Five House Republicans say they won't vote for House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy as the next speaker, but Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said she believes those holdouts will come around so lawmakers can start pushing back on President Joe Biden's administration.
"Republicans are very excited that we took back the House and retire [Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, but they want to see the House get going and start investigations," McDaniel said on Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "The longer it takes to get the speaker settled, the longer it takes to get that work done, so I think Kevin has the votes."
McCarthy, R-Calif., worked hard on the campaign trail and in recruiting candidates that won their elections, not only this year but in 2020, when the GOP picked up 15 seats, which helped lead to the party's upcoming House majority hold, said McDaniel.
Meanwhile, McDaniel is facing challengers for her seat as chair, and on Friday noted that while Republicans didn't win as many elections as the party expected in the November midterms, "we won back the House, which was huge."
"Retiring Nancy Pelosi is huge, but we didn't win as much as we expected, and we want to make sure that we do a review of that," McDaniel said. "The RNC is going to do that. At least two-thirds of the members support me. I feel good about that."
McDaniel added that party members realize the RNC, under her watch, has raised record amounts of money and transferred more than $260 million to state Republican Party organizations.
"I think one of the things from this election is if you look at the popular vote, Republicans turned out more voters," in the midterm elections, McDaniel said. "We would have won the White House with this level of the popular vote and the RNC is a turnout machine. We don't pick the candidates. We don't do the messaging for the campaigns. But we do the turnout."
However, McDaniel said she disagrees with people who say that the party should adopt procedures like Democrats use, including promoting early or mail-in voting.
"When you look at California, where we have worked on ballot harvesting since 2018 when we lost four races, we picked up four in 2020," she said.
McDaniel noted that the party worked with ballot harvesting in several states, including Nevada, where Republican Joe Lombardo unseated Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak.
"I think there's a narrative out there that doesn't match some of the results," McDaniel said. "In Georgia, we won eight of nine statewide races on election day. Brian Kemp beat Stacey Abrams by 8 points in 2022. He beat her by 1 in 2018."
The RNC, though, needs to educate voters, said McDaniel.
"If Democrats are banking votes for a month before election day, we have to be doing the same," said McDaniel. "People in our party are sowing discord and saying, 'Don't vote except for on Election Day.' That is not what I'm saying.
"We have to be getting those votes in because we can't get it all on Election Day. The RNC will continue to push that message, which we have been pushing."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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