The Party’s Bigger Problems are Solved by the Race for GOP Chair

Since former President Donald Trump’s narrow victory in 2016, the Republican Party has suffered at the ballot box every two years, from the loss of the House in 2018 to the loss of the White House and Senate in 2020 to this year’s history-defying midterm disappointments.

Many in the party have now found a scapegoat for the GOP’s struggles who is not named Trump: the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel.

But as McDaniel struggles for a fourth term at the party’s helm, her reelection fight before the clubby 168 members of the Republican National Committee next month may be diverting GOP leaders from any serious consideration of the thornier problems facing the party heading into the 2024 presidential campaign.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

McDaniel, who was hand-picked by Trump in late 2016 to run the party and whom he enlisted in a scheme to draft fake electors to perpetuate his presidency, could be considered a Trump proxy by Republicans eager to begin to eradicate what many consider to be the party’s preeminent problem: the former president’s influence over the GOP.

Those Republicans, whose voices have grown louder in the wake of the party’s weak November showing, see any hopes of wooing swing voters and moderates back to the GOP as imperiled by Trump’s endless harping on his own grievances; the taint surrounding his efforts to remain in power after his 2020 defeat; and the continuing dramas around purloined classified documents, his company’s tax fraud conviction and his insistence on trying to make a political comeback.

McDaniels does not face moderate-minded opponents. Her competitors are from the Trumpist left. They include pillow salesman Mike Lindell, who continues to spin out fanciful election conspiracies, and — more worrying for McDaniel — a Trump loyalist from California, Harmeet Dhillon, who is backed by some of Trump’s fiercest defenders, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a youthful group of pro-Trump rightists.

McDaniel has accused Dhillon, who was co-chair of the election-denying group Lawyers for Trump in 2020, of conducting “a scorched-earth campaign” against her by rallying outside activists “to put maximum pressure on the RNC members” who will choose the party leader for the next two years in late January in Dana Point, California.

“It’s been a very vitriolic campaign,” McDaniel said in an interview, adding: “I’m all for scorched earth against Democrats. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do against other Republicans.”

McDaniel is under even more right-wing pressure because Lindell, MyPillow CEO, is running for the presidency. McDaniel refuses to believe that Joe Biden was fairly reelected in 2020. (Lindell’s latest conspiracy theory is that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Trump’s biggest rival so far for the 2024 presidential nomination, unfairly won reelection in November.)

The circus brewing ahead of the RNC’s Jan. 25 gathering does not bode well for members who believe the party’s troubles stem from Trump.

“The former president has done so much damage to this country and to this party,” said Bill Palatucci, a committee member from New Jersey, who described the RNC chair election as shaping up to be “a Hobson’s choice.”

“We have to acknowledge that 2022 was a disaster, and we need to do things differently,” he said, adding, “I would prefer and still hope there would be a different option.”

The RNC has undertaken what it says is a serious analysis of the 2022 results, led by Henry Barbour of Mississippi, the son of the state’s former governor, Haley Barbour, and a co-author of the so-called autopsy that the party ordered up after Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss. That report counseled a more inclusive attitude toward voters of color and moderate swing voters, and a more open stand on overhauling immigration laws — the opposite tack taken by the party during the Trump era.

Jane Brady, a former Delaware attorney general, and Kim Borchers (a member of the 2022 review committee) are co-chairs. However, Dhillon is also co-chairing it. Dhillon has spent the last weeks rallying the hard right and not courting center.

Dhillon suggested in an interview that McDaniel should be replaced.

“There may be many reasons for the various losses over the last several years, but what they all have in common is that they occurred under the current leadership, which has promised to change exactly nothing in the next two years,” she said. “The most unifying thing that Ronna could do would be to move on to new challenges, and allow us to unite around a vision that includes much-needed reforms, improvements, and investments in a winning future.”

McDaniel’s enemies are growing. The Republican Party of Florida has scheduled a noconfidence vote against McDaniel during the second quarter of January. The chair of the Nebraska Republican Party withdrew his support of McDaniel, citing an “ever growing divide” among both RNC members and “now, even more so, Republicans across the nation.” The executive committee of the Texas Republican Party unanimously passed a nonbinding vote of no-confidence in McDaniel, and the Arizona GOP publicly called on her to resign.

Still, the Republican National Committee chair’s race is the ultimate inside game; only members get a vote. Michael Kuckelman, the Kansas Republican Party’s chair, and an RNC Member, stated that he believes McDaniel can easily win another term.

Dhillon’s pressure campaign is likely bolstering McDaniel’s support among committee members she has befriended over the past six years, he said, and potentially damaging Dhillon’s chances of leading the party in the future. Around two-thirds of the committee’s members have already said they will back McDaniel’s reelection.

Kuckelman said McDaniel was unfairly being blamed for losing key Senate and House elections. “Everybody needs to bring the temperature down a little bit,” he said. “Ronna McDaniel does not pick candidates. Republicans do that during the primaries. Her job is to get the vote out, and she does get the vote out.”

Moreover, Dhillon’s tactics have antagonized some committee members.

At Turning Point USA’s conference last week in Phoenix — where recriminations and sniping at fellow Republicans seemed to be a theme — Dhillon appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show and took her own shots at the committee she seeks to lead.

“Consultants are running the building at the RNC,” she told Bannon before a cheering crowd. “Those consultants get paid whether we win or lose.”

Her accusations have upset her colleagues. On an internal committee listserv, Jeff Kent, a committee member from Washington, wrote that Dhillon “does not have the right to go on national television and defame the character of the RNC members who have chosen not to support her.”

Turning Point Conference concluded with a straw vote in which only 2.2% of 1,150 conference participants chose McDaniel for their preferred party chairman moving forward. Kirk then emailed all 168 voting members of the committee to tell them the group would challenge any member who did not heed the call of the party’s activists.

Palatucci stated that McDaniel is still favored to be reelected, but that anything could happen in the next month.

“A lot of her support is soft, and some could be convinced to vote for somebody else,” he said. “RNC members are very experienced politicians. They’re experts at looking you in the eye and saying, ‘I love you,’ and in a secret ballot slitting your throat.”

All this fighting is about a position whose salary was above $358,000 in 2022 and whose responsibilities, at best, are peripheral to midterm election.

In the interview, McDaniel boasted of investments the party has made — in community centers to engage voters of color, especially Latinos; in voter registration drives; and in get-out-the-vote efforts. A New York Times analysis showed that Republican voter participation in November was high.

Problem is, many of these Republicans were seen voting for Democrats.

“We don’t pick the candidate,” she said. “We do not do the messaging for the candidates, right? They choose their consultants and their pollsters. What is the RNC’s role? We create the infrastructure. We do the voter registration.”

The committee’s role becomes more pivotal during the presidential campaign, raising money for the party’s nominee and staging the convention, which is set for mid-July 2024 in Milwaukee. It will also attempt to unite the party in a highly contentious primary season.

The president is often the one calling the shots from the White House, so party chairs are usually in the back row. McDaniel stated that she only began to stamp her mark on the RNC after Trump’s departure. “These last few years, in my mind, have been the first few years I’ve been able to really innovate,” she said.

She pointed out that efforts such as voter registration, Republican community centres, and legal actions related to voting are important and should be maintained. “We have to keep that going heading into a presidential year,” she said. “After that, I will happily step aside.”

But McDaniel’s keep-it-going attitude may be her biggest liability. Some committee members who do not like Dhillon’s tactics or solutions nevertheless worry about the current chair’s insistence that all is well.

“We need a leadership change; the bottom line is the status quo is unacceptable,” Palatucci said. “This election is a month and a half away. There are many things that can happen. I’m expecting some movement. And certainly the storm that Harmeet is instigating is causing a very good debate within the committee, and that’s worth having.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company