'Failing miserably': Scathing op-ed hails RNC chair as 'worst employee of the year'

26 December 2023

Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel is the longest serving leader of the Republican Party in more than a century. And given the GOP's underwhelming performances in the last few election cycles, she's also one of the least effective in recent memory.

This has prompted liberal publication The New Republic (TNR) to conduct its own end-of-year performance review of McDaniel, naming her as the "Worst Employee of the Year" as 2023 comes to a close.

"As the head of the RNC for the past six years, McDaniel has overseen one electoral loss after another, and now she’s also losing the fundraising game," TNR's Edith Olmsted wrote. "She is failing miserably at the core responsibilities of a party chair—and yet, her job seems as secure as ever."

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As Olmsted pointed out, some of the GOP's most high-profile election defeats have taken place under McDaniel's watch. Her woes began in 2018, when Democrats flipped 41 Republican seats in the House of Representatives and handed Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-California) the speaker's gavel once again.

In 2020, Republicans lost the White House, with former President Donald Trump becoming the first incumbent president in nearly 30 years to lose his reelection bid. While Republicans very narrowly reclaimed the House majority in 2022, they lost ground in the US Senate, which included both of Georgia's US senate seats flipping to Democrats. And in 2023, McDaniel oversaw Republicans losing a gubernatorial race in Kentucky — which has been reliably red in the last six presidential elections — as well as losing control of the Virginia state legislature and failing to stop a pro-abortion ballot referendum in Ohio, which has a Republican trifecta government.

But McDaniel's poor performance isn't just limited to electoral failures: McDaniel is also presiding over a Republican Party increasingly falling behind the Democrats in fundraising. Jaime Harrison, who is chairman of the Democratic National Committee, recently announced a "record" fundraising haul in the final months of 2023, with Democrats having approximately $20 million on hand heading into the 2024 election. McDaniel's RNC has less than half of that.

Even though Trump has lauded McDaniel's leadership, others in the GOP base are less than enthused about having McDaniel in the driver's seat in 2024. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has called for McDaniel to resign on his podcast, and far-right influencer Rogan O'Handley said she "could sink us in 2024" if she remains in her position. However, the RNC would need a two-thirds vote to oust McDaniel, which one Republican national committeeman from Tennessee told Politico was highly unlikely.

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