did survey work and tracked them all summer long.” Using that research, Jindal talked to voters in each segment of this custom universe. And on Election Day, he hit the magical 42 percent and won the race.

iWeb Strategies
In 2007, Hazelwood supplemented her Grassroots Targeting work by cofounding iWeb Strategies with Brian Lyle. Lyle has been working in technology for over a decade and with Hazelwood since 2003. He served as the Deputy Director for the RNC’s Team Leader online program in the 2004 election cycle. In 2006, he worked with Hazelwood at the NRSC as eCampaign Director before joining her to found iWeb. He designed and managed one of the “Top 5 Mold Breaking Websites” of the 2002 election cycle according to Campaigns and Elections magazine.

Steele Campaign
In November 2008, Hazelwood signed on to lead Michael Steele's campaign to become the next RNC Chairman in the first open race since 1997. The telegenic former Maryland Lieutenant Governor had developed a national following with his Fox News commentary. Also, those who saw Steele behind-the-scenes of his 2006 Senate race knew him as a free spirit whose first instinct is to rethink campaign conventions. An insurgent campaign in a time of internal party unrest fit his personality well.

That Steele won the chairman’s race didn’t surprise many Republican activists across the country; however, Steele’s Jan. 30 win did shock the old bulls of the Republican establishment. The core of Steele’s winning coalition were the RNC’s newer members. In fact, half of Steele’s 21-person “whip team” on the committee rose to their current Party leadership roles after the election of 2006. Steele made sure his campaign screamed “change.” Under Hazelwood's leadership in what looked like a sleepy Christmas-time race, Republicans responded in ways few inside the Beltway press corps noticed. Though the race is decided by the 168 party insiders, Steele asked Republican activists around the country to sign up to support his bid for chairman. In the two months after Obama’s victory, his website enlisted 42,000 such activists.

Hazelwood put the 42,000 to work with the same innovative thinking that led to the 72 Hour Program. She asked those online supporters to email their national committee members. While urging a vote for Steele, the supporters pledged a specific donation of volunteer hours to their state parties which caught the eye of hungry state chairmen.

With Hazelwood, Steele built a leadership team, and a winning campaign, with tactics, ideas, and coalitions rarely before used in the GOP. Steele promised to shake things up at party headquarters, and to the old guard’s surprise, the new RNC was in a mood to shake.

RNC Transition Chief of Staff
Following Chairman Steele's election, Hazelwood went with him to the RNC and served as Chief of Staff through the transition period. During this time, Steele brought in RNC Members from around the country to assist him in assessing each division within the RNC and make recommendations for improvements.

In a press release, the RNC announced that "the transition team will help implement the sweeping changes Steele proposed during his campaign for chairman. Under Chairman Steele’s leadership, the RNC will focus on recruiting a new cadre of top-notch candidates and operatives, build new volunteer networks, and forge new working relationships with state and local parties.  The team will also immediately begin preparing for the gubernatorial and local elections later this year in Virginia and New Jersey." Hazelwood was integral to these transition efforts and also to supporting the Chairman in beginning to fulfill his mission to "bring this Party to every corner of the country and ask people to join us and work with us.” The Chairman added that “by standing on our principles, we can expand and grow. My transition team will take a fresh look at everything with an eye toward preparing to win the campaigns of the future.”

Having overseen the first two months of the Steele administration at the RNC, Hazelwood, in an e-mail to Republicans around Washington on March 12th, announced veteran GOP strategist Ken McKay would take over as the RNC's chief of staff.

Hazelwood is now working full time at Grassroots Targeting and iWeb Strategies based in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia while staying very involved in an advisory role with the RNC and Chairman Steele.