Republicans Hang on to Ronna McDaniel as RNC Chair
The rats aboard the sinking Republican Leadership yacht were supposedly squabbling in the run up to the vote for the next chair of the RNC at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach luxury hotel in Dana Point, California.
When it came time to announce the victor, the party decided to keep on keeping on with its current leadership.
Incumbent Chair Ronna McDaniel–originally selected by former President Trump–won a fourth term, garnering 111 of the 167 votes cast.
In opening remarks at the meeting, in response to inquiries about why the GOP was meeting in deep-blue California, McDaniel said: "I just wanted to rub Nancy Pelosi’s face in it one more time. She is no longer speaker of the House.”
Challenging McDaniel, nee Romney (dropped because Dear Leader can’t stand her father), were Harmeet Dhillon - an RNC committee member from California leads the Republican National Lawyers Association, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
To sum up, the choices were:
Current chair + Fake-electors scheme co-conspirator, Ronna McDaniel
Harmeet Dhillon, Federalist Society puppet, Trumpist, Anti-masker, election-denier
Wack-a-doodle Qonspiracist + My pillow fraud, Mike Lindell
The pre-vote campaigning was… very Republican, complete with name-calling, whispered religious bigotry, and delusional claims.
From Time Magazine:
One RNC committee member said that Dhillon’s critiques of the party’s leadership can be alienating to some. “Harmeet brings up lots of good, valid concerns about the direction of the RNC,” says the member, who requested anonymity. “But I think the message and tactics have been too harsh. And some of the people around her are very harsh, very divisive.”
“You know what’s divisive?” Dhillon told me in response. “Losing elections repeatedly and asking to be reelected.” Still, she addressed those concerns in an email she sent to all of the committee members on Monday, making the case that they needed to take a leap into the unknown if they want to win elections again. “Making a change to RNC leadership requires members to get out of their comfort zones,” she wrote.
Advance polling of Republicans not invited to Dana Point showed overwhelming support for a change in leadership.
An earlier poll from Trafalgar Group found that 86% of 1,072 respondents favored electing RNC Chair candidate Harmeet Dhillon. These results were iffy, given Trafalgar’s utter failure in predicting a Red Wave in the midterm elections.
Rasmussen, another polling outfit with a right wing bias, showed Lindell (30%) over Dhillon (20%), and McDaniel with only 15% support.
Surprise! All the GOP polling was wrong!
Dhillon campaigned with the promise that Lindell, who’s blown a fortune and nearly all his credibility, would have a role in RNC’s marketing and communication efforts if she wins, but “not in the elections department.”
Florida Gov Ron Desantis endorsed Harmeet Dhillon, saying “We’ve had 3 substandard election cycles in a row .. I think it’s time for a change.”
Who was the MAGA candidate?
All of them and none of them:. Via Vice:
The party isn’t looking to pivot hard away from MAGA. But many RNC members recognize that a backward-looking obsession with election conspiracy theories cost them at the polls last cycle. Most want a leader who can help refocus on the future, which includes navigating a contested presidential primary between Trump and numerous other candidates without appearing to pick sides, while doing the tedious and unglamorous work of fundraising, list-building, and field organizing to be ready for 2024.
Despite a growing sense within the GOP that the former President is damaged goods, openly opposing his wishes is something just not done at this point. McDaniel and Dhillon both courted the mostly closeted not-Trump faction while claiming allegiance to the MAGA base.
Lindell was a loose cannon, looking to peddle his victimhood as a qualification for leadership:
Iowa Republican Party Chairman Jeff Kaufmann told VICE News that Lindell was running a “pseudo-campaign” that didn’t amount to more than some cookie-cutter form emails from fringe activists.
He said that illustrated how bad a job Lindell would do as RNC chairman if he won at the core part of the job: winning elections.
“His candidacy for the RNC shows he doesn’t know how to campaign for an office. Do you see the irony here? He’s campaigning to be the RNC chair for more campaigns, and his campaign for RNC chair is a bunch of boilerplate emails that have come very, very late,” Kaufmann told VICE News. “Making pillows and winning elections—I don’t think there’s a correlation there.”
Lindell ended up getting just 4 votes.
Voting for RNC Chair was by secret ballot, with the 168 voting members/proxies putting paper slips in a box hand counted inside the room. After the 1st vote for Chair, if there had been no majority, the candidate with the lowest vote total would be removed and another round of voting would ensue between the remaining candidates
Now that the voting is done, making peace within the party is going to be an uphill slog, as NBC noted in a story posted prior to the vote:
But members gathered here at the party’s winter meeting say that once all the votes are counted, the tensions are unlikely to quickly subside.
“After this is over tomorrow, it’s not over,” said Jonathan Barnett, an RNC committeeman from Arkansas who is backing challenger Harmeet Dhillon to lead the party. “It’s going to take some time to do some rebuilding, and Harmeet still has a strong voice. All of us who are supporting Harmeet are not going away.”
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A bit of context here… There’s an increasing sense that the ex-President’s legal troubles are about to take a turn for the worse. Will the GOP turn into a defense committee? Can candidates run against Trump without talking about his legal troubles? How out-of-control will the ex-president get with his social media postings once bad news surfaces?
It’s going to be a tough presidential election for Republicans.
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