RNC chief McDaniel heads for exits, leaving mess behind
It was no doubt with a measure of relief that Ronna McDaniel announced on Monday that she was giving up the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee on March 8, nearly a year early.
Consider how much the woman once known as Ronna Romney McDaniel has had to prostrate herself to get and hold the job – starting with acceding to Donald Trump’s pressure to quit using the family name that had propelled her rise to party chairman in Michigan, a state where her grandfather George W. Romney had been governor. She also parted ways with her uncle Mitt Romney, the Utah senator and 2012 GOP nominee, over Trump.
Her election last year to a fourth term at the helm of the party set a record. But hers has been a tenure marked by one electoral failure after another: the 2018 midterms that returned the House to Democratic control and ended the GOP’s one-party rule in Washington; Trump’s defeat in 2020 that was coupled with the Democrats taking back the Senate; the expected “red wave” that failed to materialize in 2022, giving the GOP only the thinnest and most ungovernable of majorities in the House.
Then there is her record on the other big job for the party chairman: bringing in money. Last year saw the RNC’s lowest annual fundraising total in a decade. At the end of January, the Democratic National Committee had nearly three times as much cash on hand.
Meanwhile, many Republican state parties – which have not always been particularly strong players – have disintegrated into a dysfunctional MAGA-fueled mess.
In the key state of Georgia, for instance, the party has spent more than $1 million on legal fees, largely to defend fake electors, including the party chairman, from criminal charges. In Arizona, another state that Republicans must win in November, the chairman stepped down after the leak of an audio tape in which he appeared to be offering a bribe to get 2022 gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake out of the Senate race. In Michigan, an ongoing power struggle has seen the new chairman locked out of the state party’s servers.
Why does any of this matter? In 2016, it was the RNC, then under chairman Reince Priebus, that organized the get-out-thevote operation that pulled candidate Trump over the finish line. McDaniel herself ran the successful state operation in Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by the tightest state margin in the country – a mere 13,080 votes, or 0.3%.
It is unfair to put the blame for the RNC’s deterioration since then at McDaniel’s feet. “I don’t think any RNC chair has had a more difficult political landscape to navigate than Ronna McDaniel,” Henry Barbour, a longtime RNC committeeman from Mississippi, told me.
For instance, it wasn’t McDaniel but Trump who squandered the GOP’s chances of taking back the Senate in 2022 by endorsing fringe candidates across the map.
The real problem is that the Republican Party is no longer recognizable, at least in the traditional sense, as a political party at all. It is being turned into a subsidiary of the Trump Organization.
The takeover will soon be complete when the Republican nominee-inwaiting installs the RNC’s new leadership team: 2020 election denier Michael Whatley, currently head of the North Carolina party, as chairman, with Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump as co-chair.
Barbour has embarked on what he acknowledges is a certain-to-fail effort to restore at least a semblance of normalcy to the RNC. He is collecting support for resolutions that would require it to remain neutral until Trump has actually secured enough delegates to claim the nomination – which will likely be the case by mid-March – and another that would assure it does not spend donor money on Trump’s legal bills.
“If we’re not spending money on winning elections, we’re not doing the right thing,” Barbour told me. But he needs the support of at least 20 of the RNC’s 168 members to bring the resolutions to a vote, and at this point, he has only six.
In announcing her decision to step down, McDaniel said it has been “the honor and privilege of my life to serve.” Her relationship with Trump has had ups and downs, and he has decided it is time for her to go. As a parting gift, perhaps he could let her have her name back.