Two contenders have thrown their hats in the ring to challenge incumbent Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who is seeking a fourth term leading the party.
The news came as another potential contender, defeated Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, declined to run, calling futile any endeavor to unseat McDaniel’s “pre-baked by design” reelection run.
“But that doesn’t mean she should even be running again,” he said. “It’s time for fresh blood!”
Such fresh blood may come from any of the three candidates currently running for the spot: Republican lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, columnist for The Washington Times Michael McKenna, and My Pillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell.
According to a report in The Daily Caller, McDaniel has already received 107 public pledges of support from the 168 RNC members who will gather in a closed-door meeting Jan. 25–27 next year at Dana Point, California. There, they will select a chairperson to steer the party over the next two years. This 107-number is well over the 85-vote threshold that she needs to win, the outlet wrote.
But in recent days, many prominent Republicans have come forward to oppose that view, indicating that McDaniel doesn’t have as much support as she claims.
On Sunday, a New Jersey RNC Committee member told The Washington Times that he takes support pledges ahead of elections “with a grain of salt.”
After addressing the Tennessee Republican Party Executive Committee on Friday, Tennessee RNC Committeewoman Beth Campbell described on Twitter the sentiment that she’s heard from other members. “There’s an overwhelming support for Leadership change on the RNC,” she wrote.
On Dec. 8, the Arizona Republican Party put out a statement on Facebook, announcing that it had held an executive committee meeting and “unanimously passed a resolution” calling for McDaniel’s resignation. “The grassroots activists of the Republican Party of Arizona are committed to working hard in 2024 to deliver the state back into the Republican column for President.”
And on Dec. 13, the Republican Party of Texas followed suit, releasing a statement expressing “no confidence in the leadership of Chairman McDaniel” and urging its national delegates “to pay heed to the grassroots’ profound dissatisfaction with the RNC and to vote for an alternative to replace Chairman McDaniel when the RNC meets in January to elect a Chair.”
Harmeet Dhillon
Dhillon announced her candidacy on Fox News’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Dec. 5.
“Republicans are tired of losing,” she said. “They want to see us fighting, … [and] I’m a fighter.”
“I’m a member of the RNC, and no other member is stepping up to challenge leadership,” Dhillon, a civil liberties attorney who also currently serves as RNC national chairwoman from California, told the outlet. McDaniel hasn’t faced an opponent, Dhillon said, since she took the reins of RNC chairwoman in 2017.
She told Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, when she appeared on his podcast on Dec. 6 that the battle for 2024 starts now, in the courts. And currently, she said, the RNC can’t compete.
Democrat lawyers, she said, “go to the courts” because they’ve realized that they can’t win over state legislatures, which are where election laws are created, “so they overturn the will of the people in the courts by litigation.”
“We don’t have a cadre of lawyers who can specialize in election litigation and are willing to do it year-round,” she continued.
Dhillon, the founding attorney of both the Dhillon Law Group and her nonprofit, the Center for American Liberty, said, “I’m willing to step away from my law practice for a few years … from my nonprofit … and make it a priority to lay the groundwork now so that in 2024 a Republican is elected to the White House, good new Republicans are elected … in the Senate, and we can have a comfortable margin in the House.”
According to Dhillon Law’s website, the firm has represented the RNC in numerous lawsuits, most notably the case RNC v. Google in federal court. There, the Big Tech company is accused of sending “millions” of RNC campaign fundraising emails and other correspondence straight to Gmail users’ spam folders.
Michael McKenna
On Dec. 9, McKenna announced his run for RNC chair in the column he writes at The Washington Times.
“Since there are no powerhouse lobbyists … no sitting officeholders … and no campaign operatives … who seem to want the job of chair and since the only credential appears to be the willingness to talk and tweet more or less indefinitely, I have concluded that I will run for chair of the RNC,” his announcement read.
In his announcement, McKenna outline his leadership plan, but also used the opportunity to launch not-so-subtle attacks at current RNC Chair McDaniel, whom he called “embarrassing” because she “has managed to preside over three losing election cycles in a row.”
He described his campaign platform as “simple.”
“On day one,” he said, he will fire most if not all of the existing legacy consultants and lead the party to create “an actual platform or agenda or whatever it will be called.” He will insist that the RNC membership and employees will exist to serve elected Republican officials, volunteers, and donors, “not the other way around.” He won’t become a puppet of any 2024 presidential candidate “unlike other candidates,” he pledged, and he will resign if the Republicans underperform in the next cycle.
“There won’t be any need for an advisory council to tell me it is time to go,” he wrote.
McKenna criticized Dhillon earlier in the piece, citing that her “main claim to fame” was “being a lawyer who has done some work for Trump-adjacent folks, especially related to claims about the 2020 election” and for “maintaining an active Twitter account.”
Nowhere in his piece did McKenna mention the other contender for RNC Chair, Lindell, who earlier last month announced his bid to oust McDaniel in an exclusive interview with The National File.
Mike Lindell
Lindell, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump and his stolen election claims, told the outlet that it will take a businessman “to unlock the full potential of the Republican Party and help save America from the failed political establishment,” similar to when Trump took office in 2016.
“We need someone who knows how to run a business to lead one of the most important organizations in our country,” Lindell said.
He pointed to McDaniel’s failed leadership during the recent midterm elections where the promised red wave “failed to materialize, arriving instead as a mere pink trickle,” the outlet reported.
“We need a new input to get a different output,” Lindell said.
Lindell has yet to register a public reaction about his latest competition entering the race.
Selecting the RNC Chair
The RNC consists of 168 members, comprised of three from each of the 50 states, five territories, and the District of Columbia. These three members include one state party chair, one national committeeman, and one national committeewoman; these are the people who will vote to select the RNC chair in January.
Republican National Committeeman from Arizona Tyler Bowyer, who is also the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, laid out how the RNC chair voting process works during “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast on Dec. 6.
Of the delegates who represent each state, Bowyer said, “They get elected, generally, by the grassroots.” The state party leader, called the Republican state party chair, gets one vote, he explained. “Then there’s a national committeeman and a national committeewoman for every state.”
Bowyer said that most of these people are prominent Republicans, many of whom are grassroots-oriented, “so they have to hear from people about what their thoughts are.”
He explained how the RNC leadership is selected. “You have a chair and a cochair,” he said. Just like in the states, “one has to be male, and one has to be female …These are the rules. So, if the chair is male, the cochair has to be female, and vice versa.”
He then went on to propose a likely scenario. Because two men and two women are currently running, he said, “some kind of formulation could work together between chair and cochair.”
For instance, he explained, “Harmeet and Mike, if they have issues with Ronna, they could run essentially together and support each other.”
Bowyer also related how the actual vote works. “It’s a majority vote, so it’s rounds and rounds of voting,” he said.
“It’s basically like runoff after runoff after runoff. Sometimes these things go for six, seven, eight rounds.”