Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made his first public move Thursday toward upending the Republican presidential nominating process, starting with a change at the top of the Republican National Committee (RNC).
“I think we need a change, I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC, I like what Harmeet Dhillon has said about getting the RNC out of D.C.,” DeSantis told right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in a Florida's Voice interview.
With a secret ballot vote set for Friday, Dhillon is challenging incumbent RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, who was handpicked by Donald Trump to lead the party after he won the White House in '16. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell is also seeking the GOP’s top job, but he appears to have garnered little, if any, support.
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In the interview, DeSantis offered a critique of McDaniel’s electoral record as RNC chief that clearly doubled as an argument against Trump and why nominating him is a path to Loserville.
"We've had three substandard election cycles in a row—'18, '20, and '22—and I would say of all three of those '22 was probably the worst given the political environment," DeSantis charged. "Huge majorities of the country think the country is going in the wrong direction—that is an environment that's tailor-made to make big gains in the House and the Senate and in statehouses all across the country and yet that didn't happen."
DeSantis said the RNC needed "fresh thinking" and predicted that grassroots fundraising and volunteerism would drop off if GOP voters "don't see a change in direction." But DeSantis’ main motivation for wading into the contest is likely that it’s a first step toward disrupting the GOP's winner-take-all primary scheme.
If the GOP maintains the same system it used in 2016, Trump will remain the odds-on favorite to clinch the nomination again in '24 using the same exact math he used to clobber his more conventional GOP rivals last time around. In ‘16, Trump didn't have to win anywhere near a majority of Republican primary voters to prevail; he only had to win roughly a third while the other dozen or so candidates sliced up the rest of the pie between them. Once Trump had won several states—taking all the delegates rather than just a proportional share—it quickly became impossible for anyone else to play catch up.
But if McDaniel were to lose her reelection bid, a new party chair might help unlock a path to a new nominating scheme. Ultimately, state parties would have to revamp their nominating processes.
Given the stakes, the upcoming vote on Friday has been the subject of intrigue for months, with McDaniel making a furious effort shortly after the midterms to look as though she had the votes locked up already.
But that's in serious question now, especially given the fact that DeSantis believed getting behind Dhillon was worth the reputation risk. One has to imagine DeSantis or his people have made at least some effort to whip the votes of the 168-member organization before he went on record opposing McDaniel.
In fact, New York Times reporting on the RNC vote this week suggested a lot of buyer's remorse about Trump and McDaniel, despite the fact that 99 of its members joined the committee after Trump won the 2016 nomination.
Even so, people are clearly sick of losing despite maintaining a personal affinity for Trump.
“Everybody is very appreciative of Trump, and he did a lot of great things,” Art Wittich, a Montana RNC member, told the Times. “There’s this burning desire to win in 2024, and that’s what’s going to drive a lot of the action.”
Mac Brown, chair of the Republican Party of Kentucky, offered a more blunt assessment.
“This isn’t 2016,” he said. “People have moved on.”
Both The Washington Post and the Times reported on a mass email penned last week by RNC member Oscar Brock of Tennessee, reading, “I supported Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, but it is clearly time for the Republican Party to move on from Donald Trump. ... In order to do that we must also move on from Ronna McDaniel."
After attempting to contact all 168 members, the Times only found four who gave an "unabashed endorsement" of Trump while 20 explicitly said he should not be the 2024 GOP nominee. Most members didn't respond but some members who did talk "estimated that between 120 and 140 of them" were pulling for someone besides Trump.
This is clearly one of DeSantis' first big plays. It will be interesting to see how he fares.
Markos and Kerry are joined by University of St. Andrews Professor of Strategic Studies, Phillips P. O’Brien. O’Brien, an expert in military history, explains how we got to where we are right now, what is unique about the world’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the parallels between the conservative movement’s isolationism in World War II and now.