One other note about Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel that I forgot to include in today’s Morning Jolt: Back in late January, RNC member and longtime Trump ally David Bossie floated, and then withdrew, a resolution to declare former President Donald Trump the party’s “presumptive” presidential nominee. If McDaniel had any objection to the resolution, she hid it well.
Now, the Republican party has a well-established process to select the presidential nominee, and you may have heard of it, it’s called caucuses and primaries, and it runs until the June 4 New Jersey primary. So far, Republicans in two states have weighed in on the decision; yesterday’s primary in Nevada has no impact on the state’s delegates to the Republican convention, which is determined by a caucus where Trump will be the only major candidate on the ballot.
Donald Trump is extremely likely to finish with more than the 1,215 delegates needed to win the nomination. But so far, just 62 delegates have been allocated. Trump has 32, Nikki Haley has 18, withdrawn candidate Ron DeSantis has nine, and withdrawn candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has three.
An RNC resolution declaring Trump the party’s “presumptive” presidential nominee would have no real impact on anything. It was absurd, and also just flat wrong, claiming that “all evidence negates the possibility of a mathematical path forward to the 2024 Republican nomination by any candidate other than President Trump, our presumptive nominee.” The fact that Haley is extremely unlikely to win enough delegates to block Trump does not mean she is mathematically eliminated.
But the short-lived effort to just come out and declare Trump would be the party’s nominee reflects the insanely wrongheaded priorities at the national committee. At the RNC, job one is sucking up to Donald Trump and stroking his ego, not helping Republican candidates win elections. We’ve seen the consequences in every election since McDaniel took over — losing control of the House of Representatives in 2018, losing the presidency and control of the Senate in 202o, and underperforming the historical pattern of opposition party gains in the midterms of 2022.
The organization doesn’t work as a traditional party committee anymore. It’s not interested in electing Republicans up and down the ballot; it’s interested in making Donald Trump feel good. Thus we shouldn’t be surprised to see the RNC spending lots of money on floral arrangements, limousines, and media consultants, and less money spent on voter-file maintenance, get-out-the-vote texting, and transfers to state parties.