Texan VP pick envisions new GOP
Mindy Finn imagines rallying the discouraged legions of the Republican Party into a new political force when this election is over. For now, the Kingwood native is the vice presidential candidate on the independent ticket of Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent and investment banker offering himself as an alternative for president to the two major party candidates and doing quite well in his home state of Utah.
“We believe we are building a new conservative movement,” Finn said from the campaign trail in Utah, where McMullin, 40, a former Republican, ranks a surprising second in an aggregation of statewide polls.
Their campaign is not as much about winning the presidency as keeping conservatism on the scene of a presidential election in which, as Finn sees it, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump,
has bucked the ideals of the party that is dear to her. Right after Trump launched his presidential campaign, she publicly opposed him, viewing him as a New York liberal at heart who could damage her mainstream conservative party.
Before she ran an insurgency against the GOP, she climbed her way up in the Republican party, working on two presidential campaigns, several private ventures and on the Republican National Committee. In spite of the long hours in Washington, she still comes home to see the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo almost every year.
At 36, Finn has spent the last 15 years on the forefront of politics in the Digital Age, helping modernize the Republican Party.
“I would call her one of the leading voices and innovators in digital politics,” said Julie Germany, former director of George Washington University’s Institute of Politics, Democracy and the Internet, where Finn was named a fellow in 2007.
Now, a question looms over Finn’s future: inside or outside of the Republican party? The answer hangs on the broader uncertainty of how the GOP will emerge from Tuesday’s election.
“This is going to be pretty messy,” said Matt Mackowiak, an Austin GOP strategist who voted for the McMullin and Finn. “There are going to be some that believe we need to start a new party. That is apparently what McMullin (and Finn) wants to do.
“My hope is they will come back into the party,” he added, noting the duo may not be warmly welcomed by all after opposing the Republican presidential ticket.
Finn grew up in Kingwood in the 1980s, before the West Lake Houston Bridge spanned the San Jacinto River, before the town had a big-name grocery store and before it was annexed by the city of Houston. Her parents divorced when she was 2, and she lived with her mother, Karen. Inspired by mother
Childhood friends said she was driven by a sense of competition in whatever she did, from neighborhood bike races and games of Tetris to piano lessons, the swim team, academics and the high school dance team.
“She excelled at everything,” said Rebecca Grif- fin, who grew up next door to Finn and considers her family.
“Alot of it had to do with making her mom proud,” said Sarah Redmond, Griffin’s younger sister. “Mindy and her mom were each other’s best friends.”
Finn attributes her early career ambitions and her political convictions to her mother, a New York City transplant whom she saw as a source of advice and wisdom for people in the tight-knit Kingwood community.
Karen Finn ran an accounting business out of the garage, and daughter Mindy filed papers as a teenaged employee. From her mother, Finn said she inherited a “philosophy that empowerment comes from self-reliance,” reverence for free markets and her lifelong Republican leaning.
Finn graduated in the top 5 percent of her Kingwood High School class and, despite her mother’s protests, flew cross country to study journalism at Boston University, where she hoped to meet a diverse crowd, including a robust Jewish community she had lacked in Kingwood, a master-planned community straddling Harris and Montgomery counties. She became secretary of the college Republicans club.
In the fall of 2001, Finn’s senior year, she worked an internship in Washington D.C., covering Congress for the Waterbury Republican American, a small newspaper in Connecticut. Her first day on the job, Sept. 11, 2001, planes crashed into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York.
“I was thrown into the deep end,” she said. “I felt this intense pressure to report the biggest story we’d had in decades as a 20-year-old inexperienced intern reporter.”
She wrote a series of front-page stories that semester, and her fascination with life inside the beltway began to bud, so much so that she returned there after college. Despite her early success, she decided journalism was not for her, longing instead for conservative activism.
So, Finn and a friend rented a one-bedroom apartment and she began knocking on doors in Congress, looking for a job. Pivoting to politics
Then, in September 2002, her mother died of cancer. Finn called it her worst fear come true. Nothing in Washington, seemed that scary by comparison.
Finn said she threw herself into her work, both for the distraction and because she realized she was alone. Her career as a digital strategist was beginning.
She helped build an interactive website for U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, in 2003, a year when few Congressional offices had webpages, a job that led to a call the next year from the BushCheney reelection team.
She wound up joining the team’s seven-person “eCampaign” team, where she drafted emails that eventually would bear the president’s signature and helped hone a micro-targeting scheme that divided the campaign’s email list of seven million names into 32 categories for tailored outreach, now a mainstay of political campaigns.
When that campaign ended, its director, Michael Turk, went to head up digital efforts at the Republican National Committee, and he brought Finn, who he called a “tireless worker and incredibly dedicated.”
“We saw the opportunity to really make the RNC think different about what it was doing online,” Turk said.
Included in that was an online video series intended to humanize Republican political celebrities and foster party loyalty. The then-24-year-old Finn was picked as co-host, bantering with party big shots in a makeshift studio in the RNC basement. When the show garnered an audience, party leaders decided to ditch the basement in exchange for a professional studio and scripts. The new version flopped.
“People wanted authenticity,” Finn said. “That was part of the point.”
In 2007, Finn ran Mitt Romney’s digital campaign as a senior staffer with her own team.
In 2009, she married Jewish investment analyst David Feinberg. It was important to her, she said, to find someone of her own faith, which she says is now a big part of her life. The couple has two sons. Anti-Trump sentiment
In the meantime, she went on to co-found a digital consulting firm, with clients ranging from U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to Google. She later sold her stake to join Twitter’s Washington staff.
As an “advocate at heart,” however, corporate work did not satisfy her. She returned to independent consulting and started a nonprofit called Empowered Women. The nonprofit’s mission was to foster leadership aspirations in young women.
When Trump, the swashbuckling New York real estate magnate, kicked off his Republican campaign in 2015, Finn grew concerned.
She knew Trump as a “typical liberal New Yorker for all his adult life,” and believed she had seen him make political pivots in recent years “pretty transparently aimed at a run as a Republican.”
From Trump’s first campaign speech, Finn feared what his candidacy could do to the party for which she had labored so long and hard.
So, she resolved that Trump must not carry the conservative banner.
She appeared in TV interviews as an outspoken Republican voice against Trump and became a founding figure in the Never Trump movement, which hoped to block the mogul’s chance at the nomination. When that failed, movement leaders recruited McMullin to run against Trump as an independent conservative. McMullin tapped Finn, citing her background in technology and business, her like-mindedness and her courage.
“As lifelong conservatives, Mindy and I both realized full-well the risks we’d be taking in this race; we’d be called traitors and we were jeopardizing our future professional opportunities,” McMullin said in an emailed statement. “However, our belief in this fight made all the risks worth it.”
Their independent campaign ticket will appear on 11 state ballots and has write-in status on 30 others.
Finn said she will rejoin the Republican ranks after this election only if the party leadership “categorically repudiates the racists, sexists and religiously bigoted rhetoric that Donald Trump has normalized.” From the ashes
Otherwise, she sees a place for herself in a new organization “that is unequivocally for the equality of all men and women,” made up of the conservatives who fled the GOP.
Trump has “toxified” the GOP brand, said Avik Roy, a Republican strategist who advised the presidential campaigns of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
“A younger generation of conservatives want a more inclusive conservative movement,” Roy said. “I think the only way a center-right party is successful at the national level is if a new party emerges from the ashes. I think Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn are trying to do that.”
He estimated it would take 20 years for a new party to establish itself. Still, it is hard to imagine a formidable alternative in the near future to the Republican Party, which currently has 31 governors, 54 U.S. senators, 248 U.S. representatives and majorities in at least one state house in most states.
“We cannot give up on the Republican Party,” Mackowiak, the Austin GOPstrategist, said. “I just don’t see how that would work.”