Ronna McDaniel represents another of the GOP’s missed opportunities

If there ever were a poster child for nepotism, the honors would go to Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee. As Vivek Ramaswamy outlined in the last GOP presidential debate, the track record of McDaniel’s leadership of the Party is abysmal. “Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022, [the] red wave that never came. We got trounced last night in 2023,” Ramaswamy said. “And I think that we have to have accountability in our party. For that matter, Ronna, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will yield my time to you.”

But McDaniel has friends in high places, including former President Donald Trump, who endorsed her for GOP Chairwoman. However, Trump has recently expressed buyer’s remorse regarding that endorsement. She raises a lot of money, no question about it. But how are those funds allocated? Much has been wasted on connected consultants who have been mostly ineffective and incompetent.

What has McDaniel done to roll back the COVID lockdown era’s loose mail-in ballot rules, advance voter ID laws, and narrow early voting time periods? Very little, unfortunately. In fact, she has embraced ballot harvesting and expanding early voting. Trump is on board with this disastrous strategy as well. Dems have this form of gaming the system down to a science. It’s a little late to play catch-up. A better strategy would be to attack through litigation the COVID lockdown era election rules that were put in place by the end-run shenanigans of attorney Marc Elias and his team at the Perkins Coie law firm, all of which benefited their client, the Democrat Party.

Image: Ronna McDaniel (edited). YouTube screen grab.

In my opinion, no one is better positioned to lead the effort to roll back these destructive rules than Harmeet Dhillon, the attorney who ran against McDaniel for the RNC chair position in January of this year. With Donald Trump’s backing and the RNC’s establishment, McDaniel unfortunately won.

However, there is still time to gather support to oust McDaniel and try to recruit Dhillon to take the helm of the RNC before it’s too late. Dhillon has a proven record of winning election law cases, which is the kind of experience the RNC needs at this crucial juncture.

Conservatives who have a media platform must apply pressure to force McDaniel to step down. Conservative activists need to withhold donations to the RNC and continue to speak out through editorials, blog posts, and other social media entries and tweets on X (formerly Twitter).

In the next GOP debate on Wednesday, Ramaswamy’s call to action must be sustained until we achieve a change in leadership at the RNC who will aggressively pursue a rollback of unsolicited mail-in ballot rules, unsupervised ballot drop boxes, and other shenanigans that the Dems slipped in during the COVID lockdown and, unfortunately were never subsequently repealed. As the far-eft is fond of disingenuously saying, “The future of our democracy is at stake.”

Michael A. Bertolone, M.S. is a freelance writer in Rochester, N.Y. His eBook The War on Equality: How Equity is Destroying Our Society is available on Amazon.