Ronna McDaniel began her fourth term as Chair of the Republican National Committee with a call for unity after a bitter, divisive campaign exposed divisions between the party establishment and its base.
“The work to make Joe Biden a president for one term is already underway: It’s time for our party to unite and get back to voting Republicans up and down,” she said Friday after the results had been announced at a luxury hotel in California where the RNC was holding its winter meeting.
Her victory by a crucial margin of 111 votes over Harmet Dhillon’s 51 was never in doubt.
But after a bitter campaign that pitted rival sections of Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition against one another, unity will be more difficult to find.
The three candidates for the chair of the Republican National Committee showed unity after the result on Friday. But winner Ronna McDaniel (left) could have a hard time crossing the divides after a bitter race against Harmeet Dhillon (centre) and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell
It ended with accusations that the result was an establishment victory over the grassroots.
Populist conservatives were quick to complain about McDaniel’s return for a fourth term after leading the party to disappointing midterm elections.
Dhillon, an attorney who has represented Trump and who accused McDaniel of mismanaging RNC funds, vowed to heed the call for unity.
But she also offered a tacit threat.
“The results are not what we, our hundreds of thousands of supporters across the country, are hoping for and I think the party will have to deal with those consequences,” shs said. “To be a separation from the base.”
After disappointing midterms as Democrats tightened their grip on the Senate and narrowly lost the House of Representatives, the MAGA base is in the mood for blood.
McDaniel’s campaign has been saying for months it has the support of more than 100 of the 168 committee members and is confident of winning on Friday’s first vote
MyPillow CEO and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell secured enough support to make the vote, but only won four votes in Friday’s vote
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (left) made supportive comments about Dhillon on Thursday. Meanwhile, Donald Trump quietly backed McDaniel to expose the rift between the parties
Dhillon criticized that tens of millions of dollars were wasted on consultants who had not achieved success. She pointed to Federal Election Commission files showing that $750,000 was spent on flower arrangements alone during McDaniel’s tenure.
And even the location of the RNC winter meeting, a luxury hotel where rooms typically cost more than $900 a night, became a symbol for some that the party was out of reach.
Tensions erupted a few weeks later, as members of Congress nearly got into a scuffle before eventually electing Representative Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House on the 15th ballot.
With Trump privately backing McDaniel, the contest even became a contest of strength in early 2024 when Gov. Ron DeSantis, who was being touted as the alternate Republican nominee for 2024, said he liked seeing Dhillon.
It’s time for “new blood,” he said after disappointing election results in 2018, 2020 and 2022.
For some at the RNC winter meeting, the matter was clear: the party needed to break away from Donald Trump and his polarizing influence on politics.
Losing candidate Dhillon speaks to reporters shortly after the vote on Friday afternoon
Donald Trump quietly offered McDaniel support, but elements of his MAGA base lined up in favor of Dhillon, who offered to be the base candidate
Kari Lake, who ran for Arizona governor last year, warned that the RNC under McDaniel would become a “carrion” if small donors at the grassroots turned away in disgust
One attendee said he was the “elephant in the room” at meetings, avoiding discussion of him even as members pondered what went wrong in between meetings.
Trump sent his campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita to California to keep an eye on the proceedings. And he will see the result as a win.
But some of his allies are furious that McDaniel won and is blaming her for fundraising and building election infrastructure until 2024. They warn that the pocket change donors who brought Trump to power no longer want to donate.
Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, said she hopes McDaniel will hear the calls for change.
“We need a change and I hope it can change course because the way I see it nobody wants to donate to the RNC,” she told .
“It’s really just going to be a carcass of a unit where the advisors collect all the money and the base says fuck you, we won’t donate unless you change your mind.”
Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, one of the most powerful voices in the party’s recalcitrant hard-line wing, went further and said he would no longer encourage supporters to donate money.
“The general mood is like, okay, you’re raising huge amounts of money. You spend it so questionably for a while and then what do you have to show for it, like a four-seat majority in the House of Representatives and you lose the Senate,” he said.
“And I think that’s totally and utterly unacceptable. I think the stakes have never been higher for our country.”
It marks a deep break in the Trump movement.
McDaniel was installed by Trump as chairman in 2016. David Bossie, a close Trump ally, endorsed her nomination this time.
But the MAGA movement is divided, and many of Dhillon’s supporters, like Lake and Kirk, said the grassroots wanted change.
Conservative broadcaster John Fredericks said small donors would turn away from the RNC. And Charlie Kirk said he would tell his supporters not to give any money
The RNC met at the Waldork Astoria Monarch Beach, where rooms start at more than $820 plus a $55-per-night resort fee and tax, which critics said showed it was out of touch
Broadcaster John Fredericks, who ran Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in Virginia, said McDaniel could only count on about 10 percent of the base.
“It’s not enough to be referred as a legitimate party,” he said.
“This thing will starve. Nobody will give him money. It’s not just the big givers… what they completely ignore are the small givers, the people who give $25, $50, $75 a month over and over again.
‘They are gone. So the money will dry up completely.’
The grassroots, he said, would now seek to replace the committee members and women who voted for the status quo.
“This is a hostile takeover that we have attempted,” he said. “And so we’re going to look at these 168 people, because in two years half of them will be gone because we’re going to vote them out.”
The third candidate in the poll was MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. He only managed four votes.
But he said the messy business being flaunted in California is just the price of democracy.
“I think when we get out of here we’ll be better,” he said. “It will be the same as you see what happened to the Speaker of the House where there was the unification process.”
As one of the country’s most prominent election deniers and skeptics of voting machines, he even gave an optimistic note when he vowed not to question the result.
“There are no machines,” he said of the ballot. “Of course I will accept the results.”