Photo: Getty Images
DANA POINT (CNS) - The Republican National Committee, meeting at the Waldorf Astoria Monarch Beach resort and club in Dana Point, re-elected Ronna McDaniel as RNC chair Friday for a fourth straight two-year term.
McDaniel prevailed in an unusually contentious intra-party election with 111 votes to 51 for her closest rival, California national committeewoman Harmeet Dhillon. "My Pillow" CEO Mike Lindell trailed the field with four votes.
The 49-year-old McDaniel is a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and the niece of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor.
She has been national GOP chair since 2017 -- when she was backed for the spot by President Donald Trump. Her fourth term, the longest for a Republican chair since the Civil War, will carry her through the 2024 presidential election.
"With us united, and all of us working together, the Democrats are going to hear us in 2024," she said after her victory.
The win came in a secret ballot among the 168 RNC voting members who gathered this week in the Orange County seaside resort for the party's annual winter meeting. Voters come from all 50 states.
Trump is the only officially declared Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election as of now, and while he stayed neutral in the McDaniel-Dhillon contest, he did congratulate McDaniel for her "big WIN" on his social-media platform, Truth Social.
Dhillon -- who also has ties to Trump, as her law firm represented the former president during the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack -- did not echo McDaniel's message of GOP unity, as the fissure in the voting likely reflected.
"The party is not united," Dhillon said.
"Nobody's going to unite around the party the way it is, which is seemingly ignoring the grassroots."