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--:-- Georgia Howe: Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- John Bickley: And I'm John Bickley, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Wire.
--:-- Georgia Howe: It's Sunday, June 18th, and this is an extra edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: Joining us now is Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. Ronna, thanks so much for coming on.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, the RNC recently launched a Bank Your Vote campaign. Tell us about that campaign.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: Yeah, we've launched a Bank Your Vote initiative. And really what this is, is educating voters, making sure they're aware that we have to take advantage of the laws as they are on the books. So during these early vote periods, during mail-in voting, we need to make sure that we're banking as many votes as possible before Election Day because we can't let Democrats have a head start.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, obviously, we're always investing in this, but in some states, just culturally, voters don't like to vote early or they don't like to vote by mail. Especially after 2020.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: So that's why we've launched this initiative with the NRCC, the NRSC, really to educate voters on the importance of getting those votes in early. And I certainly will say after 2020, we did see a cultural shift in some states, I'd say Pennsylvania specifically, where voters really became reticent to vote by mail. And after 2022, I think people are finally waking up.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And you touched on something that I want to ask you about. A lot of GOP voters are concerned about ballot harvesting and election integrity. Is that something the RNC is pushing for?
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: Yeah, well, first of all, I don't like ballot harvesting. I think it's bad. I don't think it's good law to have people have different chain of custody and have somebody have thousands of ballots to turn in. So we're going to continue to fight what we think are bad laws. We want voter ID. We don't want voting months. We would rather have a voting day.
--:-- John Bickley: So we're going to continue to fight the bad laws in the courts.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: But the reality is once elections come and laws are set, we have to deal with what's on the books. So states like California, where they have ballot harvesting, you know, we lost four House seats in 2018. And in 2020, we picked four up. We flipped four Democrat seats because we engaged in ballot collection. And we picked up a fifth in 2022 in the Duarte seat.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, you mentioned poll watchers. What's the grassroots effort there?
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: It's massive. So many people don't know, but the RNC was under something called a consent decree for 40 years where we were not allowed to do any election day operations at all. We couldn't recruit poll watchers or poll workers.
--:-- John Bickley: That ended after the 2020 election.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: So we couldn't do it for the 2020 election, but for 2022, we could. And once we ramped that system up, we had 19 different councils in different states. We had 80,000 poll watchers and poll workers recruited. We shifted 100% in counties that we knew we had issues with.
--:-- Georgia Howe: And I'm sorry, just unpack that a little bit. The RNC couldn't have poll watchers for 40 years?
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: 40 years. Yeah, we were under something called a consent decree. It came from a New Jersey court order. The judge kept re it. We appealed. And actually the judge ended up passing away. We're not happy about that, but that's actually what ended the consent decree.
--:-- John Bickley: So the 2020 election cycle, the RNC could not do any poll watching or poll working.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: That was done by the Trump campaign or state parties. 2022 was the first election cycle where we could do this in 40 years.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Now, more broadly, what is the RNC strategy to get out the vote among independent voters in 2024?
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: Well, it's going to be all of the above, right? We use our data to identify who are our target voters, who are our independent voters. 42% of the country identifies as independent. So we have to make sure we're identifying our target voters, door knocks, digital, phone calls, all of the above to engage those voters and turn them in.
--:-- John Bickley: And then beyond that, once we know a voter has requested an absentee ballot, we make sure that we're contacting that voter with as much information to make sure they return it.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: So really it's identifying our voters and making sure we chase those ballots and get them in. And that's where bank the vote is just so, so critical because it's different state by state. We're going to have to apply it state by state, but a lot of it's going to be our ground game.
--:-- Georgia Howe: TV doesn't just turn out votes anymore. You need to have an army on the ground when you know there's 2,000 outstanding absentee ballots in this swing district that haven't been returned that are most likely Republican voters.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: And our biggest tool is going to be knocking those doors.
--:-- John Bickley: The GOP presidential field is getting pretty broad at this point. Do you think that's a good thing for GOP voters?
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: I'm just so pleased with the field of candidates that are jumping into the ring, especially contrasting them to Joe Biden. And it'll be up to the voters to decide, do we winnow this field, who does well in polling, who can garner that $40,000 small dollar donation threshold to make the debate stage.
--:-- Georgia Howe: I do think the field will get smaller as time goes on just by natural things like running out of money or not catching on fire.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: But right now I think it's a great, great field. And we're going to have an opportunity to contrast what Republicans believe, like closing the border, making sure fentanyl is not coming across, parental rights, energy independence, stemming inflation, all the things that we stand for as a party that are common sense, that we can contrast with some of the crazy things we're seeing come out of the Democrat Party.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, you were challenged by Harmeet Dillon for the top RNC position. For listeners who aren't aware, Harmeet Dillon is a pretty high-profile lawyer. Have you considered and or incorporated any of her ideas into the policies you're going to push for going forward?
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: Well, I think Harmeet and I agreed on a couple things, which is creating an election integrity division within the RNC. And certainly, I'm getting on the road more and talking to grassroots about what the RNC does. I think there was a lot of misinformation. You know, the RNC doesn't pick candidates, the voters do, and that's the right thing.
--:-- Georgia Howe: We don't call the plays for the candidates. Candidates create their own messaging through their campaign manager and their pollster.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: But really what we are is a get out the vote organization. And if you look 2022, Republicans turned out 4 million more voters than Democrats did. We would have won the Electoral College because we were the top vote getter in Arizona, New Hampshire, and Georgia. And in every battleground state except Pennsylvania where we were engaged statewide, we won statewide.
--:-- John Bickley: So what we have to extrapolate from 2022 is there was a massive amount of ticket splitting and some Republicans were able to get independent voters and some weren't, which is gonna be key to winning in 2024.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: But from an RNC perspective, our road put everyone in a place to reach success. I view us as the road, the cars are the candidates. You need both to get to your destination. But if a Republican won statewide in every battleground state, then that tells me that the road worked.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Well, Ronna, thanks so much for coming on.
--:-- Ronna McDaniel: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
--:-- John Bickley: That was Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. And this has been an extra edition of Morning Wire.
