During a Monday appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” CEO of the Center for American Liberty Harmeet Dhillon announced her decision to run for chair of the Republican National Committee.
In her announcement, Dhillon — who is also the chair and founder of the Republican National Lawyers Association — argued that Republicans must “modernize” the party in order to “compete with the Democrats” in the way that they run elections.
While many establishment Republicans continue to complain about the way Democrats run their elections — especially the mail-in ballot issue — others, like Dhillon, have finally realized that, while the rules remain in place, Republicans have to step up and compete with Democrats using their own tactics.
If elected to RNC Chairwoman role, one of my first job offers will be to @ScottPresler — if he will have us — to inspire and train our ground forces on voter registration and getting every ballot to the ballot box by all legal means!
— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) December 6, 2022
Not only that, but the GOP needs to change their leadership, she argues. As Republicans were expected to make major gains in the 2022 midterms but ended up only gaining a slim majority in the House and actually losing a seat in the Senate, the current leadership clearly hasn’t done the party any favors.
“I think that we really need to radically re-shape our leadership in order to win,” Dhillon told host Tucker Carlson. “And we can’t keep running elections like we did in the ’90s and the 2000s and we really have to modernize to compete with the Democrats dollar-for-dollar in the ways they fundraise, the way they deliver their ballots to the ballot boxes.”
She also discussed an issue that is important to the conservative base — messaging. Many conservative voters have complained that the party is often just reacting to the Democrats while not putting forth its own ideas and proposals. Dhillon appeared to agree, noting: “Our messaging needs to be fresh and positive and not just reactive to news cycles and what the Democrats are doing.”
Dhillon went on to state that the GOP “needs to realize that the party has become a populist party.”
“The base of the party demands populist messages that speak to them and not Chamber of Commerce messages, not neocon messages, not warmonger messages and I’m afraid that the base of our party is not getting what it needs from our leadership,” she added. “And so, after three successive rounds of really disappointing results, Tucker, I’m a member of the RNC and no other member is stepping up to challenge leadership, and our current leadership has never been challenged for the chair job and I think that challenge and competition is very good.”
