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SUBSCRIBER EXCLUSIVE  |  NOVEMBER 11, 2023

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The Election Day Fallout Has Begun

Politics is a blood sport. When Election Day results are tallied, there is no second place. 

Since assuming the helm of the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 2017, the GOP under Ronna McDaniel lost the House in 2018, the presidency in 2020, the Senate in 2022, and everywhere but Mississippi and Louisiana in 2023’s limited slate of off-year elections.

If McDaniel were the manager of, say, a Major League Baseball team, she would be fired the day a successive losing season concluded. You don’t win, you’re out. That’s the way it goes.

Instead, since former President Donald Trump appointed her RNC chair, McDaniel’s salary has tripled, from $122,582 to $410,640 in 2020 to $358,431 in the first 11 months of 2022, according to Federal Election Commission filings. 

To many, that doesn’t make sense.

In the wake of Nov. 7’s elections that saw Democrats capture both Virginia General Assembly chambers, ruby-red Kentucky voters re-elect Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear, and scarlet-red Ohio voters overwhelmingly adopt a reproductive rights measure and make the Buckeye State the 24th nationwide to legalize adult recreational marijuana, frustrated Republicans are calling for McDaniel’s ouster.

With less than 60 days before the Iowa Caucuses officially kick off a 2024 election cycle that began the day after 2022’s midterms concluded, if Republicans want “new blood”—as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said months ago—they need that transfusion soon.

Like now. 

The Virginia elections may have hurt the most. All 140 seats in the purple commonwealth’s General Assembly were on the ballot. Among top campaign issues was a 15-week abortion ban that Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin wanted the General Assembly to adopt in 2024. He aggressively stumped, and fund-raised, for GOP candidates across the state.

When Nov. 7 began, the GOP held a 52–48 House majority and Democrats had a 22–18 Senate advantage. 

When Nov. 7 ended, Democrats had retained the Senate and taken the House.

Even before Nov. 7, as The Epoch Times’ Lawrence Wilson, Samantha Flom, Terri Wu, and Jeff Louderback reported in their post-election wrap, Republicans were complaining the RNC was idling on the sidelines while national Democratic groups were pumping millions into their Virginia candidates’ campaigns.

Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, in Dana Point, Calif., on Jan. 27, 2023. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

During the third Republican presidential candidate debate on Nov. 8 in Miami, Florida, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said under McDaniel, the GOP has become “a party of losers” and repeated anonymous online claims that she had allegedly vowed to not give “one cent” to his campaign moving forward.

“Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022" with "a red wave that never came. We got trounced last night in 2023, and I think we have to have accountability in our party,” he added, before demanding McDaniel resign right then and there on the debate stage.

The sniping continued into the ensuing days as The Epoch Times’ Jack Phillips reported and Caden Pearson documented with McDaniel claiming Ramaswamy voted for Democrat President Barack Obama and Ramaswamy insisting McDaniel is "flat-out lying" and reiterating his call for her resignation.

McDaniel hit back in a Nov. 8 CNN interview, saying Ramaswamy is not a solution but part of the Republican party’s problem. 

“This Republican-on-Republican infighting—I’m not running for president so I’m not in this primary—isn’t helping our party,” she said. “We lost races in 2022 because of vitriol within our party. We need every Republican and then some to win elections. And the Republican voters want to hear us talk about the border, fentanyl, Israel, our kids, crime, inflation, and they want to see us take on Joe Biden.”

Considering Virginia’s proximity to Washington, the turmoil in the Republican-led House that squabbled for three weeks for all to see on national TV day-after-day, followed by the adoptions, or attempted adoptions, of dead-on-Senate-arrival budget bills with a 45-day stopgap funding measure expiring Nov. 17 had to have hurt GOP candidates there and, perhaps, elsewhere.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said in an X post that, "Republicans are losing Republican voters because the base is fed up with weak Republicans who never do anything to actually stop the communist Democrats."

Some Republicans do not agree. GOP county committee members within the 18 congressional districts President Joe Biden won in 2020 but Republicans took in 2022—thanks to garnering votes cast by Democrats—see it differently.

“Every time [Greene] opens her mouth,” a Hudson Valley Republican county committee member in first-term Rep. Mike Lawler’s (R-N.Y.) district told The Epoch Times last month, “our guy loses votes.”

To dig deeper into the subject, read the following original reporting by our journalists:

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