Race for GOP chair obscures party’s bigger problems
Conspiracy theories and infighting reign
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.
McDaniel, who was handpicked 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.
But McDaniel is not facing moderation-minded challengers. Her rivals are from the Trumpist right. 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.”
The candidacy of Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who exemplifies the conspiracy-driven fringe, has put still more right-wing pressure on McDaniel, who refuses to say Joe Biden was fairly elected in 2020. (Lindell’s latest conspiracy theory is that Governor 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.”
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-outthe-vote efforts. She cited a New York Times analysis that showed that Republican voter turnout in November was robust.
The problem: Many of those Republicans appeared to vote for Democrats.
“We don’t pick the candidate,” she said. “We do not do the messaging for the candidates, right? They pick consultants, and their own pollsters. So what does the RNC do? We build the infrastructure. We do the voter registration.”