Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was elected to a fourth consecutive term Friday after winning the support of about two-thirds of the RNC members who gathered here for their winter meeting.
McDaniel fended off a stronger-than-expected challenge from Harmeet Dhillon, an RNC committeewoman from California and an attorney who has represented former President Donald Trump.
The vote was conducted by secret ballot and McDaniel needed a majority of the members casting ballots to win. After just one round of voting, the parliamentarian announced that McDaniel had received 111 of the 167 votes cast. Dhillon received 51 votes and four ballots were cast for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a 2020 election denier and ardent Trump backer.
Dhillon had argued the party needed to “radically reshape” its leadership amid recriminations about Republicans’ lackluster showing in the midterm elections, which compounded disappointments over the results in the previous two cycles.
“The results were not what we or hundreds of thousands of supporters around the country were hoping for, and I think the party is going to have to deal with that fallout of being in a disconnect from the grassroots,” Dhillon told reporters outside the RNC’s general session at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach resort.
“The party is not united, but it’s our job to try and unite the party, and that’s going to mean changes at the RNC,” Dhillon added.
Both McDaniel and Dhillon have ties to Trump. The former president backed McDaniel when she first ran for party chair in 2017. Dhillon’s law firm represented Trump in his dealings with the House select committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. The RNC paid more than $1 million for the legal work.
But Trump stayed neutral in the race for RNC chair, stating that McDaniel and Dhillon should “fight it out.” On Friday, he congratulated McDaniel on her “big WIN” in a post on his Truth Social platform.
Trump’s likely rival in the 2024 contest for the White House, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, weighed in on the race in an interview that posted Thursday, telling Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, a conservative web show host, that it was time for “some new blood in the RNC.” But the GOP governor stopped short of offering a formal endorsement of Dhillon.
