More Of The Same?

It really didn’t make a lot of headlines. Oh, the fact that there was some competition did, but in case you missed it, Ronna McDaniel was reelected as the Chair of the Republican National Committee this past week. McDaniel beat out former Trump advisor, Harmeet Dhillon, and pillow sales guy, Mike Lindell. I don’t think many people took him seriously. The vote was 111 for McDaniel, and just 51 for Dhillon.

Now, it’s safe to say that with a former Trump advisor running against the establishment, and Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis saying just before the election, “We’ve had 3 substandard election cycles in a row, ‘18, ‘20, and ‘22, and I would say of all of those ‘22 was probably the worst. Given, the political environment of a very unpopular President Biden, huge majorities of the people think the country’s going in the wrong direction.”

You gotta admit, he DOES make some good points.

Here we have a nation that basically hates the guy in the White House, especially the GOP, and we lost ground in 2018 in the midterm (which is normal). We then lost the presidency, and the House with a tied Senate in 2020, and in 2022, we won a squeaker of a majority in the House, and outright lost the Senate. And though we have debated why the Senate was lost in the past, the basic reason falls on two people…Donald Trump for picking weak candidates, and Ronna McDaniel, for backing the way it was done.

McDaniel is good at raising money, but she got her rear end handed to her in 2022. Here in the desert, the GOP candidate for Senate, Blake Masters, had to rely on his boss, Peter Thiel to give him millions to run against incumbent Mark Kelly. The GOP was outspent seven to one by the Democrats. Kelly spent all summer running ads, and no one in the Grand Canyon State heard anything from Masters until close to Labor Day. You’re not going to win elections that way.

By reelecting McDaniel, the GOP is sitting in the same boat they’ve been in for the past six years. And they’ll sit in it again heading into 2024. But with three election cycle losses to her credit in her three terms at the helm, McDaniel is in the unenviable position of having to win both the White House, AND the Senate, as well as keep and expand the lead in the House. If she isn’t able to do that, she most likely won’t be around for her fifth term, which by the way, is unprecedented in GOP politics!

The question becomes, is Ronna McDaniel the problem? Or is it something else? Actually, I think the problem is deeper than just one person. There has been a rift in the GOP that was a lot deeper than originally thought. It happened when Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower. That candidacy split the party in two and it’s never really gotten back together. Now you’ve got more than two factions that have very little to do with each other. You’ve got the Trump base, you’ve got those that don’t want Trump back at any cost, you’ve got the “freedom caucus conservatives” that tried to stop Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be Speaker, and you’ve got the mainstream Republicans like McCarthy.

And it’s going to be McDaniel’s job to pull everyone together and fight as one team, rather than spend time and effort fighting each other. If you’re going to be the head of a political party, you’ve got to be able to rally the troops around the people that are running and get them across the finish line one way or another. That’s basically, in a nutshell, her whole job description. If she can’t do it this time around, it’s time to find someone who can, and no…I’m not looking in Mike Lindell’s direction. He only got four votes!

Carry on world…you’re dismissed!

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