The challenge is trying to stay both visible and viable for 2026.
If there is one thing all factions of the Republican Party agree on, it’s that the party needs new leadership after the serial fiascos of 2018, 2020, and 2022. And these days, when all factions of the Republican Party agree on something, they will inevitably set about it in such a way as to ensure that it doesn’t happen, so that each faction can profitably blame the others. Thus, the entire slate of House and Senate Republican leadership is being returned to office, frustrating those who wanted Mitch McConnell replaced with someone more MAGA, those who wanted Tom Emmer held accountable for the failures of the National Republican Congressional Committee and/or replaced by someone more conservative, and those who thought that Kevin McCarthy was either too subservient to Donald Trump or not conservative enough. The McConnell challenge presented the particularly absurd spectacle of people who were angry at the allocation of Senate campaign resources in 2022 rallying behind . . . Rick Scott, who led the National Republican Senatorial Committee through the 2022 cycle. Stay tuned to how well the new-leadership effort goes in preventing the party from nominating the same man for president for the third cycle in a row.
Defenestrating congressional leadership is complicated by the fact that these are all elected officials. The chair of the Republican National Committee is not, but answers to a party infrastructure that is ultimately chosen by the self-selected sorts of activists who show up at local party committee meetings. Ronna McDaniel, formerly known as Ronna Romney McDaniel, can point to no great success stories but has been broadcasting that she has sufficient support locked down to keep her in office. But now, Lee Zeldin is considering a bid to unseat her. Politico reported on an email in which Zeldin says that he is “very seriously considering” a run: “It is time for our party to retool, transform, win back the Presidency in 2024, expand our number of Republican held seats in Congress, and elect the maximum number of down ballot races across the country. The Republican Party needs to be all in to do everything in its power to save America.”
Zeldin is smart, tough, and energetic, and his stock is at an all-time high after he ran the strongest statewide campaign for governor by a Republican in New York in two decades, with coattails that helped Republicans flip four Democrat-held House seats and narrowly miss flipping a fifth. He can probably raise money, which is the RNC’s top job, having done it so well for his own campaign in 2022, and he can probably be a solid public voice for the party, albeit one who still carries the baggage of having voted to object to Biden electors in two states in 2020. It is debatable whether he would be an improvement on McDaniel in some of the other nuts-and-bolts jobs, but his statewide campaign did a great job of organizing and turning out voters. The 2,703,401 votes for Zeldin, at last count, were an increase of half a million votes from Marc Molinaro’s showing in 2018 and 1.1 million over Rob Astorino’s in 2014. The state was blanketed with Zeldin signs, and he was on the ground constantly in the various contested districts.
The harder question for Zeldin is whether this is the right move for him. Becoming the face of the national party will keep him in the news, but it will also identify him more closely with the message and agenda of a party that remains broadly unpopular in New York and likely to stay that way. If Zeldin is planning another bid for governor, that could be a liability. On the other hand, especially if there is a Republican in the White House in 2026, the environment is never likely to be more favorable to a Zeldin victory than it was in 2022, unless the state’s crime problem has gotten so much worse that voters will not care about much else. Trying to read the 2026 tea leaves today is, in any event, a very uncertain business. At 42, Zeldin would probably be wisest to capitalize now while his stock is high, and accept that trying to stay both visible and viable for 2026 may be a high-wire act too delicate for any man to bank on. If a Republican wins the presidency, a successful tenure at the RNC might instead set up Zeldin for an appointed post as his next act.