Days before, Oscar Brock, a Tennessee committee member, issued a public appeal to members, tying Ms. McDaniel to Mr. Trump and saying it was “obviously time” for the party to leave Mr. Trump’s leadership behind. . And in early January, the Steering Committee of the Republican Party of Alabama announced a vote of no confidence in Mrs. McDaniel.
In an interview, Mr. Brock said he remained neutral in the fight for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, but was convinced that Ms. McDaniel was beholden to the former president and his bid for another nomination.
“My loyalty is to run an independent primaries, and I want a president who can do that,” he said.
Shelly Gibson, a committee member from Guam, said Monday she received 113 emails about the leadership race that day. Others reported that voicemail boxes were filled with messages, thousands of emails and even home visits from activists supporting Ms Dhillon.
To a majority of the members, that was all noise.
“The committee members are a tight-knit group, like a family,” said Cindy Costa, an RNC member from South Carolina. “We don’t get involved in all that political stuff.”
The game took an unexpected turn on Thursday, when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis waded into the fray, praising Ms. Dhillon and urging “new blood” at the commission. The comments were remarkable given Mr Trump’s decision to publicly shy away from making an endorsement. While Mr. Trump was silent, some of his top campaign aides were spotted at the event in a luxury resort town on Thursday. Last night Kellyanne Conway, a Trump administration aide, was the guest speaker at the dinner.
But as a proxy campaign to probe Mr. Trump’s dominance over the Republican Party, the race for party leadership wasn’t perfect. Ms. Dhillon co-chaired the election-denying group Advocates for Trump in 2020 and has never made Mr. Trump’s grip on the party an issue in her effort to remove Ms. McDaniel from office. Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a conspiratorial Trump loyalist, also challenged Ms. McDaniel.