Republicans are losing confidence in their party—and in Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel.
Days ahead of an RNC meeting, hundreds of conservatives descended upon Las Vegas for a Turning Point Action event meant to be a “wakeup call” to the Republican Party.
“We are at war,” one man shouted from a microphone at the event, reported Politico. “Where are the tools? Where are all the little things that the left is doing but we don’t?”
Most of the attendees of the Restoring National Confidence summit—which by no coincidence shares the RNC’s initials—put that blame on McDaniel’s shoulders, citing her seeming inability to earn them reelections. Some state party officials bemoaned the poor results in 2023, while others held her responsible for party failures even before Trump got her the job in 2016. Altogether, the Republican activists seemed set on going their own way—taking their chances for reelection on their own merits rather than relying on party strategy.
“My county is going to flip to blue if we can’t get control,” Maria Holiday, chair of the Republican Party in Johnson County, Kansas, told Politico. “And I don’t see any effective strategies coming out of the RNC down to the grassroots, and that’s where the people are going to vote.… We’re on our own.”
Event organizer and Turning Point Action’s founder Charlie Kirk also gave the RNC an earful, calling the upcoming, official party convention a “bunch of losers.”
“They know it. The grassroots knows it. The donors know it,” Kirk said. “They lost in ’18. They lost in ’20. They lost in 2022. We have tried to reach out to them many times, and I’m not going to put up with another culture of losing.”
The alternative event points to larger unrest within the party, as national lawmakers worry that their failure to follow through on campaign promises will doom them this election. In October, the GOP witnessed its House representatives cannibalize their own leader for the first time in U.S. history, ousting former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in a coup led by just eight members of the party.
The ensuing madness, seeded, stoked, and fueled by Trump, has amounted to a complete divide in the Republican Party, with some members disavowing the formal platform entirely.
“I used to be the establishment when I first got started in politics,” Fanchon Blythe, the RNC committeewoman from Nebraska, told Steve Bannon’s War Room. “But God awakened me.”
Turning Point spokesman Andrew Kolvet told Breitbart News that the impetus for the alternative event was due to “overwhelming demand” from conservatives who were allegedly turning to Kirk and his co-organizer, Tyler Bowyer, for answers.
“How many hundreds of phone calls does Tyler have to take before he’s like, ‘OK, I guess we have to get the band together? I guess we have to do this thing because everyone’s telling me there’s this huge problem.’ The way we see it is people need this,” Kolvet told the far-right publication.
The RNC is meeting behind closed doors this week, after McDaniel’s plan to make Trump the party’s presumptive nominee crumbled due to Republican outrage, reported the Associated Press. Even Trump declared it was too soon to rule Nikki Haley out.
“While they have far more votes than necessary to do it, I feel, for the sake of PARTY UNITY, that they should NOT go forward with this plan,” Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social.
