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How Did Ronna McDaniel Become RNC Chair?
Ronna McDaniel has been under fire as RNC chair for a few years already, so it raises the questions of how she ascended to lead the RNC and how she has stayed in office for six years.
McDaniel was active in Michigan politics for years. She worked in her uncle Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and it appears he helped her become the Michigan representative on the GOP national committee in 2014.
The next year, in 2015, she was elected chair of the Michigan State Republican Committee. She checked all the boxes — she had the support of the state party establishment and the state Tea Party movement, she had demonstrated fundraising ability and campaign experience, she promised to listen more to the party grassroots, and she promised to expand the party’s base to include non-traditional groups such as minorities. Upon election, she immediately laid out a vision to win Michigan for the party’s 2016 presidential nominee.
In the 2016 presidential election, McDaniel made her vision for winning a reality, beating Hillary by 11,000 votes and giving Michigan’s 16 electoral votes to Trump. When Trump selected Reince Priebus, the national GOP chair, as his chief of staff, he asked Priebus to recommend his replacement. Priebus had been Wisconsin state GOP chair, so he knew McDaniel well and trusted her as a strong leader. Pence and Steve Bannon backed Nick Ayers, the former successful executive director of the Republican Governors’ Association. But in December 2016, Trump recommended McDaniels as his choice. Although the national committee chair is elected by the 168 members of the committee, they usually follow the president’s recommendation, which they did with McDaniels.
How has McDaniels remained RNC chair, despite her rather poor record? At first, she continued her success from the state level. She was a phenomenal fundraiser for the 2018 cycle, raising $213 million for the RNC compared to $101 million for the DNC. But the 2018 mid-terms produced disappointing results for the Republicans despite their massive fundraising advantage.
More important, though, she has been famously loyal to Trump. When her uncle Mitt condemned Trump as lacking moral character in a Washington Post editorial, McDaniel denounced him as feeding into the Democratic narrative, even though Mitt was the one who had jump-started her career in 2014 by pushing her for the GOP national committee. She hired many Trump campaign staffers onto the national committee, and she paid his legal expenses out of RNC funds. While it might have been reasonable to pay Trump’s legal fees, it reduced the funds available for other candidates.
McDaniels led the efforts to censure Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on the J6 House committee. Whenever a Republican denounced Trump, she attacked that person, even though one might expect the GOP national chair to stay publicly neutral in internal party fights. Although Trump did not openly endorse her in the contested 2023 RNC chair contest, she was widely believed to be his choice.
Despite her demonstrated failures in every national campaign she has led, McDaniels is the longest-serving RNC chair since Edward Morgan, who led the party from its inception in 1856-1864. If she serves out her current term, which ends in 2025, she will tie Morgan’s tenure. McDaniels is yet another example of how Trump’s prizing loyalty over competence has created problems.
Published in Politics
Thanks for that background, Steve. It is surprising that Pence and Bannon agreed on something! I noticed you used an old photo of Ronna, before her dramatic weight loss. That was not very kind of you. Ronna’s tenure is emblematic of the GOPs culture of losing where friendship is valued more than competence.
I don’t think Trump is the problem. I think Ronna is a victim of the Peter Principle . . .
I knew of the familial tie between Mitt and Ronna but was not aware of her role in Michigan politics. That was informative. I also didn’t realize that Rience Pribus had a hand in getting her in that position.
I suspect that Ronna ‘helped’ Mitt with that Project Orca!
FYI, Grandpa George Romney was governor in Michigan in 60’s.
Are they really victims, or just examples?
Us people out here seem more like the victims.
How? Who else would want to be responsible for election success with so many losers in the party?
There’s more. Her mother, who was also Ronna Romney, ran for US Senate against Carl Levin in 1996. Her grandmother Lenore Romney ran for US Senate in 1970
Ronna comes from a long line of squishy establishmentarians.
That’s a good observation. She was very successful in Michigan and initially at the national level. But I think that Trump should have solved the problem by recommending someone else in 2019, or 2021 at the latest. Now he can’t because we are in the middle of the 2024 election cycle.
Yes, but she is not personally a GOPe squish. She brought the establishment and the Tea Party together in Michigan, and she has been an unshakeable MAGA/Trump supporter at the national level. The story is more about how she cut off her Romney/establishmentarian roots when it was time to support Trump in 2016.
I like Ronna, but she has been ineffective. In sports, ineffective managers and coaches are fired, regardless of how nice a people they are.
The problem was TDS. That discouraged many talented people.
I don’t know how Nick Ayers and Bannon got connected, but Ayers had been the campaign manager or strategist on several senatorial and gubernatorial races. He built the Republican Governors’ Association up from a little amateur gathering into a professional PAC and septupled the budget of the RGA. He implemented a plan to contest every governor’s race in the country and won a net of seven governorships in three years.
Ayers was the strategist on Pence’s gubernatorial campaign and then chief of staff for his vice-presidential campaign. He was regarded as the link between the Trump and Pence camps during the campaign.
In hindsight, I think he would have been a better choice as RNC chair than McDaniel because he had a lot more national experience. But he was more connected to Pence than to Trump, and I imagine that was a deal-killer for Trump.
Only four words needed.
Kinda like this, eh?
If you think party chair makes a difference in election outcomes, that’s a new one to me. I think a party chair’s ability to fundraise is the key metric that matters. Sounds like she wasn’t bad at that. When parties lose they want to rearrange the chairs on the sinking ship. I’m not claiming expertise here but I can’t see how she has anything to do with the poor election results.
Well, if nothing else didn’t she spend millions of party money on things other than ads, etc?
“Example” is a good word, but I chose “victim” because I don’t think she intentionally set out to be incompetent . . .
I’d do it and I’d do it better.
Why is the Michigan GOP bankrupt (financially)? That is mismanagement at two levels.
I don’t know. Such as?
I don’t have any personal attachment for her. But I think it’s crazy to think she made a difference one way or the other.
Isn’t that a problem?
Like @manny I don’t see the point in attacking the RNC chair, whoever it may be.
It’s a mostly titular, powerless position, and probably it was always so, even during the era of party “smoked filled rooms” where party insiders had a much larger say who the nominee would be at every level of political office.
The real problem is the government run primary elections (in most other countries parties pick their nominees using their own resources and balloting) as well as not having legal carve outs for political parties when it came to political donations. Instead everything is run by political action committees, who may or may not be issue oriented.
If insiders had more power inside their respective parties, neither would have nominated Biden in 2020, when he was already showing signs of dementia as a way to prevent Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination. The same with Trump.
Neither Sanders or Trump were long time members of either party. If you have insiders running things behind the scenes, one prerequisite for a potential nominee is party loyalty. Neither Sanders or Trump fit that.
So the fundamental problems the parties, and in this case we’re talking about the GOP, goes way beyond the powerlessness of the RNC chair.
Under the present system, there is no one person, or even a distinct group of people, like the RNC that can actually run the party, while the GOP doesn’t hold the presidency.
Not only is the chair of the RNC powerless to run the party as a whole, but the RNC itself is.
The RNC chairman is responsible for fundraising, the overall brand and strategy of the party, research, and the national convention. The cash that flows through the RNC gives it a lot of power to affect local races by making donations to local parties and candidates.
Who is doing opinion research and formulating a unified response on the abortion issue? Who is coming up with the best campaign issues and how to message them? Why has the MAGA label become so toxic and who is responding to that? Who should coordinate the weekly talking points and get talking heads out there to push them? All these should be the RNC.
That she didn’t make a difference? That’s every party chair. That’s par for the course.
That’s the carrot. Where’s the stick? If a so called Republican running for office is going off brand and strategy (you’re saying the RNC chairman is responsible for overall brand) what powers does the chair or RNC as a whole have to discipline that politician benefiting from that branding?
There are plenty of conservative think tanks that do that. AEI, Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation immediately come to mind. The RNC has no control over the reason that the MAGA label has become too toxic. It’s all on Trump, who after all formulated it. And Trump cannot be controlled.
Cutting off funding is a good stick.
There are lots of think tanks, but someone has to say, “This is our strategy.” RNC could have been running a campaign to remind people what MAGA stands for. Or worked with Trump to come up with a new acronym. They should be letting candidates know how to talk about abortion, e.g. these are the three phrases that resonate with independents. McDaniels is a Trump loyalist, so she should have his ear to work with him.
That picture didn’t do much for me. I guess it goes to show that she didn’t make it on her looks…
It *was* insiders that got Biden nominated and all others to drop out in 2020 primary.
That was before she lost a lot of weight. Check the other Ronna-oriented post thread for something more recent.