I wrote yesterday that FL Governor Ron DeSantis made a politically boneheaded move in getting involved in today’s RNC Chair election. I posited that there was no benefit for him either way, and only loss.
I was right. DeSantis came out the loser today in his little poke with the stick at Trump. But he wasn’t the only one, nor to my mind was he the biggest loser. For my money, the biggest loser was the Mike Pillow moron, Mike Lindell. He just crushed it today, garnering an astounding four votes out of a total of 168 cast.
But here’s the other, nore under-the-radar loser. I wrote yesterday that it appeared as though the GOP civil war might be going underground into the RNC itself. The New York Times polled all 168 of the voting members, and only four of the members wholeheartedly Trump for 2024 and wanted him to lead the party. 20 of them wanted to move past Trump in a new direction, and 30 more were waffling on the fence. The remainder never responded. Which means that 54 voters, just 14 short of half of the voters were either against continuing on the MAGA path, or open to another direction.
The election for the RNC Chair is a simple majority,which means that McDaniel needed 85 votes to win. She logged in north of 100 total votes. Which makes those members of the traditional moderate HOP who were hoping to use this election to start moving the GOP away from MAGA are losers too. Without even openly endorsing, Trump proved that his grip on the party remains solid, even if the voters are revolting.
But believe it or not, it wasn’t Ronna Romney McDaniel who was the big winner today. The big winner was the DNC and the Democratic party. Because today’s election assures that the same clownish stupidity and feckless leadership that laid the GOP low in the first place will continue at least through the 2024 election.
The funny thing is that DeSantis wasn’t wrong for once. When McDaniel took over the GOP had it all. They held the White House, the House, and the Senate. The Blue Tsunami of 2018 was under her stewardship. In 2020 Traitor Tot became only the 3rd modern President to get turfed out after just one term, and McDaniel lost the Senate too, in Georgia of all places. And in 2022, despite raising over $400 million, McDaniel lost a seat in the Senate and pissed away what should have been a big, fat red wave.
Anybody who loves sports knows what political malpractice this is. If you have a coach or manager that spends three straight seasons not even finishing above .500, much less making the playoffs, you can pretty well guarantee that he isn’t getting a new contract. For God’s sake, even the Bad News Bears and the Mighty Ducks got hew coaches! But not the GOP.
Which brightens the Democrats 2024 chances on two fronts. First, it means that for at least the next two years, Not only will the national GOP continue to waste money like a drunken sailor, and nominate flea bitten dog national candidates, but the state and county GOP’s will continue to promote MAGA candidates and waste money on terrible messaging and advertising. The Democrats didn’t flip all of those seats in state elections on charm alone, their opponents were basically unelectable.
The second reason is totally self contained for the GOP, but could have an even worse effect. Remember the old adage, Stop throwing good money after bad.? Truer words were never spoken in this case. McDaniel and the RNC bragged of raising more than $400 million for the 2022 midterms. McDaniel herself bragged of taking special measures and resources to turn the state of Michigan red again. And what happened? Not only did the Democrats sweep every statewide office, they retook both the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years. It reminds me of about a dozen years ago when then GOP strategist Karl Rove, once dubbed Bush’s brain raised almost $1 billion to invest nationwide in the election, and up with a 0.004% Return On Investment. His career was over at the point.
And that’s the real risk for the GOP going into 2024. Rove raised and blew %1 billion in a national presidential election. The GOP raised more than $400 million for a midterm, spent extra money and resources on Michigan, and would have done better if she had just gone out drinking. If a CEO has three losing years in a row, you can bet your ass that either the Board replaces him, or he faces a shareholder revolt.
By far and away the single most important function of a national Chair is fundraising. It’s the Chair who has the numbers for the guys and gals with the keys to the treasury. McDaniel put the arm on them for more than $400 million for the midterms and has nothing more to show for it than a razor thin majority in a kindergarten House whose actions will tank the party’s chances in 2024, especially with a far right Presidential candidate. Why throw good money after bad?
For the GOP, it would have been far better if the Trumpian lawyer Dhillon had won. At least she would have given the impression of a fresh face and a new direction. Instead what the GOP ended up with was more of the same old shit. But if I’m the Democrats right now, I’m smiling a mile wide. Because at the moment that same old shit is sticking to the GOP’s heels just fine.
Well, no one ever said the RNC was all that smart anyway.
Michael Steele–the Black guy who was chosen to prove the GOP had some Black guys (and to deflect against the coming racist attacks against Obama: “Just because we’re using race-coded language against Obama, we’re not racists; our Chairman’s a Black guy too!”)–got dumped after the GOP managed to regain the House in 2010.
Meanwhile, his replacement, Reince Priebus (the white guy with the really funny name but somehow LESS “foreign-sounding” than Barack Obama) not only oversaw another Presidential debacle in 2012 and saw the GOP lose 8 seats in the House (although the GOP kept control) and the Dems pick up 2 seats in the Senate managed to keep his chairmanship for another go-round. Now, granted he DID oversee a better run in the 2014 cycle but that wasn’t entirely surprising either (given the usual pattern of “President’s party fares worse in the midterms”) so how much of that was due to Priebus’s handling is entirely questionable. And, in 2016, while the GOP did take the White House and kept control of Congress, the Party suffered losses in both the House and Senate (and, if not for the previous quarter-century of Hillary-bashing that, unfortunately, poisoned a LOT of Democratic voters). Priebus would step down from the Chair position to take a post in the Trump Administration, only to lose it when he “resigned” the office some 6 months later.
You know, ideology aside, I always felt bad for Steele. He’d done the job he’d been hired to do and for that, he got the Scipio Africanus treatment as a reward. Maybe they could have avoided unnatural disasters like Trump if he’d stuck around.
Bottom line – it doesn’t matter who the Chair of the RNC is. The party is dying and the only reason they still have solid R districts is the gerrymandering. That with all the voter suppression tactics are the only way they can overcome the the country’s major liberal shift. That’s why they are so desperate to enact so many laws that marginalize and take more rights away from anyone who is not ultra conservative.
I see that less as “overcoming” and more “clinging by your fingernails”. After a certain point, NONE of that works. It’s why smarter predators like Kemp in Georgia and Youngkin in Virginia diversified their tactics. They remain horrible Republican governors, the both of them, but they know how to adapt.
When I heard about Lindell’s vote count, I could hear our own Ursula cackling with delight. Still, what was there really to win with any of the candidates available? They’re going to be presiding over inevitable decline.
Who are the people donating their money? Why did she pick up Trump’s legal bills and who wants someone who spends so much on herself