Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) said that he has been unable to rely on the Republican National Committee for get-out-the-vote operations in elections in recent years, and a shake-up is expected in the party’s leadership.
Former President Donald Trump unveiled his slate of replacements for RNC leadership last week, and rumors of current RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel’s departure continue to mount. The Georgia governor would not comment on potential Trump-backed shake-up but did say the current RNC was unreliable for helping get Republican voters out to the polls and that his campaign had to lead efforts for his race while speaking on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlan Collins on Tuesday.
“I’ve had concerns about the RNC and their ability to get the vote out and to get the early vote out and to raise enough money to be able to help candidates on the ground, and in Georgia, we had to do a lot of that ourselves,” Kemp said, “and I’m not trying to pick at anybody that’s in the state party, the national party. But it’s just the fact that we could not rely on them to get the vote out.”
He warned candidates that they should be assembling a “good ground game” and raise significant funds to ensure they can win on Election Day. Kemp also said that if they had done that for previous close races, the GOP would have won more of them.
“We’ve had to do that ourselves, and I think that’s the concern. That any campaign, whether it’s Nikki Haley or Donald Trump or anybody else that’s going to be running, I mean, you got to have a good ground game. You got to raise a lot of money to get the vote out. We don’t need to wait till Election Day to do that,” Kemp said.
“And, quite honestly, the last couple cycles, we haven’t done that. If we had, we’d have won close states versus losing them,” he concluded.
Before being reelected as RNC chairwoman in 2023, McDaniel defended the poor record in close races in the 2022 elections by saying it was not the job of the committee to pick candidates but to get voters out to vote for them.
“You need the road and the car to get to your destination. We built the road. The candidates are the cars, and it takes both, and I’m not candidate-bashing,” McDaniel said in January 2023. “The RNC doesn’t pick the candidates; the voters do. We don’t do the messaging for the campaigns. That’s up to each individual candidate, but if you look at what the RNC is responsible for, which is turning out the vote, 3 million more Republicans turned out than Democrats.”
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McDaniel has not announced her intention to resign, but rumors have suggested after the GOP’s South Carolina presidential primary this week that she may step down. Trump’s slate for new RNC leadership includes North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley for chairman, Lara Trump for co-chairwoman, and his co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita for committee COO.
Lara Trump made headlines for her comments that she would spend “every single penny” from the committee to get her father-in-law, Donald Trump, elected president in November, later saying on a television appearance on Sunday that she would also spend funds on ensuring GOP majorities in the House and Senate.
