The Washington Post reports today on how the National Republican Congressional Committee is relying on telemarketing to attract more, smaller doners in light of new restrictions on large donations to the parties.

The interesting part of this shift is the ideological commitments of the consultants behind it.

[At InfoCision], chief executive Gary Taylor hires workers — all of them Republicans — to call Republicans to ask them to give to Republicans. The NRCC sometimes sends along lists of potential donors it buys from conservative groups or magazines, too….

In contrast to some telemarketing companies, InfoCision works exclusively for conservative groups. In the 1990s, it turned down an overture from Bill Clinton’s campaign.

These aren’t volunteers calling party members on their own time, but they also aren’t your run of the mill telemarketer out to make a buck. They’re something different. InfoCision, and other companies like it, are using party membership to define not just their audience, but themselves. This is not new (see Citizen Coors, for example), but the potential synergy of a party-based audience, a party-based workforce, and modern technologies that allow careful tracking, grooming and cultivating of donor lists is chilling.