Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Republicans Re-elect Head of the R.N.C. After a Heated Challenge

Ronna McDaniel won a fourth two-year term to lead the Republican National Committee, fending off a fierce challenge after the party’s poor midterm showing.

Ronna McDaniel, wearing a green dress, speaks to a crowd from behind a podium on Friday, with an American flag and an elephant symbol behind her.
Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, promised to be the agent of change that Republican activists wanted and to keep the committee neutral in the coming presidential primary contest.Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

DANA POINT, Calif. — Members of the Republican National Committee re-elected Ronna McDaniel on Friday to a fourth two-year term at the helm of the party, despite an angry pressure campaign from conservative activists and spirited calls from inside the committee for a leadership change after three successive elections of defeats and disappointments.

Ms. McDaniel, a Michigan G.O.P. insider chosen in 2017 by President Donald J. Trump to lead the party, beat back a fierce challenge by Harmeet Dhillon, a member from California who was backed by an eclectic coalition of both far-right conservatives and members opposed to Mr. Trump’s third bid for the White House.

Ms. McDaniel, 49, a granddaughter of a moderate Republican governor of Michigan, George Romney, and a niece of Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, promised to be the agent of change that Republican activists wanted and to keep the committee neutral in the coming presidential primary contest. Those pledges, and years cultivating connections with the committee’s 168 members, proved unbeatable as the party gears up for what could become a wide-open race for the 2024 Republican nomination.

“We need the continuity at this point in time,” said Mike Kuckelman, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. “There’s really no one challenging her that offers anything that is materially different than what she will do as our leader.”

But the contentious battle over what is typically a low-key campaign for R.N.C. chair exposed a party struggling to find its way amid deep discontent. Republicans lost the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020, and then turned in a historically anemic performance for a party out of power in 2022.

Supporters of Ms. Dhillon posted committee members’ personal email accounts online, resulting in a flood of contentious messages, and activists made phone calls and even personal visits to members. Ms. McDaniel mounted her own campaign, persuading members to promise their support, doing media tours of conservative news outlets and distributing bright-orange pins that read “Roll with Ronna” — a version of a slogan used by her grandfather during his campaigns for Michigan governor in the 1960s.

The fight mirrored the fractious, intraparty disputes that held up Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be House speaker and that Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, faced in holding on to his leadership position. In the end, Ms. McDaniel won 111 votes, slightly more than two-thirds of the members who cast private ballots at the luxurious seaside Waldorf Astoria resort in Dana Point, Calif., where the meeting was held. Ms. Dhillon secured only 51 votes.

After pausing for a standing ovation, Ms. McDaniel invited Ms. Dhillon and Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a conspiracy-minded Trump loyalist, who also challenged her and won four votes, to the front of the ballroom.

“We heard the grass roots,” Ms. McDaniel said. “But with us united and all of us going together, the Democrats are going to hear us in 2024.”

Ms. Dhillon, speaking to reporters after her defeat, was dismissive of the “group hug” after the vote. She accused Ms. McDaniel of leveraging the committee’s resources, including its press operation, to support her bid and of promising members plum committee posts and additional support for their state parties in return for their votes.

“At the end of the day, if our party is perceived as totally out of touch with the grass roots, which I think some may take away from this outcome, we have some work to do,” Ms. Dhillon said.

Ms. McDaniel opened the winter meeting with a dig at Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker who lost her role after Republicans won control of the body.

“Why are we in California? Because I just wanted to rub Nancy Pelosi’s face in it one more time,” she told the audience, about an hour after a San Francisco court released graphic footage from a police body camera showing a man attacking Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, with a hammer in October at the couple’s home in San Francisco.

Much of the debate between the two Republicans centered on the best way for the party to win. And while Ms. McDaniel was eager to promote the party’s victory last year, despite its slim margin, the specter of the next election hung heavily over the gathering. Ms. Dhillon claimed that in private conversations, some potential 2024 candidates had questioned whether the R.N.C. would remain neutral in a primary race that included Mr. Trump.

On Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is widely seen as a top 2024 contender, waded into the fray, praising Ms. Dhillon and urging “new blood” at the committee. While stopping short of a formal endorsement, the comments were notable given that Mr. Trump shied away from endorsing Ms. McDaniel even as he backed candidates for other committee positions. Though Mr. Trump stayed silent, some of his top campaign aides were spotted at a Thursday event and Kellyanne Conway, a long-serving Trump administration aide, was the guest speaker at dinner on Thursday night.

Yet as a proxy campaign to gauge Mr. Trump’s sway over the Republican Party, the race for party leader was imperfect. Ms. Dhillon was a leader of the election-denying group Lawyers for Trump in 2020 and never made Mr. Trump’s hold on the party an issue in her effort to unseat Ms. McDaniel.

Some of the biggest voices of the party’s right wing, including the Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a youthful group of pro-Trump conservatives, backed her effort.

But so did some of the most outspoken anti-Trump members of the R.N.C., who reasoned that Ms. Dhillon’s call for change best aligned with their efforts to move the party beyond the former president. The committee played a leading role in defending Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and it funded his personal legal defense bills for months until he announced his candidacy in November.

Some members who oppose Mr. Trump worry that Ms. McDaniel, a staunch supporter of the former president, will use the committee to tip the scales in favor of his bid. Oscar Brock, a committee member from Tennessee, made a private appeal to members, tying Ms. McDaniel to Mr. Trump and saying it was “clearly time” for the party to move on from his leadership.

In an interview later, Mr. Brock said that he remained neutral in the fight for the Republican nomination, but that he was convinced Ms. McDaniel was beholden to the former president.

“My loyalty is to running an independent primary, and I want a chairperson who can do that,” he said.

Ms. Dhillon persuaded state-level party organizations to get involved in the fight. She earned endorsements from state parties in Washington and Nebraska with broadsides against Ms. McDaniel’s leadership. And in early January, the Alabama Republican Party’s steering committee announced a vote of no confidence in Ms. McDaniel.

“The grass roots, they’re the ones that knock on the doors, they work the polls, they put the time in on campaigns, and when we come up empty-handed, they’re just scratching their heads, saying, ‘What in the world?’” said Beth Campbell, a Republican committee member from Tennessee. “They all want change. They want to win, is the bottom line.”

Yet it was not clear how much Ms. Dhillon was willing to change direction, either. For instance, she said before the vote that she supported Ms. McDaniel’s decision last year to demand that Republican presidential candidates sign a pledge to not participate in any debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

“I would not change course on that,” Ms. Dhillon said.

Ultimately, she did not have the votes. Ms. McDaniel had six years to win over the loyalties of a majority of committee members. And with some, the pressure campaign orchestrated by Ms. Dhillon actually worked against her. Shelly Gibson, a committee member from Guam, said on Monday that she had received 113 emails that day about the chairman’s race. Other members recounted activists’ showing up at their homes to make personal appeals — including to their spouses.

Accusations that Ms. McDaniel had bought off individual members and the leak of personal emails left even some friends of Ms. Dhillon’s seething about vile voice mail messages and a deluge of emails.

“I cleared out my inbox this morning, and since 9 today, I’ve had another 50,” Ms. Campbell marveled in an interview at lunchtime Monday, saying she was in the passenger seat of her car combing through the latest messages.

Lisa Lerer reported from Dana Point, Calif., and Jonathan Weisman from Chicago. Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.

Lisa Lerer is a national political correspondent, covering campaigns, elections and political power. More about Lisa Lerer

Jonathan Weisman is a congressional correspondent, veteran Washington journalist and author of the novel “No. 4 Imperial Lane” and the nonfiction book “(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.” His career in journalism stretches back 30 years. More about Jonathan Weisman

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: McDaniel Re-elected As Head of the R.N.C. After a Heated Race. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT