Perspective: The GOP’s path to victory in 2024

Editor’s note: This essay is part of a series looking at the upcoming 2024 election cycle from different political perspectives.

In January, I was honored to be reelected for a record fourth term as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. I campaigned on a simple platform: unity.

As the great Ronald Reagan said during his 1966 gubernatorial campaign, it benefits our party to adhere to an 11th commandment: “thou shall not speak ill of other Republicans.”

Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t disagree. It doesn’t even mean that we can’t disagree vigorously. But it does mean that at the end of the day, we join together and focus our efforts on defeating Democrats at the federal, state and local level.

Disagreements within our party highlight our breadth of ideas and personalities. No movement should be bereft of debate, and iron sharpens iron. However, when it’s time to win, it’s time to come together. And we have serious work to do as we seek to make Joe Biden a one-term president.

At the Republican National Committee, my role is to lead and build the national party infrastructure in the months and years leading up to Election Day in November 2024. Think about it this way: if Republican candidates were a football team, the RNC builds and maintains the stadium in which they play. Regardless of who triumphs in the primary —throughout which the RNC will remain entirely neutral — our candidate will receive the keys to an already built political operation immediately after they receive the nomination.

That means hiring staff, opening offices and training volunteers across the country to knock on doors, make phone calls and register voters. It means developing cutting-edge data to ensure that our voter turnout efforts are targeted in the right place at the right time.

During the 2022 midterm cycle, we engaged 1 million volunteers who made 100 million “voter contacts” — meaning knocking on a door, making a phone call or otherwise getting in touch with potential voters. We built the largest ground game in the history of the party to flip the House and fire Nancy Pelosi as its speaker. As we look ahead to 2024, we’re going to build even bigger. We’ll need to break more records to defend the House, flip the Senate and put a Republican in the White House.

Reaching out to new voters — especially those who aren’t historically associated with the Republican Party — has also been a key part of our strategy at the RNC. At my direction, the RNC made a multimillion-dollar commitment in the 2022 cycle to increase our organizing efforts in minority communities in key states across the country.

We opened 38 brick-and-mortar community centers in 19 states to make inroads with Hispanic, Asian/Pacific, Black, Native American, Jewish and veteran voters. Our community centers worked to deliver historic wins for diverse candidates including Monica De La Cruz in Texas, Michelle Steel in California, Juan Ciscomani in Arizona, Anna Paulina Luna in Florida, Jen Kiggans in Virginia and Tony Gonzales in Texas. We will continue to build on that progress as we reopen community centers and build new ones in the months leading up to 2024.

Crucially, we must also make gains in the youth vote. To do so, the RNC is hiring a youth engagement director and establishing a Youth Advisory Council made up of young conservative leaders and influencers to spread our winning conservative message to younger generations. Our team will prioritize working with colleges, universities and high schools to ensure that participants and graduates can begin receiving class credit for their participation in our programs. To expand our efforts on college campuses, we plan to begin recruiting and hiring GOP Campus Team leaders nationwide.

In addition to broadening the Republican Party’s big tent, we will continue our unprecedented progress on protecting the vote. We saw success in this arena in 2022: we deployed 80,000 poll watchers and poll workers, filed 100 cases of election integrity litigation and secured key legal victories in battleground states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada.

There is room to improve, however. We are laser-focused on finding ways to increase Republican participation in early voting, absentee voting and ballot harvesting, where legal. We’ve already filed our first election integrity lawsuit since my re-election, suing a town in Vermont for allowing noncitizens to vote.

Soon, primary season will be in full swing and our party will showcase its deep bench of quality candidates for president. Unlike in previous cycles, they’ll do so on debate stages that are fair and free of bias. In April 2022, the RNC withdrew from the Commission on Presidential Debates in order to find fairer platforms for our candidates. The commission’s laundry list of offenses against nonpartisanship is long and includes selecting a former Biden staffer to moderate a 2020 debate between Biden and then-President Donald Trump.

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Americans are feeling the daily squeeze of trying to get ahead in Biden’s failed economy. While the White House might gaslight you about inflation, try to tell you it’s just a “transitory” thing, or pretend it doesn’t exist, families understand the real cost. Here are some facts: thanks to skyrocketing costs for basic goods, more than half of Americans have been reduced to using savings to pay for everyday expenses.

Meanwhile, credit card debt is at an all-time high, putting too many households near a breaking point. Due to this unforgiving economic environment, folks are burning through their savings and racking up debt at a rate so unsustainable that numerous economists warn that we’re headed for a recession, which would only make things worse.

It’s not just a failed economy. Biden has failed in his most fundamental obligation as president: to keep the American people safe. By effectively throwing open our southern border on Day 1 and undoing years of Republican-led border security progress, the Biden administration has created a humanitarian crisis. There have been over 6 million illegal border crossings since Biden took office, including an estimated 1.2 million “gotaways” — folks who have slipped through the process and come into our country without documentation. Those numbers are the largest on record.

These failed border policies have aided and abetted a surge in fentanyl smuggling, allowing cartels to poison our communities “at catastrophic and record rates like we’ve never seen before,” according to Biden’s own Drug Enforcement Administration. Fentanyl is one of the deadliest drugs in the world and can kill in unimaginably small doses. It’s now believed to be the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-45. It’s not just a problem in the Southwest; when you don’t have secure borders, every state becomes a border state.

Meanwhile, crime is surging under the watch of Biden and the defund-the-police Democrats. At least nine cities, seven of which are Democrat-run, saw record homicides last year as skyrocketing crime continues to plague communities across the country. Many other major cities in 2022 saw homicide levels not seen in decades, including New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Phoenix. New York City set a new felony crimes record last year, with the most felony crimes reported in at least 15 years. This is a direct result of Democrats repeatedly calling to defund the police and following through by slashing money from police budgets.

Democrats at every level support pro-criminal policies. Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has expressed support for releasing one-third of prisoners, eliminating cash bail, opening heroin injection sites and decriminalizing all drugs. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stands by cashless bail, supports DAs who refuse to enforce the law and lowered penalties for parole violations, including failed drug tests. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek stands by the state’s failed drug decriminalization measure and wants a “meth stabilization center” in Portland that will further enable illicit drug markets.

The White House doesn’t seem to mind: Vice President Kamala Harris supports “reimagining” the police, saying putting “more police on the streets” is not the way to make communities safer.

There is no question that Americans cannot afford four more years of crises on every horizon. Republican leadership matters: if you need proof, just look at the progress we’ve already seen under a Republican-controlled house. The days of Biden being able to rubber-stamp far-left policies with impunity are over and Democrats are being held accountable. Republican leaders in the House are holding hearings on the origins of COVID-19, Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, the border crisis, the administration’s wasteful spending and its energy policy. These are issues that the American people want — and deserve — answers on. Thanks to the hard work of Republicans and volunteers in the 2022 cycle, those answers are on the way. That wouldn’t be the case if we hadn’t flipped the House.

Just consider the first bill that House Republicans, under the leadership of my friend Speaker Kevin McCarthy, are looking to pass. House Resolution 1, known as the “Lower Energy Costs Act,” will improve our energy security, lower costs, help the environment and improve our national security. Meanwhile, Biden’s new budget proposes $31 billion in tax hikes on U.S. oil and gas production.

Need more proof that Republican leadership works? Look at the difference in outcomes between Republican and Democrat-led states. Through December, nine of the top 10 states for jobs recovered since the coronavirus pandemic began are led by Republican governors, and all 10 states have Republican-controlled legislatures. Out of the top 15 states with the lowest unemployment rates, 13 are led by Republican governors. When far-left teachers’ unions worked with the Biden administration to keep schools locked down — a catastrophic mistake that is leading to long-term negative impacts on our kids — it was Republican governors who stood strong and quickly reopened schools. Leadership matters. Decisions matter. If you want a steady hand when it matters most, you should be voting Republican.

We’ve experienced life under Joe Biden, and no one is better off than they were before he took office.

Our party is doing the work to meet this moment. How? By focusing on the future, not the past, and by presenting an agenda that resonates with the American people. We have the winning message: we believe in freedom from government tyranny, supporting law enforcement, driving down costs, cutting taxes and ensuring the safety of the American people from threats foreign and domestic. Everyone is welcome in this movement. Everyone is welcome in this Republican Party. Alongside those principles, we are working overtime to build an infrastructure to deliver wins for our candidates up and down the ballot. In politics, having the better message is only half the battle: we also have to make sure that everyone hears it.

Republicans stand for freedom. Republicans stand for opportunity. Republicans stand for America. As chairwoman of this party, it is my mission to ensure that our candidates have the tools and advantages they need to win and deliver on our deeply-held convictions through winning policy. I hope you’ll join the fight with us.

Ronna McDaniel is chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.