Michigan's Ronna McDaniel to step down from leading RNC: 6 things to know

After more than seven years as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Michigan's Ronna McDaniel on Monday announced she is, as of March 8, leaving the post, having lost the support of former President Donald Trump — who she helped get elected in 2016 as the state's GOP chair and to whom she remained steadfastly loyal throughout her tenure.

The granddaughter of the late George Romney, a popular Michigan governor in the 1960s, and the niece of U.S. Sen. (and former Massachusetts Gov. and 2012 Republican presidential nominee) Mitt Romney, McDaniel, 50, of Northville, said in an email sent early Monday that she would step aside at a party gathering March 8 in Houston "to allow our nominee to select a chair of their choosing."

McDaniel's departure had been widely expected following the South Carolina primary, which was held Saturday, and Trump's continued march toward securing the Republican nomination for a third time. He is widely favored to beat former South Carolina Gov. (and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) Nikki Haley in Michigan's primary on Tuesday and outperform her in the Super Tuesday states voting March 5.

"It has been the honor and privilege of my life to serve the Republican National Committee for seven years as chairwoman to elect Republicans and grow our Party," McDaniel said in the email. "The RNC has historically undergone change once we have a nominee and it has always been my intention to honor that tradition. I remain committed to winning back the White House and electing Republicans up and down the ballot in November."

She also thanked her family and Trump "for giving me the opportunity to lead our Party."

McDaniel departs the RNC as only its second female chair and the longest in its history for more than a century, having caught Trump's attention as she worked as Michigan's Republican Party chair to make him the first GOP presidential nominee to win the state since 1988, beating Hillary Clinton by two-tenths of a percentage point en route to the White House. She followed that by winning three more terms as chair of the committee, remaining a popular figure among many of its members even as she fended off a challenge in early 2023 to remain in the office another year.

But McDaniel also took her lumps during the years in which Trump became the central focus of the GOP, with a series of losses, including Democrats retaking the House in 2019 and the White House and Senate in 2021; even as the GOP gained a narrow majority in the House in 2023, its gains were not as great as expected and Democrats held on in the Senate, adding to their slim majority. Meanwhile, the number of Republican governors nationwide also fell.

Here are some highlights about McDaniel's personal history and her tenure as RNC chairwoman:

• While speaking of her family, her granddad and her uncle aren't the only notable political members: Her father, G. Scott Romney, is a lawyer who lost the GOP nod at the state convention to run against then-Attorney General Jennifer Granholm in 1998; and both her mom, also named Ronna, and her grandmother, Lenore, won nominations for U.S. Senate seats, though neither won. McDaniel has cited both as inspirations for her own career in politics.

• The Romney family name has been central to her career, to be sure, but not always in a good way. Her uncle Mitt denounced Trump as unfit for the presidency in 2016; she worked as state party chair to try to turn him around and let Republicans know she was in full support of Trump both that year and throughout his tenure, even dropping the "Romney" from her public name (she used to be known as "Ronna Romney McDaniel") in 2017, though she has said, despite rumors to the contrary, she did not do that at Trump's behest. And when Mitt got elected a U.S. senator from Utah and wrote an op-ed criticizing Trump's behavior as unproductive, she blasted his comments as "disappointing and unproductive."

• As RNC chairwoman, she was widely considered popular and a prodigious fundraiser, and during her tenure, the party raised more than $1.6 billion, according to a quick scan of Federal Election Commission records. She also was part of the effort to get WinRed, the Republicans' answer to the Democrats' successful ActBlue grassroots fundraising platform, off the ground. But some of that success has tailed off: In the current two-year political cycle, the RNC has raised about $99 million — which is at least $20 million less than the Democratic National Committee — and ended the most recent reporting cycle with less than $9 million in the bank, compared with the DNC's $21 million.

• McDaniel clearly worked as an ally of Trump's in the aftermath of the 2020 election and his efforts to undermine — or at least raise serious doubts about — his loss to Joe Biden in Michigan and elsewhere. As recently as last summer she was saying the results weren't fair, though she wasn't denying that Biden had been legally deemed the winner. Unlike Trump and some others, McDaniel hasn't been charged with conspiring to break laws involving the election that we know of. McDaniel, according to the U.S. House committee that investigated efforts to overturn the election, took part in putting together slates of fake electors, including in Michigan, that certified falsely that Trump won the balloting (in Michigan he lost by more than 154,000 votes) but she also told the committee she did so believing it was in support of the campaign in the event of its winning litigation contesting the results, which it did not, rather than those slates of fake electors being sent to Washington as if they were genuine.

• McDaniel's support of Trump has been staunch: In 2018, she caught criticism for a post on what was then known as Twitter warning Republicans that, "Anyone that does not embrace the @realDonaldTrump agenda of making America great again will be making a mistake." She later tried to clarify the remarks but she had a point: Many anti-Trump Republicans have either been purged from the party or left on their own. That said, her support hasn't always been slavish. For one, she insisted on going on with debates among Republican presidential candidates even when Trump refused to participate and insisted they end. Last summer, she said it would be a mistake for the former president to skip the debates; he did anyway.

• By last fall, according to the Washington Post, Trump was telling her in phone calls that people were mad at her, even though as recently as last year she handily beat back an effort to replace her by those who wanted the RNC to be even more closely tied to Trump. Election losses were blamed on her and lagging RNC support, even though, in many cases, they were equally tied to the Trump brand, if not more so. But powerful forces, including former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, wanted her out; asked this month on the conservative Newsmax network whether she should step down, Trump replied, "I think she knows that." Trump then endorsed North Carolina Republican Party Chairman Michael Whatley, the RNC's chief counsel, to be the new chair, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, to be co-chair. Rumors swirled that McDaniel would step down after South Carolina's Feb. 24 GOP primary.

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Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @tsspangler.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan's Ronna McDaniel to leave as RNC chair March 8