UPDATED 5:25 p.m. — 9/21/10

In an interview with KGMB Saturday night, James “Duke” Aiona, the Republican candidate for governor, said: “We’ve been growing as a party since 2002.”

On Monday, when this Fact Check was posted as “in progress,” Civil Beat tried to get a hold of an Aiona representative to clarify exactly what the gubernatorial candidate was referring to. It seemed that there were two possibilities: Membership in the Hawaii Republican Party or Republican representation in government.

The 2002 date was significant because that’s when Aiona was elected lieutenant governor in the administration of Gov. Linda Lingle, the first Republican governor since 1962.

We e-mailed and called the Aiona campaign to clarify, but did not initially hear back. So, we called the Hawaii Republican Party and spoke with Executive Director Dylan Nonaka. He told us on Monday afternoon that, while currently there are about 20,000 registered Republicans in Hawaii, the party did not keep track of figures going back to 2002. Or even 2009, for that matter.

So, we figured, Aiona must have been referring to representation. No growth there, we found. (See the chart at the bottom of this article for our figures.)

On Monday evening, we received an e-mail from Aiona’s communication director, Travis Taylor.

Taylor said: “Duke meant that we have more members in the Hawaii Republican Party than in 2002, and we’re continuing to grow. His statement is correct, according to figures we’ve heard from the party.”

That was confusing, given that we had already heard from the Republican party that it doesn’t keep such figures.

So back to the party we went on Tuesday morning.

Nonaka again told us that the party doesn’t keep registration numbers from the past. However, he said he would contact Taylor to clarify the situation and get back to us.

He did.

“OK, we had two different understandings of what the question was,” Nonaka said when he called Civil Beat. “If you’re looking for the number of people who have joined the party since 2002, it’s a little over 5,000. I thought you wanted how many members were in the party in 2002 and how many members were in today, and that we cannot do.”

That seemed strange. How could Aiona say membership had risen without a base number in 2002 to compare with today?

To make sure we weren’t missing something, we asked: “So you don’t know how many were in the party in 2002, but you know how many have increased since 2002?”

Nonaka replied: “The way it works is, it’s a rolling database and the membership is based off of registered voters. Obviously, if a party member moved to California, they don’t tell us. So, what we do is every year, a couple times a year, we buy the registered voter list and then, in order to be a Hawaii Republican Party member, you must be a registered voter. So, if they drop off the registration rolls, we remove them from the database. So today we could have lost two people, gained five people. It’s a net gain of three.”

Nonaka continued: “Are all 5,000 people still members? I don’t know… But if you’re looking for how many joined the party, that’s the number.”

Actually, we weren’t looking for how many had joined the party. That’s not what Aiona had been speaking about. He said the party had grown.

We were still lost. (Forgive us.) Civil beat asked: “You said yesterday that today, you could say about 20,000 people or so (belong to the party). So, I guess what I’m trying to figure out, is if you had 5,000 grow since 2002, would it be fair to say you had 15,000 in 2002?”

Nonaka replied: “No, it’s not. And again, I’m saying hypothetically here, because I don’t know how many people were members in 2002. I mean, because literally, we could have had 10,000 members in 2002 and 20,000 today, but it could have been, we had 10,000 people join and then 7,000 people leave and then 5,000 people join and then 2,000 people leave. You’re talking about net versus growth numbers.”

What we were tying to figure out was whether or not total party membership has grown since 2002, as Aiona said, and whether the party kept figures to back that claim up.

We asked: “I mean, just using your example, you could have gained 5,000, but lost 5,001? Right?”

Nonaka replied: “Yes.”

So, what did we learn?

First, that Aiona was in fact talking about party membership. Taylor, his spokesman, told us so.

Second, that despite the claim that Republicans have gained 5,000 new members since 2002, the party may very well have lost 10,000. It didn’t know.

Bottom line: The party can’t say whether it has grown its membership because it doesn’t have historical data.

And, just in case you are interested in whether Aiona would have been correct if his statement had referred to representation by Republicans, below you’ll find the table we built on how that’s changed since 2002.

You can judge for yourself what you think of the party’s “growth” since 2002, but the numbers don’t add up unless you consider a single seat in Congress — Charles Djou‘s — as being worth more than the 13 seats the party lost in the House and the one it lost in the Senate.