Ronna Romney McDaniel, the Michigan Republican Party chair, speaks before a Republican presidential primary debate in Detroit in March.
Ronna Romney McDaniel
DANA POINT, Calif. (AP) — Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel is fighting for reelection in a bitter leadership feud that’s testing former President Donald Trump’s grip on his own “Make America Great Again” movement.
The high-profile contest to lead the GOP through the 2024 presidential election will be decided Friday afternoon in a secret vote at the committee’s winter meeting in Southern California.
The former president is privately backing McDaniel, whom he picked for the job after his victory in 2016. But rebel factions inside his own MAGA movement have lined up behind her challenger, Trump attorney Harmeet Dhillon.
Dhillon has waged an aggressive challenge against McDaniel that featured allegations of chronic misspending, mismanagement and even religious bigotry against Dhillon’s Sikh faith — all claims that McDaniel has denied. Above all, the case against McDaniel, a niece of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, has been focused on conservative frustration with repeated election losses on her watch.
The vote comes as the Republican Party struggles to unify behind a message or a messenger as the 2024 presidential season begins. Similar divisions plagued the House GOP’s dayslong fight to elect a House speaker earlier in the month. And on Friday, those same forces are threatening to derail McDaniel’s bid to become the longest-serving RNC chair since the Civil War.
