Even as Donald Trump looks like the clear favorite to run away with the GOP presidential nomination for 2024, the Republican Party is trying to put the Trump genie back in the bottle. Five-time loser Ronna Romney McDaniel was reelected to an unprecedented fifth term as chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) on Friday. The RNC establishment’s plan appears to be to continue the beatings of Republican voters until morale improves and we can go back to pretending it’s the 1990s – and no one had ever considered Donald Trump as presidential material.
The final vote on Friday was 111 votes for McDaniel, San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon with 51 votes, Mike “Pillow Guy” Lindell with 4 votes, and Lee Zeldin with 1 write-in vote.
Although Dhillon mounted a good challenge, thanks to the help of people like Tucker Carlson and Kurt Schlichter of Town Hall, she really didn’t even come close. Not that the everyday Republican voters wanted her to take over the party, either.
Normal people who vote Republican clearly preferred Mike Lindell as the new head of the RNC. In a poll released by Rasmussen Reports last week, Lindell won a plurality of votes over McDaniel and Dhillon. Us regular folks preferred Lindell, while the GOP donor class preferred one of the other two poor choices.
Lindell is the only one of the three candidates who has remained a steadfast and loyal Trump supporter. He’s not afraid to put his career on the line by continuing to say, loudly and publicly, that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. We all know this to be true, and that’s why most of us out here in the real world preferred Lindell as the candidate to shake things up at the RNC.
When’s the last time you ever heard Ronna Romney McDaniel say the 2020 election was stolen? When’s the last time Harmeet Dhillon said it? (Spoiler alert: Neither one of them has ever said this out loud.)
So, why do the RNC members vote so differently from the general public?
Ronna McDaniel has lost, in order, the 2018 midterm elections for the party, followed by the 2020 election, followed by a Georgia runoff election for US Senate, then the 2022 midterm elections (the red drizzle), and finally, another Georgia Senate runoff election. She’s 0-for-5.
If you want to run a political party, and want to be reelected to run it again, you would think that “Having a Worse Track Record Thank Karl Rove” would be something you would not want on your resume. But the RNC donors who voted in the contest don’t seem to mind.
Their runner-up choice, Harmeet Dhillon, is not any better. Dhillon was on the ground in Maricopa County for the November midterms. When a mountain of irregularities popped up on Election Day, disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of Republican voters who had turned out for Kari Lake and Blake Masters, Dhillon went on Fox News with a big announcement.
She told the voters to hang tough. She was on it, and she was going to file lawsuits to get an extension, and everyone should trust her crack legal team and trust the process. Dhillon filed one lawsuit, which she immediately lost, and then picked up her suitcase and bailed. We know a lot of people like Harmeet Dhillon from her appearances on Fox News, but those are the facts. Is a liberal civil rights lawyer really the best choice (or second-best choice) to lead the Republican Party?
Apparently, many of the RNC voters thought she was. They want anyone running the party other than what they see as an “icky” Trump supporter like Mike Lindell.
