Chaos at the Republican National Committee (RNC)

Choosing loyalty over competence and experience

Campaign headquarters? Photo by Sergei Wing on Unsplash

A political party’s national committee is the central organizer and fundraising arm of the party, the place where campaigns are carefully planned, and executed with extensive ground operations during major elections. Those ground operations include volunteer recruitment, get out the vote efforts, supporting party candidates up and down the ticket, and much more.

They are the lifeblood of a party during an election cycle. But the Donald Trump campaign has drained the blood out of the RNC, replacing it with rapid Trump loyalists whose only criteria for being hired is that loyalty.

To put it bluntly, Trump is sucking that lifeblood out of the Party and changing it into nothing but a means to funnel money into his pockets and pay his exorbitant legal bills.

It started when Trump forced out their extremely loyal Trumpist leader, Ronna McDaniels and replaced her with two co-leaders, a MAGA wack job and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wife of son Eric. They then asked for the resignations of over 60 experienced staffers so they could install loyalists.

The results are already disastrous, unless you are a Democrat. Because they removed those with extensive national campaign experience, they currently, well into the election year, have no ground campaign in many key states. Their fundraising is lagging far behind Biden’s, in part because donors may not want to be paying legal bills, money that contributes nothing towards an actual win.

Worse than that, Lara Trump clearly stated that the new RNC was formed to funnel all its resources directly to Trump, leaving nothing for the hundreds of down ballot Republican races from local to vital positions in the Senate and House. She subsequently attempted to backtrack from that but it sounded like an order directly from Trump.

Without those get out the vote, feet on the ground, and heads on phones people, many Republican voters may not be motivated to even go to the polls. And in case you don’t think those voters count, in recent years elections have been extremely close, making every vote count.