Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel said the party is doing well since President Trump took office, with fundraising “at a massive extent” and “seeing positive feedback from everybody.”
“They see a president that before he was even in office, started fighting for American jobs. He is rolling back regulations. So from a business standpoint, that’s great,” McDaniel told MSNBC this morning. “But from a grassroots, average voter standpoint, to see the regulations be lifted and see business potential and job potential be unleashed, especially in states like Michigan, where the regulations have really killed a lot of the jobs, they are pleased with what he is doing.”
“So he has a base right now and there’s a strong united coalition behind this president and we have to show action behind it,” she added. “We are going to have to pass things and get things done because now we have it all. And so I think that’s going to be the next big step, is to run on what we have done.”
The RNC reported a $19.8 million haul in January, the best post-presidential election month in the party’s history.
McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s niece, said in Tuesday’s night address to a joint session of Congress she “saw the Donald Trump I saw in Michigan through the campaign trail, somebody talking to the average American and saying, you have lost your voice in Washington.”
“And I will go and be a champion for you. And I will talk about how we get jobs back and how we improve wages and how we fix the failure of Obamacare and what it’s doing to your premiums and your deductibles,” she said. “And he put forward an optimistic vision. And then he reached out a hand to the Democrats and said come work with me. Let our purpose unite us. We need to work to make our country better for everybody.”
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said Tuesday that his party is focused on expanding its reach at the grass-roots level.
“We lost this election in this past November in no small measure because we didn’t turn out voters in Michigan, we didn’t turn out voters in Wisconsin, we didn’t turn out voters in Pennsylvania. And frankly, over the last eight years, you look at what’s happened in state legislatures, we have to turn out voters,” he told MSNBC. “…When you build strong parties and you define your mission as electing people from the school board to the Senate, not just the president, that’s the definition of success. And I’m confident we can move forward.”
Perez said he was in northwestern Wisconsin about three weeks ago and met “a good Democrat there for a generation — and he said, I feel politically homeless because the national Democratic Party stopped showing up.”
“And the story of Wisconsin, the story of Michigan was, you know, underperformance in big cities, whether it was Detroit or Milwaukee. And then we got our butts whupped in the rural portions of the state because we didn’t show up. And we have to have a 12-month organizing presence… The solutions to the challenges we confront as a party are not rocket science, but we’ve got to execute and we’ve got to execute everywhere, and we’ve got to do so relentlessly.”
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