Exclusive — Ronna McDaniel on RNC Chair Race: ‘It’s Easy to Burn It Down, It’s Harder to Build It’

Ronna McDaniel, incumbent chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) running for reelection, said on Thursday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast with Alex Marlow that her tenure as RNC chair yielded increasing victories for the Republican Party over time.

Marlow asked, “You’re one most powerful people in the conservative movement, and people are going to say, ‘It’s time for a change.’ So how would you respond to that, that we’re just not getting enough Ws under your watch?”

McDaniel replied, “Well, I would disagree. Un 2018, we did pick up three Senate seats, which defied midterm history and in 2020, of course, we were disappointed at the presidential [election], but we picked up 15 House seats. That put us in a position to take back the House in 2022.”

“We just flipped the House,” she continued. “I think it’s really wrong to undervalue retiring Nancy Pelosi and taking the reins of [the House Oversight Committee] in a year where we did have [the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] and we’re coming out of a pandemic. It hasn’t been the easiest six years with two impeachments, a Mueller report, a pandemic, and Dobbs. I think we weathered a lot of that because of the RNC.”

“I’ll also add that everybody seems to gloss over 2021, where we flipped Virginia and won for Glenn Yougkin … and flipped [Virginia’s] House of Delegates. So there’s a lot of success there.”

McDaniel said the RNC had expanded Republican appeal to “minority communities” across her tenure

She remarked, “If you look at our investment — especially in minority communities — you are seeing massive gains in states like Florida and Texas with us expanding our reach to Hispanic, Asian, and black communities, and that, I think directly correlates to our community centers and the investments we’ve had year-round, We still have those community centers open across the country.”

McDaniel warned that a “change in leadership” at the RNC would threaten the organization’s ongoing projects she said were growing the GOP’s public appeal. 

She went on, “We’ve got to continue the community centers. We have to continue the legal pressure with the lawsuits and the election integrity efforts. … We can’t take up that infrastructure and have a gap and win in 2024. We have to keep this going, and if we have a gap and we’re not investing in these things, and we have a change in leadership, it will absolutely impact our effectiveness when we can win back the Senate and the White House.”

“It takes time to build a machine,” she stated, “but I know something: It’s easy to burn it down. It’s harder to build it. And right now, unfortunately, we’ve got a lot of people trying to burn it down who don’t understand what the RNC does, and they’re doing it for various reasons, but we need to keep building our party and working together.”

McDaniel concluded, “RNC was a net positive in this election.”

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.

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