Betsy Ankney is a premier Republican political operative from Toledo, Ohio. She began her career in politics in 2008 working for the Republican National Committee. Since then, she has managed high-profile campaigns including Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson’s 2016 race and Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential bid. Ankney also served as the Political Director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This fall, she is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. Akney joined the HPR to discuss her career, the 2024 election, the state of politics in America today, and her vision for the future.
This interview occurred prior to the 2024 Presidential Election. It has been edited for length and clarity.
HPR: As an expert in the field, what pieces of wisdom have you picked up or that have been taught to you in your career that you think students who want to go into politics should carry with them?
BA: One of my early bosses said something that has resonated with me, and it might not be the healthiest advice, but it has proven to be true: That [political work] will take as much as you will give. There is always more to do, and there is always more that can be done. When you’re working on a campaign, you never leave at the end of the day and say “I have done everything that I need to do.” I think a hard work ethic is incredibly important. Understanding that the little things matter is incredibly important: Details matter.
My advice for people going into [politics] is be prepared to work hard. Do not underestimate how far that can take you. Understand, campaigns are made up of the big, sexy things that we all see — the TV ads, messaging, debates — but at the end of the day, so much of the blocking and tackling, getting the little things right really is what makes a campaign function. I would say going in with a good work ethic and a good attitude, and understanding, especially when you’re starting out, there’s a lot of grunt work that goes into it.
HPR: In 2016, I don’t think there was a pollster in the country that would have said six months before the election that Ron Johnson would not only win his Senate race comfortably, but that he would also outperform Donald Trump at the top of the ticket. That seems to be a paradigm in your career. How did winning that race shape your strategy going into subsequent elections?
BA: That was a really fascinating and fun race. I moved to Wisconsin before Ron was actually in cycle. I really put in a lot of leg work to get ready for that race. I basically said “Here is the plan. This is what I would like to do. I’d like to be the campaign manager.” I was pretty young at the time and had not managed a race. There was a little bit of hemming and hawing and I said “You can go try to find someone else to manage this, but I’ll be here just doing the work.” Finally, Senator Johnson came back and said “You’re the campaign manager.” It was a pivotal moment in my career.
We knew that it was going to be an uphill battle, that Russ Feingold was going to be coming back for a rematch. Ron had beaten him before in 2010, which was another upset. 2016 was a different cycle; there was uncertainty at the top of the ticket. I think the biggest takeaway from that race was that it’s incredibly important to understand what your mission is, understand what your plan is, and execute. There’s a lot of noise in politics. There are a lot of people just chirping in your ear saying that you’re not going to win, saying that the polls aren’t in your favor, saying that you should do X instead of Y. We had to be incredibly disciplined and focused to just tune that out and say “we know what we need to do. We know the race that we’re going to run. It doesn’t matter what anybody else says; we’re going to keep plowing forward.”
That was a difficult thing to do as a manager, knowing that every day, when you walk into the office, your attitude and demeanor sets the tone for the rest of the team, for the candidate, for the rest of that day. It was really an exercise in focus and discipline and grit. We saw some things that other people didn’t necessarily see. For example, we looked at a universe of voters in the north-central part of the state in small towns under 10,000 people, and we saw that these were largely swing voters — not based on ideology, but because they didn’t like what was happening in D.C., what was happening in Madison. Those voters ultimately kind of became the new Trump coalition.
Early in that race, we identified those people, spent a lot of time talking to them, and positioned Ron — despite his incumbency — as the outsider, the guy who was going against the grain. For Russ Feingold, we knew in that race that the voters of Wisconsin had voted for him for decades. They liked him. We had to make the race about how he had changed; he was no longer the guy that had represented them for all those years. He had turned his back on his principles. That was really how the dynamics of the race played out, and I think a lot of people did not necessarily see those dynamics in the way we did. While the world was surprised by our win, we knew what we had to do, and we went and did it. It was so sweet to win that race when everyone said that we couldn’t.
There are always going to be people that say that you can’t do something, that you can’t win a race, that you can’t do a job. Doing those hard things is what is going to make you great. It’s going to make you better. It can be scary at times, but pushing through that fear and defying the odds is where you’re going to learn the most as a person and as an operative and what’s really going to push you to the next level.
HPR: You said that was a fun race, but I have to imagine that it wasn’t fun all the time. What do you do mentally to prepare for something like that? How do you survive?
BA: Having a great team is the most important thing, a group of people who work well together, trust each other, get along together, and complement each other is so important. On campaigns, whether it’s a Senate race or a presidential race, there’s often infighting and drama and leaks to the press. Having a group of people who you trust, who are focused on the mission, focused on doing the best thing for the campaign, is so important. It makes your job so much easier and so much more fun every day. Having that camaraderie, that sort of team spirit, doing fun things together is really important. Building those teams from a management standpoint is not always easy, but, again, that’s where it’s almost better to have somebody who you have a camaraderie and a chemistry with instead of just going after the person who has a particular skill set or something that you see in their rèsumè. That culture fit and that camaraderie is really important.
HPR: There was an overwhelming feeling in the country that Nikki Haley came out of nowhere. Overnight, pundits went from dismissing her altogether to considering her a real contender for the Republican nomination. What did the inner workings of that campaign you ran look like that took Governor Haley from a place of relative obscurity to center stage?
BA: You are absolutely right. She was underestimated. She started with zero dollars in the bank, 2% in the polls, and there were ultimately 14 other candidates in the race. But she was the last woman standing against Trump. Between February and the first debate in August, Ron Desantis, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, Mike Pence — all of these other candidates got into the race.
The narrative at the beginning was really Trump versus Desantis. We knew that when Nikki spoke to a group of people, at a town hall in Iowa or a town hall in New Hampshire or an event in South Carolina, she won rooms. We knew that she was incredibly smart, incredibly talented, incredibly passionate, and that people connected with her. We just needed a bigger room. The debate stage in August provided us with that. All of a sudden, Nikki was being Nikki, doing what she does best, talking about the issues she cares about and how they relate to people, connecting with people on a personal level. All of the sudden people said, “Wow, she’s incredible. She offers a breath of fresh air.”
That was really the moment when people started to pay attention, when the race started to change. Nikki is an incredible candidate, person, leader, and boss, and our entire team felt and knew that. That’s why we were there working for her: because we truly believed that she would be the best leader, the best president that our country could have. Our job was just to make sure she was put in the positions where everybody could see that. It was really fun to watch Desantis and Tim Scott falter and all of these guys kind of fall like dominos, while Nikki continued to rise.
Strategically, how the race played out was kind of what we thought it would be going into Iowa and New Hampshire. It was really fun to watch, and again, when you are defying the odds, when you are doing something that everyone says that you can’t do, that’s a pretty sweet moment.
HPR: As you get the chance to talk to young people while you watch the nation become increasingly divided, are you optimistic about the future of politics?
BA: I am optimistic about the future of politics, in part because there are so many people who want to get involved. It’s easy to get frustrated about what’s going on, and I fully understand and appreciate that. It’s going to take people in this community, people across the country, people who truly care about the future of the country, who want to make this a better place, to stay involved and stay engaged.
Programs like the IOP at Harvard, the Bipartisan Campaign School at Yale, entities like this, they really foster those relationships. I love being part of bipartisan organizations and talking to people like John Anzalone about his perspective on things. There is so much more that unites us than divides us. We are in a very divisive place right now; there’s a lot of anger and we need to get past that. We can get past that. It’s going to take not only our leaders to help bring us together, but everyone in these communities to have real conversations and not just demagogue the other side. We’ve gotten to a place where there’s a lot of finger-pointing, where people want to pick fights, where the media rewards that kind of behavior.
Most people just want a better life for themselves and their families. They just want to do right by their kids. They just want to live a nice, normal life and not have to worry about all of this division and hatred. It’s going to take people getting involved and staying engaged to make that happen, but I do have faith that we will come out stronger on the other side. Just as there are growing pains in the Republican Party, there are growing pains in the Democratic Party as well, and growing pains as a country. But we will get through it and we will be stronger for it.
Associate U.S. Editor
