Morning Glory: Ronna McDaniel was the best hire NBC could make

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As a lifelong Republican I was sorry to see Ronna McDaniel depart as Chairwoman of the Republican National Committee because I’ve been around GOP grassroots activism since my first campaign —for then Congressman Paul Cronin in Massachusetts in 1974 (he lost in the "Watergate wipeout" of that fall to Paul Tsongas)— and McDaniel was as good as it gets in this new political world. The GOP is so big and so wildly diverse that it takes a great deal of balance and dexterity to keep everyone happy most of the time.

McDaniel did. She also ran a very fair primary system and debate schedule as did her colleague David Bossie and the debate committee of the RNC. I participated in that process as well as just generally interviewing Republican electeds of all sorts and just almost always voting Republican and know, again, that McDaniel, Bossie and their entire committee had to navigate a lot of white water over the past four years. That is because there aren’t just the "five families" of the House GOP Causus to contend with, there are the 74 million plus folks who voted for former President Donald Trump in 2020. The degree of diversity within that 49% of the 2020 electorate is wildly more complicated than the very complicated House Republican dynamics.

Ronna did a very good job doing just that. The GOP got the House back over the course of two elections in four years. They did so despite COVID arriving on the GOP watch in 2020, which is like a recession arriving on a party’s watch. It does not help. It hurts. Badly. Disasters and hard times impact incumbent parties more than the out-of-power party. But despite that, and despite a raft of bad-to-terrible candidates that McDaniel did not select,