No Reason to Replace RNC Chair

The right party chair can make the difference between winning and losing. And the race is on.

The first job of a national party chair is to secure their political base by uniting the disparate factions. Otherwise, the factions can tear a party apart the way the mugwumps tore the GOP apart in 1884, propelling Democrat Grover Cleveland back into the White House.

The current chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, is the niece of former presidential nominee and current U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah. And she’s an unflinching Trump loyalist.

It requires deftness to unite the Republican Regulars with the MAGAs. That kind of suave touch is rare.

House Speaker-aspirant Kevin McCarthy recently got the UltraMAGA Marjorie Taylor Greene to rally to his standard. But surely McDaniel has set the standard for uniting the fractious GOP.

Little wonder most of the national committee people want her for a historic fourth term. In addition to straddling the party’s MAGA/Regulars divide, McDaniel provided the Republican Party with what The Washington Post described as “a huge financial edge heading into the 2018 midterms.”

As for that: Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh taught us that “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” The left likes to complain that there’s too much money in politics. Untrue! As I wrote at Forbes almost a decade ago, There’s much too little money in politics.

There I said,

“One can't redirect a multi-trillion dollar entity with nothing but good ideas, eloquence, and gallantry. Those who wish to see their ideals reflected in government policy have a constitutional right … and a civic duty … to underwrite, generously, the advocates, institutions, and candidates of their choice. The left seeks the funding advantage. If it seizes it, whether by cunning or by virtue of more, and more generous, donors, the left will shape the future of America very much to its own vision. And the right will have nobody but itself to blame.”

McDaniel has taken the duty to raise big money for GOP races seriously.

Who’s considering challenging McDaniel? Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., recently, as reported by Newsmax, bowed out, recognizing the inevitability of a McDaniel re-election. Mike “MyPillow” Lindell has thrown his hat into the center ring of the Republican National Circus. Beloved by UltraMAGAs, disdained by the Regulars, Lindell’s a long shot.

Recently, per Politico, “Harmeet Dhillon, an RNC committeewoman whose firm represents Donald Trump, is prepping a bid for party chair.” Dhillon is formidable, but signs are that McDaniel already has this sewn up.

Why is she even being challenged? McDaniel is under fire for a series of election losses and underperformances correlating with her chairship. Most of those obviously are due to forces beyond her, or any chair’s, control.

That said, as Red Sanders once said and as applies to politics: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Hearteningly, stories are circulating that McDaniel is setting out to cure the RNC's most obvious deficiency and bring a new level of sophistication to its political armory.

McDaniel told The Hill, in response to a letter from 100+ committee people pledging to support her re-election: “I look forward to continue working hard on behalf of the grassroots, in every state and territory, to grow our Party and invest in the critical infrastructure needed to keep the House, take back the Senate, and retire Joe Biden in 2024.”

Take down Dark Brandon? Smile when you say that, podner.

Key words, “invest in the critical infrastructure.” Cutting edge digital technology and artisanry more and more dominates politics as it does many other aspects of our lives.

Time for the RNC to up its tech game! Why?

Many have heard, from Shakespeare’s Henry V as to the historic battle of Agincourt:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition…

Dramatic license! King Henry’s remarkable victory was not the result of the camaraderie of his vastly outnumbered troops. No, it was tech to the rescue!

Per The Guardian: “Against all the odds, King Henry V triumphed over a fresh army four times bigger than his own because, arguably, King Henry’s forces had the longbow. The massively powerful longbows were the medieval equivalent of modern machine guns.”

The “critical infrastructure” to which McDaniel cryptically alluded refers, one infers, to the RNC’s promised new digital political ordnance — “the political equivalent of machine guns” — for ballots, not bullets.

If word on the street proves right, a strong case can be made for the reelection of Chair McDaniel, uniter of the Republican factions, for her “moneyball” chops, and, most of all, preparing to politically re-arm the GOP digitally, preparing it for big wins in 2024 … and beyond.