What Happened to the 2020 Election?

Merry Christmas. Welcome to The Liz Wheeler Show. I’m Liz Wheeler. All I want for Christmas is a new RNC chair. I know Christmas is over, but my wish has not been fulfilled yet. I hope everyone is having a wonderful week. Hopefully you have this week off, but I have a very important episode for you today. If you haven’t already subscribed to the show, I know I ask you this every day, but it’s doubly important today because YouTube gave us our second strike against our channel last week, which yeah, it sucks, but it wasn’t unexpected. The problem is that we’re not allowed to upload any new videos, anything, episodes, interviews, just any video at all, for two weeks. So until the new year, we’re not allowed to upload anything. So if you would go over to my Rumble channel, it’s Rumble.com/LizWheeler, you can get everything there.

You can get all episodes, all interviews, all videos, completely uncensored, completely free rumble.com/liz Wheeler, just to push back a little bit on YouTube. I think they’re gonna let us back on. I don’t think we’re gonna get fully kicked off…yet, although I do expect at some point that will happen. So let’s make sure that we have not put all of our eggs in the YouTube basket. If you could join me on Rumble. Also, next to that subscribe button on Rumble, there is a little red button. You will see it. That is how you can join The Liz Wheeler Show Community on Locals. I invite you to do that. I also have a promo code for you. If you become a VIP on the Liz Wheeler Show community on locals, and you use my promo code, CHEERS for the new year. Of course, you can picture me, you know, toasting you with champagne.

Then you can get the first three months of the year free as a V I P, which is the best deal we’ve ever offered. So why wouldn’t you start out your year like that? Just go to Rumble.com/LizWheeler, click that subscribe button, then click the red button next to it. Join the Liz Wheeler Show Community on Locals and use promo code CHEERS for just a great deal. A great deal. Okay, what are we going to talk about today? After the country comes back from this holiday week off, if you will. I know a lot of people are working, but your head in your mind may not be in it. I know that it’s hard, it’s hard to work in between Christmas and New Year’s, right? It’s very hard not to just feel in the resting, relaxing holiday spirit. However, we do have something very, very important that is just ahead, just after the first of the year.

And I don’t want us to lose sight of this. So the Republican majority will take office in the House of Representatives. Thank God we will have a little bit of a ball war against Biden and the White House and the Democrat Majority in the Senate. The GOP will take the house, which is good, not great, because I wanted to take the whole Congress. But the other thing that’s happening is the RNC chair elections are taking place in mid-January, and these are very important elections because the leadership of the Republican Party is not simply a presidential candidate or a President, or even a majority in the Senate in the House. The chair of the Republican Party is essentially the leader of the Republican apparatus. We’ve talked about this a lot. It is what I would rate of the second half of this year, at least, the most important thing to winning, to being able to win elections in the future

that as conservatives, we have given underrated importance to. I wanna flip that on its head. I want us to understand that if we do not change the leadership at the r n, if we do not elect someone, if our RNC committee members from our states do not elect a chair who acknowledges the reality of the political enemy that we face, then we will not fight well, we will not win in elections. And what happened in 2022 and what happened in 2020 will happen over and over again, and I don’t want that. So I wanna talk more deeply about what we need from an RNC chair and how to make this happen. So let’s get to it.

Okay, so the RNC chair elections happen in the state of California. They happen in Dana Point, California. I don’t know if you guys have been to Dana Point. It’s really, really beautiful. When my husband and I lived in California, we lived in San Diego for, what, eight years. We went up to Dana Point when we were going to visit Catalina Island. It’s a gorgeous area. But in light January, all 168 committee members of the Republican National Committee will all gather in Dana Point, California, and they will vote internally, privately, secretly, they will vote for a new RNC chair. There are two main contenders, Ronna Romney McDaniel, who has held this position since 2017. And Harmeet Dhillon, who is a legal expert. She’s the partner at the Dhillon Law Group, her law firm. And she’s an RNC committee member, obviously, and she’s highly active through her law firm in pushing back on the legal assault from the Left on elections, on free speech, on science, parental rights, all the different cultural issues here.

So, Ronna Romney McDaniel has said that she has 100 RNC members who support her. But what I have heard lately from RNC committee members, who I’ve spoken to off the air, is that there is growing support for Harmeet Dhillon based on her platform, based on her record, based on what she’s done. And people are changing their minds. People are switching their votes. Meaning what you are doing when you email your RNC committee member, there are three for each state. When you contact your state Republican Party, you get the email address or the phone number of your RNC committee member, you communicate with them and say, Hey, it’s time for a change. Harmeet Dhillon’s the way to go. That’s impacting how these committee members are casting their votes for an RNC chair. So, if you haven’t done that already, do it.

If you did it, if you’ve already done it once, do it again. This is an effective campaign that we are waging because one of the main takeaways from the elections, the 2022 midterm elections, is that it doesn’t matter if Republicans win public opinion. It doesn’t matter if we run good candidates. It doesn’t matter if we have good fundraising. If we do not have fair elections, then we will not win if we do not combat the electioneering that the Democrats have imposed upon us in the past. It’s not even just since 2016 or 2020, they’ve been trying to do this for a long time. It just accelerated in the Trump era. And then with COVID as an excuse, without fair elections, we will never win. And so a couple weeks ago, you’ll remember we did an episode together. It was the day that Harmeet Dhillon announced that she was going to challenge Ronna Romney McDaniel. And we did an episode where I said, listen, these are the questions that I have for the RNC chair or a potential RNC chair, a candidate who wants to be the chair of the Republican National Committee. And today I am happy to have Harmeet Dhillon join us on the show, willing and happy to answer these pointed questions about the future of the Republican Party. So with me now is Harmeet Dhillon.

Thanks for having me, Liz.

Of course. And you know, a lot of Republican voters across the country are hungry for change in the leadership in Congress, in the House, in the Senate, and at the top of the Republican party apparatus, the RNC chair. You have a lot of supporters, but people are very nervous. People are very skeptical about politicians and political leaders understanding the reality of the political enemy that we face. Because as we always say on this show, if you don’t understand that, then it’s impossible to fight well against it, and it’s impossible to win. So I did an episode two or three weeks ago, where I laid out questions for the RNC chair and potential RNC chair, and I’m glad to be able to ask you those questions today so that people can hear from you directly. My first question is, can you describe to me what happened related to election integrity or electioneering in the 2020 election?

Yeah, so for many years, Liz, Democrats have been using the courts to downgrade our election integrity, because under our constitutional scheme, the state legislatures set how elections are run in states, whether there’s absentee balloting with no excuses or what the excuses are, how much early voting, if any, there is, et cetera. So, you know, in a red state or a state where the Republicans control the legislature, the only way for Democrats to change that is by going into the courts. Now, if they went into the courts to change our laws and say, for example, that a voter ID is racist, or that you have to allow days of curing, or you have to allow ballots to be received a week after election day, and the Republican Party did not step in and fight that, or make its own arguments, then you just lose.

And so that has been the situation for many years. And, you know, I joined the RNC four years before the 2020 election, and it’s been sort of my one, I’m a one-note constantly talking about that. So after we lost in 2020, and you know, frankly, some of the recommendations that I made were not implemented in terms of litigation, we saw that the Democrats successfully used COVID to leverage this huge change in our election laws all in one year. So it had been happening slowly and slowly. And it wasn’t just governors who did it with emergency orders, it was also some legislatures that did it, including some Republican legislatures who didn’t think through the implications. And then it was a lot of courts that ignored the legislature. So this combination of forces combined with a lack of resistance by Republicans or not enough resistance led to 2020 election. And so that’s what happened. We smartened up after that. We’re still playing catch-up.

Okay. So talk to me specifically about what happened in Wisconsin, because I think Wisconsin is an interesting case study because a lot of the procedures for the elections at the state level were changed. They allowed the drop boxes that were unmanned, they sent out ballots, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court later ruled that those changes were made without the authority to change them, which in the future, the Wisconsin’s Freedom Court said would render the outcome of an election invalid. Talk to me a little bit about that, because I think a lot of Republican voters are wondering, is that specific situation, what happened in a lot of these different states? And if these procedures and rules and laws were changed without the authority to do so in violation of the state Constitution, for example, how was, how was the election simply, how did we just shrug our shoulders and say, okay, well that was a fair election?

Well, I don’t think anyone said it was a fair election, but I think we were, you know, caught flat-footed. To be very clear, when you have a presidential nominee and it’s your party, the campaign and the RNC work hand-in-hand, literally operatives from the Trump campaign and the RNC were working side-by-side at the same desk. So there was a lot of responsibility for of the Trump campaign in setting election litigation priorities. And then RNC also had had a role in that, which, you know, neither side successfully intervened in time, saw these things happening, thought they could do anything with it. COVID hampered the ability to even go into court. I litigated numerous COVID lawsuits during COVID. I never went into a courtroom once.

And so access to the courts was more difficult. Getting a hearing is more difficult. All of these things happen. And so now people say, well, why can’t we just redo the election or declare Donald Trump the winner? That’s not how election law works. I’m going back centuries. It is the case that if you don’t prompt the act before the election or immediately following the election, and you have a case that you can prove that, but for the illegitimate votes that were cast, and you can identify who they are whatever is declared as the outcome of the election is set in stone, that’s pretty much election law, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat. And it’s benefited both sides over the years. So what should be done in these cases is not just rely, in my opinion, on a Supreme Court ruling. It is to go back and tighten up those laws and make it very clear that in the future, either they make, make those laws part of the constitution or otherwise make it impossible for judges to simply, or legislatures to snap their fingers and do this.

We saw the same thing in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, the legislature, the courts and election officials in Georgia similarly, they just changed things without the constitutional authority to do so, and there was little pushback in the courts, or not timely pushback in the courts. The situation is even more difficult now in the sense that in the wake of 2020 election litigation, where frankly a lot of lawyers who did not know what they were doing, and were not experts in election law, stepped in to make challenges after the fact. A lot of bad precedents were set in the sense that election integrity litigation got a bad name. And now a lot of lawyers won’t do that work. In fact, my law firm is one of the few in the country on the Republican side that’s willing to go into court and make these challenges, but they still have to be consistent with existing law and precedent.

So I guess that’s my next question, is the litigation that the Democrats have used to reinforce this system of voting, this election season versus election day, can it be undone or has that ship sailed?

It’s state by state, really. And so I don’t think anything is ever final, but sometimes it requires electing a Republican governor to sign a law passed by a Republican legislature. And so I get a lot of pushback on my campaign trail right now saying, Harmeet, you aren’t gonna quote, unquote get rid of the machines. And I try to explain, it’s not something that I can do as a chair of the RNC to get rid of machines. It’s a state law matter. And secondly, with 350 million people in this country, we’re not gonna be counting votes by hand and get the results on election day, which to me is very important. So to me, it’s not the machines so much as open sourcing the code of the machine so everybody knows how these votes are counted, proper training and oversight. And frankly, I believe we have to shift in states with early voting, which is most states in the country.

Now we have to shift to a model until we can either close that down or increase the integrity of the elections to getting our votes in at the beginning of the process, not at the end of the process. This is what the Democrats do. We should not be leaving to chance that whether like in Nevada might interfere with people voting on election day, or in Arizona. Poor training, inadequate staffing, and malfunctioning machines lead to long lines for Republicans when Democrats voted 30 days ago. So I think we need to get in and vote early and have a lot more investment of manpower training ballot chasing and ballot curing until such time as we can eliminate or restrict that what you call election season, in California, it’s 60 days, it’s 30 days before the election, and it’s 30 days after the election. That’s ridiculous. And somehow they keep counting until they find votes. Now, it doesn’t always mean the Democrat wins. They kept counting and they found some more votes. And we have a new member of Congress on the Republican side thanks to that, but I hate it. We ought to be having the certainty that third world countries have.

And what does that model look like? Because I think a lot of us agree that we would prefer election day, but when we have election season, we need to compete where the Democrats are beating us, which is in this early voting. So how do we not mimic their apparatus, but how do we challenge their apparatus with one of our own?

Well, it’s just a matter of, there’s no shortcuts in life. It’s in a matter of investment training and willpower. One of the things we have in California is actually we are pretty successful in ballot harvesting, ballot chasing, ballot curing. That’s how some members of Congress we picked up seats over the last few years because we’re used to it. In fact, in California for the, for 30 years, Republicans did a better job than Democrats of getting our votes in early. I will, I will tell you, as a person, with people of all ages in my family, elderly voters like to vote early. It’s more convenient for them. They like to mail in their ballot. They don’t wanna stand in line, you know? And you know, my husband likes to vote early. I don’t like to vote early. People have different preferences.

So how do you do that? You have to first provide the training and the manpower. Now, Democrats have an army of humans who go out there and they do this work. They call, they show up at your doorstep. They have unions who do it for free. They have a culture where people bring their ballots to churches or community centers or food banks or whatever, and they vote over there. We don’t have that culture on the Right. And, you know, rightfully so, people like to fill out their own ballots and turn them in themselves, but that’s not the system we have. So we’ve been trying to invest in that. Now, without that investment, you aren’t gonna be able to do it. Now does that mean the r and c has to make the monetary investment? Not necessarily. But there has to be a leadership at that level to say it clearly, guys, until we can change the laws, this is how we need to do it.

And here are some training resources. Now, I still think states should be mostly responsible for that because we know our community’s better. And some states don’t even have this problem. Many states and increasingly more states do, but empowering states and local Republicans with the resources necessary for the training, and then how to raise your own money, and then how to harness activists. So for example, we have so many Republican clubs in the party your Women’s Federated clubs, your Young Republicans, your College Republicans. If we were to make College Republicans or Young Republicans as a volunteer activity, chasing ballots, curing ballots, and have people devote their time to that, that would be a great thing. That would be a way to combat what the Left does.

So the purpose of the RNC is sort of fourfold. It’s to build the platform of the Republican party. It’s to brand republicanism, branding. It’s fundraising. And it’s election strategy. So I guess putting election strategy aside for just a second, talk to me about the platform. The Republican Party has not issued a party platform in recent years. What would that look like? What would that look like if you were chair of the RNC? Well,

I wanna slightly disagree with you. We had a robust debate in the 2016 convention. I was on the rules committee, not the platform committee, but we had a debate about the platform. And we issued a platform. I was also at the convention in 2020, which was a very truncated convention, you know, no guests. It was just us. We readopted the 2016 platform with no changes. So we do have a platform, and I fully support the platform of the Party. It’s the constitution of the party, if you will, or it’s the policy plank of the party, and it needs to be defended. We shouldn’t run from it. Now we don’t hear a lot about it. I think it’s interesting your comment, because you’re right, you don’t hear a lot from the current share talking about the platform. Some people think the platform’s a liability. I think that first principles about moral issues, about national security issues, about our border, about how we spend our money and about our philosophies about empowering the individual. I think these are very important values that the party has. And they will be debated in 2024. I’m sure that there will be discussions about cultural issues, social issues, economic issues. To what extent should the party be focusing on the Cold War issues as opposed to new security issues. I think it’s very important, but I’ve pledged to strongly support the platform and stand behind it.

Well, and maybe it’s more of an issue with branding then, if, if so many people are unaware of what the platform is. But I think it is the case that the current leadership at the RNC shies away from hot-button issues shies away from culture war issues, they trail a little bit behind. Even when they do speak out, they trail behind public opinion to make sure that their position is going to be popular. And a lot of us conservatives in the country sit here and we see these assaults that are being waged on our children, specifically on institutions like the family through the education system on religion. And we understand that not just elected leadership in Congress, but the leadership of the Republican apparatus needs to understand the importance of the cultural issues and have that fire in her belly to fight that fight. Can voters be confident that you will not shy away from that?

Well, Liz, I think my record speaks for itself. I have a lengthy record in speaking out on behalf of life. I’m in court regularly at my law firm. Half a dozen lawyers at my firm are involved in pro-life litigation at any given time. I’m suing Javier Bacerra and Kamala Harris and Planned Parenthood for conspiring against pro-life warrior David Deleon, and trying to shut him down and persecute him for exposing Planned Parenthood’s fetal part trafficking. And one of the leading lawyers in the country taking on the transgender grooming movement. In two lawsuits, one is for Chloe Cole, who’s a prominent spokesperson who’s detransitioned from that movement. She’s 18 and another is Jessica Cohn and the mom of a girl who was groomed by teachers in California to consider herself bisexual and then trans. And now luckily the girl has come back to her original way of appearing and perspective, but I’m not afraid of these issues at all. And I’m a leader on them. In fact, there’s no comparison, really. So I don’t think anyone should fear about that. I put my money where my mouth is, and I do it in liberal San Francisco. So I am not afraid about people’s opinion about me. I do what’s right. And so that’s something that I think is a distinction between myself and the current chair.

One of the other parts, or one of the other roles the R n C chair plays is helping pick candidates. I know that this is supposed to be state centric, but the RNC plays a big role in helping in helping pick candidates because they pick which candidates to support even in primaries. How, what would your process be to pick candidates to ensure that we don’t accidentally elect more squishes to the United States Congress or to state houses or to governor’s mansions? What would that process look like for you?

Well, actually, I wanna take issue with that. It’s actually under our rules. We are not supposed to be playing in primaries, and we do not support one candidate over the other in primaries. So we do have sister committees, the NRCC, the National Republican Congressional Committee, Kevin McCarthy is the of nominal leader of that. But there’s usually a different member of congress, like Tom Emer is that person right now, if I’m not mistaken. And then the NRSCA United States Senator is in charge of that. There’s a lot of overlap and fundraising and lawyers, the same people are kind of in that group, but even they don’t necessarily choose the candidate, but they do have persuasion over it. Now, I think as an RNC, we should be using our power as a leader and as the voice of the party to be.

I think we should be stepping in in a few cases. Now, generally, I prefer the voters to make that choice. So generally in the primary, however, we’ve had some instances in the last election cycle where Democrats poured tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars of dark money into our primaries to select candidates who are not good fits for the district. We have no answer for that. We’ve been sitting there like a sitting duck like we can’t do anything about it. We have to evolve strategies for that, whether that be personally getting in and having conversations with candidates and brokering a deal where somebody runs later. This is politics 101, like as a county chair. I used to do that here in San Francisco when I was a county chair. I used to say, Hey, maybe you wait till next term to run for that position, or how about if you do this?

That kind of deal making is part of politics. And when we let the Democrats define who our candidates are, we lose every single time. I have not heard a plan from the current share on how to deal with that. And I think we have to have that conversation as a party and have a plan to deal with it. And that’s very important. And so you mentioned one more thing, which is branding. Branding has been absent from our party. I frankly think that our messaging, we pay probably millions of dollars to communications and messaging experts. I have heard from our voters in the last few weeks as I’ve been running, nothing good about that. And so we really have to upgrade our game in that regard, and I feel like communications is one of my skills.

Yeah. And that’s one of the things after 2022 when I think we were all a little surprised that we didn’t see more of a red wave, because we assumed that with the dissatisfaction that voters feel towards Biden with high inflation, high gas prices, with just the general direction of our country, that voters would say, oh, wait, we’ll vote Republican here, because Republicans are offering the obviously better option. And I think that we overestimated the human nature aspect of how difficult it is to overcome that hurdle to vote for a Republican when pop culture and Hollywood and politicians have been vilifying the Republican brand for so long. It’s difficult for someone who’s not an a lifelong Republican voter, who doesn’t have Republican family members to say, oh yeah, I’m gonna align myself with this group that I’ve been told is bigoted and hateful and evil and homophobic and xenophobic and all the other insults all along. How do we go about changing that since it is not just a political issue, it’s a cultural thing.

Well, speaking of culture, I made, I made this comment at Turning Point Action yesterday in Phoenix. And most members of the RNC don’t have social media accounts. And the chair doesn’t appear to do her own social media. I do my own social media, and I think it’s very important that we engage with young people, with people from all the communities we’re trying to reach and have them be the ambassadors. Look, you’re right. You’re not gonna get some older member of the RNC like me to convince some younger person necessarily. But if you have ambassadors from that cohort who communicate with them through the media that they communicate through Instagram, Twitter, Rumble, all these, you know, new platforms, we don’t do that. We don’t engage like that at all.

And that’s such a failure. I saw this week that Democrats are gonna be investing very heavily in data and in social media, and I would, if I were the chair, it’s the actually relatively inexpensive way to reach people compared to expensive ads trying to emotionally tell them to go vote on election day. They’re just much more efficient uses of our money and our messaging to do that. So if we had the same leadership as we had the last six years, I think you can expect the same results, which wasn’t satisfactory. And so that’s why I’m running,

Here’s the million dollar question then. Can you win?

Well, yeah, I think we have five weeks to go. And I’ve gone from zero to 60 pretty fast, in a short time. Look, people ask, why did you get into the race recently? Well, the Chair actually promised us she wasn’t gonna run for a fourth term two years ago. And I had assumed another person was gonna step up and run. And she’s kind of sandbagged us with announcing that she was running again and, you know, getting all this support. There’s a certain amount of inertia, there’s a lot of turnover at the RNC. Some people have only known it to be one way. But I think change is important, particularly when you’re losing elections. It’s important. And I don’t wanna suggest that the Chair is responsible for winning every race in America. She isn’t, or he isn’t, but they set the tone, they set the energy, they set the direction, and they must lead, not follow. And I think that we have to see that in the Party, and I’d like to see it because I’m tired of devoting thousands of hours of my time and dollars and losing elections. It’s not satisfactory to me. That’s why I stepped up.

You mentioned on your Twitter a couple days ago that you’ve been on the phone constantly with other RNC committee members. Are you hearing from them that they’re changing their minds, even from those hundred who supposedly signed a letter pledging to McDaniel? Have you gotten some people who said, you know what? I I agree with what you’re saying. I think she’s done a poor job and I’m gonna switch.

People aren’t saying she’s done a poor job. I mean, I think everyone is kind and courtly. It’s kind of like a country club atmosphere. I think people are saying, I’m hearing from my voters, or I’m hearing from donors, or I’m hearing from the legislators in my state that we need to change. It’s nothing personal, and I don’t think it’s something personal either. I mean, I’ve gotten along with the chair for the last six years. I think it is about winning elections. It isn’t personal or personality. And if she were to win a fourth term, it would be the longest serving chairmanship since the 1850s. That’s 170 years.

Yeah, of course. And I appreciate you coming on and answering all these questions. I know that my viewers and my listeners were really eager, are really eager to hear from you, to hear concrete answers to these issues that are so important to us all. We’ve all been sending emails to RNC committee members of our states all across the country. I’m glad to hear that’s making a difference. So people keep that up. Harmeet, we wish you the best of luck. I think that you are the best one for this role that you would lead the party to the most wins, which is something that is not just self-serving for a party. It’s in the interest of our family and our freedom and our nation as a whole. So we will talk again soon, I’m sure, but best of luck. All right, guys.

I’m interested to hear what you think. I’m interested to hear if you believe that Harmeet answered your questions to satisfaction. If you believe that there’s something lacking. I’ve been pretty open about my opinion on the matter. I believe Harmeet Dhillon is the best choice to run the RNC, mostly because she has a track record of fighting these fights of understanding the reality of the political enemy that we’re facing and calibrating her behavior to counter that political enemy. That’s what we need, that’s what we need. Someone who understands how to make our elections free and fair, someone who understands the importance of the culture war. Because if our cultural institutions, our civil institutions are toppled by the radical Left, by the Marxists, that’s the first step to toppling our governmental institutions, which is the ultimate goal of the people on the left who tell us that they don’t like the United States, that they want to subvert the United States.

If you’ve already written to your, if you’ve already sent an email or made a telephone call to your RNC committee member, there are three in every state in the country, great. It’s working. People are changing their minds. Even if they had said, oh, you know, I’ll support McDaniel, they’re changing their minds when they’re hearing more and more from Harmeet Dhillon, and more importantly, when they’re hearing more and more from you. So if you’ve sent, sent an email, made a phone call, great. Do it again. I’ll post the link to the website that has the name of all the RNC committee members from your state. Politely, kindly, and firmly demand that they vote for Harmeet Dhillon for head of the RNC. This is one of the fundamental changes that we must make if we want to have a chance of winning elections. So without further ado, if you haven’t subscribed to the show, please do so. You can go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you listen. If you prefer the video form to watch, please go to Rumble.com/LizWheeler, hit that subscribe button, show YouTube that they can’t stop you from hearing what I have to say. They can’t stop me from communicating with you just because they slap a strike on my channel. Rumble.Com/Lizwheeler. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is The Liz Wheeler Show.