DANA POINT, Calif. – When the Republican Party decided whether to award party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel again after three bad elections, she continued to ignore the 239-or-more-pound elephant, wear orange makeup, and attempt a coup. room.
Since the beginning of McDaniel’s tenure at the Republican National Committee in 2017, Democrats won back the House in 2018, won the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and enjoyed the best midterm for the party that controlled the White House in decades, almost without losing the House. This past November and actually took a seat in the Senate.
In each of those elections, voters said one of the main motivating factors was their dislike of former President Donald Trump — a dislike that manifested itself in 2022 when he lost to Trump-backed Republicans in key statewide races.
“When Republicans look at Sen. [Chuck] Schumer who is the president of the US Senate, there is no one to blame but Don Trump,” said Bill Palatucci of New Jersey, one of Trump’s most outspoken critics on the 168-member committee, referring to the role of the New York Democrat who continues to be the majority leader.
Despite this, in pitches and arguments both for and against McDaniel, Trump’s name almost never appeared.
Her primary challenger, California RNC member Harmeet Dhillon, has been making it clear to Republicans and conservatives across the country for weeks that he is “tired of losing.” That said, McDaniel actually has five bad elections, counting the Georgia runoffs in 2020 and 2022 as separate events.
Of course, it wasn’t McDaniel who alienated a key bloc of Republican-leaning suburban swing voters with his chaotic and dishonest leadership style, attempted blackmail of Ukraine and, on January 6, 2021, a coup attempt to stay in power. It was not McDaniel who traveled to Georgia before the runoffs in 2020 and told voters that the election was rigged, thus depressing turnout and leading to two Democratic wins. And it wasn’t McDaniel who recruited a candidate in 2022 based exclusively on his willingness to lie that the 2020 election had been stolen.
A close ally of Dhillon’s race for the seat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that if RNC members decide that Trump really is a major problem, then McDaniel — whom Trump picked for the job six years ago — should be someone else. solution.
Dhillon refused to participate in Trump’s various lawsuits to overturn his 2020 election defeat, the ally said, while McDaniel allowed Trump’s legal team of Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani to hold a strange news conference at the RNC headquarters where they claimed a plot involving the death of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has stolen Trump’s victory from the people.
“Maybe the answer is we don’t have to have a leader who spends all his time trying to catch Donald Trump,” the ally said.
For his part, McDaniel in his own defense did not blame Trump by name for a loss that could clearly, according to exit polls, be laid at his feet.
However, he argued that the role of the RNC is to register voters and raise money, and that the committee does not select candidates or offer campaign strategies. The closest he came to explaining that candidates who won primaries based on their willingness to re-elect Trump because he was a poor general election nominee was to show that in all but one contested state, at least one Republican could win. statewide – proving that the party is indeed laying the groundwork for success.
While Trump’s allies in Arizona and Georgia argue that the RNC did not do enough to nominate Kari Lake for governor or Senate nominee Herschel Walker, McDaniel believes that the single biggest vote in Arizona is Kimberly Yee, the Republican treasurer candidate, and eight. Republicans win statewide races in Georgia.
Indeed, Yee, when he won twice, got 120,000 more votes than Lake. In Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp won 203,000 more votes than Walker. Yee was ignored by Trump, while Kemp was one of the candidates Trump worked hard to defeat in the primaries.
Trump’s avoidance has led to related questions about how to hold Democrats in early and absentee voting. Both McDaniel and Dhillon emphasized the importance of improving Republican ballot “chasing” programs. However, he ignored the fact that the party was a pioneer in this tactic, but then threw away the advantage when Trump announced in early 2020 that the vote was fraudulent.
When Fox Business host Stuart Varney challenged him last month to explain why it wasn’t all Trump’s fault, McDaniel said it didn’t take too long, and that he had provided an “after action” report to understand what happened in the midterms. “Now I’m not participating in the blame game. We have to do an analysis. I think it’s too soon,” he said.
Instead of blaming Trump, McDaniel has decried the aggressive campaign mounted by Dhillon, which includes urging conservative audiences across the country to badger local RNC members into voting for change.
Dhillon has attacked McDaniel for spending too much on consultants and party vendors — even though Dhillon himself has received $1.3 million in payments from the RNC since appearing at Trump White House social media events in 2019. and other allowances.
In a recent podcast hosted by an ally of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell, McDaniel said Dhillon ran a “scorched earth” campaign against him. “I watched a woman who I thought was my friend do that to me,” she said.
Some RNC members believe that Dhillon’s style, and especially grassroots activists for lobbying, may work against him.
“Some tactics have been overbearing and probably backfired,” said one senior member of the RNC, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The member said that, in the end, Republicans who are ready to move on from Trump appear to be in the wrong place if they are focusing on Friday’s election at the committee’s winter meeting – which will also include the nomination pillowmonger turned election conspiracy theorist. Mike Lindell.
“Who will be nominated for ’24 is the most important thing,” said the member. “This is a real fight for the future of the party. It’s not the chairmanship of the RNC race.
That offers little consolation to Republicans who are desperate for the party to bypass Trump.
Dan Eberhart, the head of an oil services company and a major Republican donor who has sounded the alarm about Trump for years, said the recent election is proof that the party needs to act quickly.
“The RNC should focus on winning the election instead of trying to stay on Trump’s good side. Winning the election requires a candidate who can succeed with the general election voters and not just the partisan primary,” he said. “Trump’s base may want to eliminate Republicans it considers disloyal, but it makes the party smaller and weaker. We need to attract more voters if we want to govern, not fewer.
Amanda Carpenter, a former top aide to Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, said, unfortunately, it is too much to expect for the RNC to take the lead in breaking away from Trump.
“Republicans want to win again, of course. They know they can’t do it with Trump. But I don’t expect the rank and file to be loud, unless there’s someone else to go on,” he said. . It is in limbo until now.