Her win for a fourth term as party leader last year set a record. However, her tenure was marked by failure after failure in her election. President Trump’s defeat in 2020 and the Democratic Party taking back the Senate. The predicted “red wave” did not materialize in 2022, leaving Republicans with only the thinnest and most ungovernable seats in the House majority.
And then there’s her record on the other big job of a party chair: delivering money. Last year’s RNC annual fundraising total was the lowest in a decade. At the end of January, the Democratic National Committee’s cash reserves had nearly tripled.
Meanwhile, many state Republican parties, which weren’t always strong in the best of times, have fallen into disarray fueled by a dysfunctional MAGA.
For example, in the key state of Georgia, the party spent more than $1 million in legal fees to protect fake electors, primarily party chairmen, from criminal charges. In Arizona, another state Republicans need to win in November, an audiotape appeared to show 2022 gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake offering a bribe to remove her from the Senate race. As a result, the chairman resigned. A power struggle continues in Michigan, with the new chairman locked out of the state party’s servers.
Why is this important? In 2016, it was the RNC, then under Chairman Reince Priebus, that orchestrated the get-out-the-vote operation that got Trump across the finish line. McDaniel himself led a successful state operation in Michigan. There, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by the narrowest state margin in the country (just 13,080 votes, or 0.3%).
It would be unfair to lay the blame for the RNC’s deterioration since then at the feet of Mr. McDaniel. “I don’t think there is a more difficult political climate for an RNC chair to navigate than Ronna McDaniel,” Henry Barber, a longtime RNC committee member from Mississippi, told me.
For example, it was Trump, not McDaniel, who squandered the Republican Party’s chance to retake the Senate in 2022 by endorsing fringe candidates across the country.
The real problem is that the Republican Party is no longer recognized as a political party at all, at least in the traditional sense. The Trump Organization is in the process of becoming a subsidiary.
The takeover will soon be completed with the potential Republican nominee installing a new leadership team for the RNC. Michael Whatley, a 2020 election denier and current North Carolina Party chairman, will be the committee’s chairman, and Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, will be its co-chair. Chair. Lara Trump, who is unqualified for this job other than that she is married to Eric Trump, may be willing to have political party donors pay for her father-in-law’s legal costs (including possibly a judgment in the hundreds of millions of dollars) She caused a stir by suggesting that she could not. He is accumulating. (Campaign officials have since tried to rescind it).
Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele posed the obvious question in an interview: “If I were a donor, why would I donate money to the RNC Defense Fund for Donald Trump?” Instead, he said, it makes much more sense to donate to individual Republican candidates in key races before and after the vote.
Mr. Barbour has embarked on what he acknowledges is a sure-fire effort to restore at least a semblance of normalcy to the RNC. He has proposed a resolution calling for President Trump to remain neutral until he actually has enough delegates to claim the nomination, which is likely to happen by mid-March, as well as President Trump’s legislation. Support is growing for a resolution that would ensure that donations would not be spent on financial aid. invoice.
“If we’re not spending money to win elections, then we’re not doing the right thing,” Barbour told me.But he The resolution would need the support of at least 20 of the RNC’s 168 members for a vote, but he currently has the support of only six.
In announcing his decision to step down, McDaniel said it had been “the honor and privilege of my life to serve.” Her relationship with Trump had its ups and downs, and Trump decided it was time for her to break up. Maybe she could get her name back as a farewell gift.