‘The country is dying for change. And neither party seems all that determined to give the country what it wants.’
Last week, I reported on the RNC’s dismal fundraising through November (less than $10 million on hand compared with the DNC’s roughly $20 million).
This kicker from Mississippi’s RNC committeeman Henry Barbour really stuck with NR readers: “If the election is about Biden’s miserable record, it won’t matter if we have $12 cash on hand, we will win. . . . But for that to happen, Republican voters have to go with a new candidate, because if we nominate Donald Trump, the election is going to be all about Donald Trump. And we can have a billion dollars in cash on hand and lose just like we did the last few cycles.”
The polls suggest a Trump blowout in the early states. But somehow, Barbour remains optimistic that Republicans will nominate someone new like Nikki Haley, who is surging in New Hampshire but still lags far behind the former president.
Here are a few more insights on the 2024 presidential race from Barbour as the first nominating contests draw near:
- “I wish Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley would stop firing at each other and start talking about Trump, and talking about how we need to move on. If you look at the Republican candidates in ’22 that did well, who are they? Well, they were people like Ron DeSantis, who were focused on results, who weren’t divisive. And they did much, much better than the candidates like Kari Lake who were stuck in the past. If we can learn that lesson, from ’22, we’ll be a lot better off. And obviously there’s nobody more stuck in the past than Donald Trump.”
- “If we nominate Nikki Haley — or to a lesser degree DeSantis — we will win the popular vote. We will win the Senate. And I suspect we would gain seats in the House, which would be pretty amazing considering how we’ve operated in the House in the last year. The country is dying for change. And neither party seems all that determined to give the country what it wants.”
- “We just have too much at stake in the country to let Biden get reelected. And if we nominate Trump, it’s the one way this won’t be about Biden.”