Exclusive — Harmeet Dhillon on Running for RNC Chair: ‘We Haven’t Won an Election for the Last 6 Years’

Harmeet Dhillon, attorney and candidate for chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), said on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with special guest host Monica Crowley that the GOP’s years-long record of losses is due to the party elite’s disconnection from its voter base.

“I’m running for chair of the RNC because I think we need to really refocus the party,” Dhillon stated. “We haven’t won for the last six years. Our last midterm was – I would say – disappointing at best, and I think that there are a lot of things at the RNC that are institutionally geared towards not winning.”

Political consultants enrich themselves via contracts with the Republican Party despite a lackluster performance, Dhillon held.

She added, “We have some consultants who are focused on their funding … as opposed to focusing on winning. We have messaging that isn’t resonating with our base. We have mixed messages on what to do about early voting and ballot harvesting, which I think we need to absolutely be engaging in aggressively in order to win elections.”

Dhillon remarked on the conflicting priorities between Republican base voters and the party’s de facto aristocracy.

“There really needs to be a different approach as to the grassroots of the party,” Dhillon advised. “The RNC is very much a top-down institution. It’s for the elite of the party. The power is concentrated at the top.”

She reflected, “Ronald Reagan began a populist wave in the party and … Donald Trump [led a] transformation of the party to much more of a blue-collar, grassroots party. The party structure and leadership doesn’t reflect all of that. So these are the things that I’d like to focus on.”

Existing business relationships between the RNC and its contractors had become ossified and are in need of review in order to increase the judicious spending of donors’ funds, Dhillon stated.

She explained, “[There is a] virtual lack of turnover in vendor relationships at the RNC. I call for a top-to-bottom review of contracts and consulting agreements at the RNC to make sure that we have competitively bid agreements, that we are selecting these people based on pricing and also reviewing them based on results.”

“A lot of consultants — whether it be fundraising or otherwise — they get paid, whether they really succeed in elections or not,” Dhillon noted. “It needs to be run like a business.”

The RNC chair has a duty to spend donor money and the party’s resources prudently, Dhillon held.

She remarked, “The way you shepherd other people’s money is a very important selling point on whether people should give you money, and I don’t see a big emphasis on that [at the RNC]. In fact, what I see is to the contrary. I don’t want to get into details here, but one look at the FEC reports, there’s a lot of stuff there that I think we can be doing better.”

“Three successive general election losses means we really have to reexamine how we’re doing things.”

Dhillon is the founder of Dhillon Law Group and the Center for American Liberty. She chairs the Republican National Lawyers Association and is a national committeewoman of the Republican National Committee for California.

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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.