* NY Times…

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey may be pressing his own candidacy to be the next chairman of the Republican National Committee, but Mr. Trump, who has the final say, appears to have other ideas.

A person close to Mr. Trump said the president-elect’s allies are coalescing around Nick Ayers, a member of the transition team, to be the party’s chairman. Mercedes Schlapp, another Republican operative, is being considered for a role as co-chairwoman.

* From July…

Pence’s vice presidential race is headed by the same operative, Nick Ayers, who ran Rauner’s 2014 race for governor. Ayers described himself to me in a telephone call last year as a key player in Rauner’s campaign—the guy who drafted the campaign plan, hired staff, and handled media buying. He said, “I was the one who on election night [November 4, 2014] called [Rauner] and Diana in their hotel suite and told them we had won. I gave them the news before the AP called it.” […]

In addition to guiding Rauner, who had never run for as much as student council president before taking the state’s top job in 2014 from incumbent governor Pat Quinn, Ayers also connects to Rauner through the Schrimpf twins, Mike and Chris. When Ayers, 33, became executive director of the Republican Governors Association in 2007, he hired both Schrimpfs (also 33), Chris first, as communication director.

Ayers claims credit for later talking Mike Schrimpf into working for Rauner as communications chief, before the venture capitalist formally entered the race. Schrimpf stayed on during the campaign, and until well into Rauner’s first term […]

Interestingly, while Ayers made plenty of money working for Rauner—Politico’s Natasha Korecki reported late last year that Ayers’ Target Enterprises, which creates campaign ads, “was one of [Rauner’s]…biggest payees”

Schrimpf was in Springfield briefly last week, by the way.

* Also from July…

In 2014, Ayers reinvented himself, this time with a much lower profile, finding new success on the shadowy edges of the dark-money world, where avoiding scrutiny is the point. After the Pawlenty debacle, Ayers went to work for Target Enterprises, an ad-buying firm based in Los Angeles. Ayers and his new employer picked up work consulting on the campaign of Bruce Rauner, an extremely wealthy Republican businessman from Chicago, who ran for governor as an outsider against a crowded field of Republicans and a troubled incumbent Democrat. Shortly before Ayers went to work for Rauner, his opponents came under fire from mysterious outside groups.

The groups, based in Ohio, emerged out of the blue to lob factually dubious attacks at Rauner’s opponents, and then disappeared. Far more experienced Republican candidates and would-be candidates fell by the wayside. The Ohio groups doing the attacks—with vague names such as Jobs & Progress Fund—hid the source of their money and the motivations for the attacks. (It later came out that one of the groups was partially funded by Ayers’ old employer, the Republican Governors Association.) But the limited paper trail they left showed that they had hired Ayers’ consulting firm. Rauner’s campaign denied any knowledge of the outside groups or who was funding them, despite their close ties to Ayers.

More background on those mysterious 2014 primary ads is on this site.

* But it appeared to start even earlier…

In early 2013, Rauner was publicly considering a run for Illinois governor, as was Rep. Aaron Schock (R). Quite suddenly, a previously unknown — at least to Illinoisans — group, the Jobs & Progress Fund, began running a series of ads on television and radio tearing Schock down for allegedly voting for huge tax increases and “a mountain of debt.”

Jobs & Progress, an Ohio group, had less than a month earlier changed its name from the equally bland Ohio First for a Better Government. A politically active 501(c)(4) nonprofit, the group is not required to disclose its donors, nor did it share much else on its initial corporate filings besides the name of its attorney, David Langdon. Langdon is known in Ohio as a staunch conservative and opponent of campaign finance disclosure.

Schock wasn’t even a declared candidate at the time, though there was a good deal of buzz that he’d throw his hat into the ring. All of that immediately screeched to a halt.

“It looked to everybody that it was a brushback pitch,” said Rich Miller, a blogger and local pundit who covered the mysterious attacks at the time. “It was getting fairly clear that (Schock) was gearing up for something like that and then those ads appeared and everything kind of stopped.”