MAGA purges the RNC
“The RNC is entering the 2024 election with a third of the Democratic National Committee’s reserves,” writes David Graham in The Atlantic. Graham noted last month that the Republican National Committee has ceased functioning as a political party. Today, it operates as another arm of the Trump Organization, now with loyalist Michael Whatley, immediate past chair of the North Carolina GOP installed as chair, and Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, as co-chair.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that “with the political equivalent of shock and awe,” Team Trump has begun a purge of the RNC staff. “The senior leadership has been almost entirely replaced or reassigned, while dozens of lower-ranking officials including state directors were either fired or told to reapply for their jobs.”
The RNC is now eating its own.
Given the RNC’s years of electoral losses post-2016, clearing out the dead wood makes sense, Graham writes, and presidential nominees typically take control of the party. Whether putting toadies in charge will change the RNC’s trajectory is questionable:
Truth be told, Trump can’t really distance himself from the recent mismanagement. The deposed chair, Ronna McDaniel, was Trump’s pick in 2017, and his main complaint about her is that she was insufficiently compliant. If Trump just wants more of the same, that’s bad news for the party. Trump critics within the GOP also fear that he intends to use the party coffers as a personal defense fund, underwriting his substantial legal bills. Last week, the committee pointedly rejected a proposal by an old-line member to prevent that.
From where I sit, installing Whatley who, according to a Fox News source, was selected for being “so powerful on election fraud,” is a plus. He struggled to raise money in North Carolina while the Democrats’ chair, Anderson Clayton, lapped him, and multiple times in small donations. Expect similar performance from Whatley at the national level.
Marrying the national party to its presidential candidate harms a political party, Graham argues, which is “where Obama offers a cautionary tale.”
When he won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Obama was an insurgent; the DNC had long been dominated by allies of Hillary Clinton, whom he defeated in the primary. He wasn’t as deeply embedded in the old way of doing things. Obama viewed the Democratic Party as essentially a national organization, with the goal of supporting his political goals and his reelection. Upon winning the presidency, he moved key DNC functions to Chicago, his hometown and political base, despite the protests of party insiders who worried that downballot efforts would be overshadowed by Obama’s reelection campaign. He also created a group outside the DNC, Organizing for America, to support his political movement.
The result was a badly weakened DNC. The national focus led to a neglect of other elections. After Senator Ted Kennedy died, Democrats managed to lose a 2010 special election for his seat in Massachusetts, of all places—a failure that some Democrats blamed on the national party. The loss delayed the passage of the Affordable Care Act and required congressional Democrats to water it down to pass it.
The Bay State special was a harbinger. As Matt Yglesias calculated in 2017, the Obama years saw Democrats lose 11 Senate seats, 62 House seats, and 12 governorships. The damage was especially bad at the state level. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats in state legislatures, the worst loss since Herbert Hoover dragged down the GOP. Republicans captured 29 separate chambers and gained 10 new trifectas—control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. All of this happened at the same time that Democratic presidential candidates won the national popular vote in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential elections (as they would again in 2020).
Now Trump is poised to replicate that for Republicans, with the RNC reportedly moving much of its operation to Palm Beach, Florida to be closer to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
Slashing the national footprint of the RNC may weaken the party at lower levels. Several state parties are already a mess. The chair of the Florida GOP was recently ousted amid a sex scandal. Michigan’s GOP chair, a fervent Trump backer, was also deposed after a tumultuous stint, and the state party is reportedly broke. The Arizona GOP also recently lost its chair and has been racked by feuds. But more MAGA is unlikely to be the solution to these problems, because infighting and obsession with Trump’s election denial have been at the center of several blowups. The most effective wing of the GOP apparatus right now, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has succeeded by managing to create some insulation from Trump, allowing it to select strong candidates. In 2020, Republican congressional candidates mostly ran ahead of Trump.
When Trump is done with his party, or when the country and the the courts are done with him, they’ll have to rebuild. Democrats had to after Obama, explains Graham.
But Democrats’ over-focused on the presidential race before Obama. And Obama did not just lose seats. Republicans (and their moneyed enablers) strategically deployed resources with REDMAP to win them while Democrats abandoned the hinterlands to the GOP and focused on vote-rich cities for their top-of-ticket candidates. Ask me how losing control of state legislatures impacts local communities. Ask rural communities that lost hospitals. Organizing is not either/or. It’s both/and.
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