Ronna McDaniel calls for unity after RNC victory, but faces uphill fight to heal divisions

Ronna McDaniel began her fourth term as chair of the Republican National Committee with a call for unity, after a bitter and divisive campaign exposed divisions between the party establishment and its rank and file.

“The work to make Joe Biden a one-term president is already underway: It is time for our party to come together and rededicate themselves to electing Republicans from top to bottom on the ballot,” he said Friday, after the results were released. at a luxury hotel in California where the RNC held its winter meeting.

His victory, by the decisive margin of 111 votes to Harmet Dhillon’s 51, was never in doubt.

But finding unity will be more difficult, after a bitter campaign that pitted rival parts of Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition against each other.

It ended with accusations that the result represented a victory for the establishment on the grassroots.

Populist Conservatives were quick to complain about McDaniel’s return for the fourth time, after leading the party to a disappointing midterm election.

Dhillon, a lawyer who has represented Trump and who accused McDaniel of mismanaging NCR funds, vowed to heed the call for unity.

But he also offered an unspoken threat.

“The results are not what our hundreds of thousands of supporters across the country expect and I think the party will have to deal with those consequences,” shs said. ‘Of being a disconnection from the bases.’

After a disappointing midterm election, when the Democrats increased their grip on the Senate and narrowly lost the House, the MAGA base is out for blood.

McDaniel’s campaign has said for months that it had the support of more than 100 of the committee’s 168 members and was confident of victory on Friday’s first ballot.

MyPillow CEO and conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell garnered enough support to make it to the ballot, but won just four votes on Friday’s ballot.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (left) weighed in Thursday with comments of support for Dhillon. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was quietly backing McDaniel by exposing the party’s split.

Dhillon criticized that tens of millions of dollars had been wasted on consultants who failed to turn a profit. He pointed to Federal Election Commission files showing that $750,000 had been spent on flower arrangements alone under McDaniels’ tenure.

And even the location of the NCR winter reunion, a luxury hotel where rooms often cost more than $900 a night, became a symbol to some that the party was out of place.

Tensions flared a few weeks later, when members of Congress nearly came to blows before finally choosing Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House on the fifteenth ballot.

With Trump privately endorsing McDaniel, the race even turned into a force contest in early 2024 when Gov. Ron DeSantis, envisioned as a 2024 alternative Republican candidate, said he liked it when he saw Dhillon.

It was time for ‘new blood’, he said after disappointing election results in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

For some at the RNC winter meeting, the cause was clear: the party had to put Donald Trump and his polarizing impact on politics behind them.

The defeated candidate Dhillon speaks to reporters Friday afternoon shortly after the vote.

Donald Trump quietly offered support to McDaniel, but elements of his MAGA base rallied in favor of Dhillon, who offered herself as the grassroots nominee.

Kari Lake, who ran for Arizona governor last year, warned that the RNC would become a “corpse” under McDaniel if small, grassroots donors walked away in disgust.

One attendee said that he was the ‘elephant in the room’ during meetings that avoided talking about him even as members pondered what went wrong in midterms.

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 victory.

But some of her allies are furious that McDaniel won, keeping her in charge of fundraising and building election infrastructure until 2024. They warn that the small-money givers who propelled Trump to power won’t want to keep giving.

Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, said she hoped McDaniel would listen to calls for change.

“We need a change and I hope she can change course, because the way I see it, nobody wants to donate to the NCR,” he told DailyMail.com.

“It’s really going to be just a corpse, of an entity, with the consultants raising all the money and the grassroots saying fuck you, we’re not going to donate unless you change.”

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, one of the most powerful voices in the party’s restive hardline wing, went further, saying he would no longer encourage his supporters to give money.

‘The general feeling is like, okay, you raise massive amounts of money. You spend such a questionable time, and then what do you have to show like a four-seat majority in the House and you lose the Senate, she said.

And I think that’s completely and totally unacceptable. I think the stakes have never been higher for our country.’

It marks a deep break in the Trump movement.

Trump named McDaniel as president in 2016. David Bossie, a close Trump ally, supported his nomination this time.

But the MAGA movement is fractured and many of Dhillon’s supporters, like Lake and Kirk, said the rank and file wanted change.

Conservative broadcaster John Fredericks said small donors would steer clear of the RNC. And Charlie Kirk said that he would tell his followers not to give money.

The RNC met at the Waldork Astoria Monarch Beach, where rooms start at more than $820 plus a $55-a-night resort charge and tax, which critics say showed he was out of touch.

Broadcaster John Fredericks, who chaired Trump’s 2016 and 2020 Virginia campaigns, said McDaniel could only count on about 10 percent of the base.

“That’s not enough to present as a legitimate party,” he said.

This thing is going to starve. Nobody is going to give you money. It’s not just the big givers… what they’re totally discounting are the small givers, the people who give $25, $50, $75 a month over and over again.

‘They left. So the money is going to run out completely.’

The base, he said, would now seek to replace the men and women on the committee who had voted for the status quo.

“This is a hostile takeover that we have tried to do,” he said. “Then we will look at these 168 people because in two years, half of them will have left, because we are going to expel them.”

The third candidate on the ballot was MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. He got only four votes.

But he said the messy business on display in California was just the price of democracy.

“I think when we get out of here we’ll be better,” he said. “It will be how they see what happened with the president of the Chamber where he was uniting the process.”

As one of the country’s most prominent election deniers and a skeptic of the voting machine, he even struck an optimistic note by promising not to challenge the result.

“There are no machines,” he said of the ballot. ‘Of course, I will accept the results.’