Harmeet Dhillon says the endorsement of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has energized her bid in the contest for the RNC chairmanship against Ronna McDaniel.
“I heard some who back Ronna are now kinda freaking out about it. I’ll just leave it at that,” Dhillon told Politico. “I don’t want to jinx this, but we had a very good night and a very good day.”
Prior to the DeSantis endorsement, McDaniel was expected to breeze to an easy win in the chairmanship election. She had the tacit endorsement of Donald Trump and she had 100 national committee members on record endorsing her while Dhillon had only 30. But since the endorsement by the Florida governor, there’s been a definite move toward Dhillon.
Part of the reason has been the heavy-handed tactics of the McDaniel camp, drawing expressions of sympathy and calls of foul play by the McDaniel team.
“I think everyone noticed that I got very little time to speak at this meeting and [McDaniel] basically used the whole convention as her campaign and people thought that was a little too much,” Dhillon said. (To be fair: the RNC Winter Meeting is about more than the election; it’s also about RNC housekeeping, and McDaniel has to run those meetings.)
The drama between the candidates escalated last night when at a private RNC dinner featuring guest speaker Kellyanne Conway, Dhillon was assigned a seat in the back of the conference room, facing the corner. Her team was protested, causing something of a hullabaloo.
“Look, I’ve run in elections before; I’ve always been gracious to my opponent,” Dhillon told Playbook last night, adding that one person told her they may be changing their vote because of the slight. “That’s not gracious. That’s petty. People saw that.”
One of the interesting facets of this leadership race is that both women are strong supporters of Donald Trump. The difference between them is that Dhillon says she’s not an election denier and promises to do more than McDaniel to push back against Trump if he tries to interfere in RNC matters.
But really, the difference between them is based on personality more than ideology. McDaniel has definitely rubbed some RNC committee members the wrong way while Dhillon has a less abrasive style.
Dhillon has felt it necessary to apologize to some committee members who became the target of a MAGA email campaign organized by her supporters. She, no more than McDaniel, is a MAGA toady, and both candidates have vowed to keep the RNC neutral in the 2024 primary campaign.
Related: Choose Your Weapon Wisely—It’s Judgement Day at the RNC
It’s McDaniel’s stewardship of party finances and the fact that she’s presided over two straight elections that had disappointing results that are working in Dhillon’s favor.
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.
With Trump’s quiet support, McDaniel should eke out a win. But what happens after the vote is what’s really going to matter as the winner must find a way to unite the party going forward.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member