How NRSC’s Collins went from no to yes

Rob Collins was initially hesitant about taking the job, and even more so when his newborn baby started to cry.

It was about a year ago when Collins was considering whether to become the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), the chairman of campaign arm, had urged Collins to work with him to regain the majority in the upper chamber.

{mosads}Collins loved his job at Purple Strategies, a bipartisan public affairs firm, and was well aware that the NRSC post would take him away from his young family.

“Our newborn, at the Purple Christmas party, started to cry. So I took him into a back office. And then my wife came back and a colleague of mine at Purple came back, and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to do this. I just can’t see how I can detangle myself from this world — I’ve made so many commitments. I don’t see how I can do this.’ ”

But his wife had little doubt it was the right move.

“She was the one who, at the beginning, was a whole lot more gung-ho about it,” Collins told The Hill in a sit-down interview.

His wife, Susan, and Sarah Hamlett, a colleague, convinced him the risk would be well worth it, much like his experience setting up the American Action Network, a GOP super-PAC.

“It was [Susan’s] belief that I’d really enjoy this. She was there when I built the American Action Network with [former Minnesota Sen.] Norm Coleman. And she saw how hard it was, but then she saw how much fun I had when we were successful,” he said.

“For someone who plots his life out very carefully, this was a very dramatic pivot. This was something I’d not planned to do. But it’s been interesting; it’s been exciting and gratifying.”

And quite hectic. Collins and his wife have three kids, aged 6, 4 and 1, with a fourth due in May.

Collins now employs the arguments used on him to convince reluctant candidates to run for the Senate. The GOP needs to win six seats to take control of the Senate, and it is targeting seven Democratic-held seats in red states, as well as a handful of open seats in swing states.

Collins, 37, has spent most of his career on the House side, rising to be then-House Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s (R-Va.) chief of staff before launching the American Action Network.

He and Moran had met only briefly, when Moran was still a congressman. But the senator was quickly convinced Collins was the right man for the job.

“Any conversation you have with Rob, including my very first one shows how sincere and genuine he is,” Moran said. “I’m a Rob Collins fan. I had great regard for him before he accepted the job, and my appreciation for him has only grown. … Rob just exudes a level of expertise and understanding. He knows what he’s doing, knows what he needs to do to.”

An upstate New York native from a mostly Democratic family, Collins first got interested in politics out of boredom. His mother, a professor, dragged him to the university library while she was working, and around age 10, he began reading National Review. “I don’t know why I wasn’t reading Sports Illustrated,” he says.

He would also read articles his mother’s liberal colleagues would post outside their offices — though that got him in some trouble.

“I’d write questions on them, or I’d write comments on them not thinking it was anything weird. And the professors would put these lengthy, scathing attacks back up,” he said with a laugh.

“Finally, my mom [said], ‘Someone has been writing on these boards, and these professors are really upset.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me.’ ”

Besides politics, Collins’s great passion is for the Grateful Dead. A book about the band is one of his office’s few personal touches besides a large wall of drawings from his older children: pink-hued ones from his daughter, and drawings of spiders and bugs from his son. He loves the music — and the reaction it elicits from his opponents.

“It drives Democrats crazy when they hear I like the Grateful Dead. The last person I told challenged me to name 25 songs, at the Tune Inn [a Capitol Hill watering hole],” he said. “And I’m not good with names, so it was really hard for me — but I got to 25.”

Collins’s genial, self-effacing personality conceals a killer political instinct, friends and allies say.

Cantor told The Hill, “Rob is a very competitive individual, and he likes to win.”

Cantor credits Collins for helping his office, and the GOP, refocus its efforts to win the House after Democrats took control in 2006.

“He can identify themes and doesn’t get caught up in short-term distraction. He’s really a strategic thinker and knows how to win, and he’s really good at laying out a plan to get there,” Cantor said. 

Collins said the House and Senate worlds aren’t as different as some would guess, but noted that the NRSC has taken on a more aggressive posture this election cycle, partly because many staffers hail from the lower chamber.

A core lesson Collins learned in Cantor’s office is that it’s best to hire smart people and let them do their jobs.

“We’re House guys — we’re much more aggressive sometimes,” he says. “We’re not going to allow people to define us. And we’ll make mistakes, and we know that, but also we’re going to put points up on the board every day, and we’re going to be as aggressive as possible. … The people that decided to join this organization are the people that like that challenge.”