Republican National Committee

It is day three of the Republican convention in Milwaukee and tonight Trump’s vice presidential pick J.D. Vance will take the stage. The reaction was muted in the arena when Trump anointed Vance on Monday, likely due to a combination of low name identification and concerns from the establishment that he is not helping Trump’s electability. This will therefore be an important moment for Vance to introduce himself to the broader Republican electorate. Outside of the security perimeter this morning, a Trump supporter was holding court with the following sign: “Advance America, vote Trump and Vance.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin The Spectator is on the ground in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where the big story of the day is Donald Trump’s pick for vice president: Ohio senator J.D. Vance.  Trump told Fox News’s Bret Baier this morning that he would be making the announcement at the convention Monday. Later reports indicated that it would take place around 4:35 p.m. Eastern Time. Trump then blasted out the news on his site Truth Social minutes ago. Of no surprise to anyone is that Trump treated the spectacle like an episode of The Apprentice. A couple of days ago he listed out four finalists for the VP nod: GOP senators Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and Tim Scott and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum.

Welcome to Thunderdome. So I want to open with a caveat: Fox News is my employer, and anything I say that is critical of their pollsters should be understood as distinct to their pollsters, and not to the network as a whole. That said, their pollsters have occasionally been... very wrong. Who can forget the ludicrous Indiana Senate poll from 2018 that envisioned a dead heat between the candidates in a race the Republican won by seven points? So the point is, everyone can be off on occasion. But right now, the Fox prognosticators are out with a poll that shows Joe Biden up, and the opinions about the economy up as well. It’s been a shift that is notable over the past month. For Republicans, this may come as a shock, or they might dismiss it.

NBC’s decision to hire former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel as a paid contributor has made lots of folks angry. The backlash was so strong, in fact, that days after its parent company brought in McDaniel as a political analyst, MSNBC’s president, Rashida Jones, announced that the former chairwoman won’t be contributing on air to the cable network. McDaniel appeared for her first hit as a contributor on NBC’s long-running Sunday show Meet the Press and was interviewed by anchor Kristen Welker.

The barbarians — along with a $464 million judgment against Donald Trump —are at at the gates of Mar-a-Lago. On Monday, Trump's attorneys in his civil fraud case said securing a large enough bond is a "practical impossibility."  Despite bragging about the depths of his pockets, Trump doesn’t have the money on hand to post bond, nor can he use his properties as collateral. According to his lawyers, nearly thirty insurance companies have already declined to underwrite a bond backed by real estate. Whatever stockpiled cash Trump does have on hand has already taken a hit. Last week he posted a $91 million bond in the second E. Jean Carroll defamation case.

Welcome to Thunderdome. The Republican Party has new leadership, with North Carolina GOP chairman Michael Whatley and daughter-in-law of the former president Lara Trump taking over an organization that will, in reality, be run by Chris LaCivita. They’ve already made one controversial but wise decision in demurring on the hiring of Scott Presler, a ballot harvester popular with the MAGA crowd. But they now confront the harsh reality of the RNC’s fundraising woes: they’re well behind the Joe Biden campaign and the DNC. The Democratic president’s campaign account officially reported taking in $21 million in February, according to its report filed with the Federal Election Commission late Wednesday, ending the month with $71 million cash on hand.

Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is reportedly preparing to step down from her post after seven years on the job. Multiple sources told the New York Times that McDaniel intends to resign after the South Carolina GOP primary at the end of the month; she had been facing years of pressure as the longest-reigning RNC chair with seemingly few tangible successes. The RNC expressed plans at its Winter Meeting last week to take out a credit line amid disappointing fundraising and cash-on-hand numbers, and McDaniel took sharp criticism for her failure to produce a “red wave” in the 2022 midterms and her unwillingness to get financially involved in Virginia’s state elections in 2023.

As the Republican National Committee launches its annual Winter Meeting in Las Vegas, Trump allies are once again calling for the GOP to oust Ronna McDaniel as its chairwoman. Their preferred replacement? Scott Presler. Presler, for those unfamiliar, first rose to social media and political fame by organizing a clean-up in Baltimore after the former president Donald Trump called the Maryland city a “disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess.” Since then, the activist better known on X as “#ThePersistence” launched a Republican voter registration effort and, subsequently, Early Vote Action, a political action committee aimed at getting Republicans to cast their votes before Election Day. Prior to all this, Presler was a co-founder of Gays for Trump during the 2016 election.