Republican National Committee Chairwoman Rona McDaniel said Sunday that her party’s candidates will accept the results of the midterm elections after letting “the process play out.”
“Listen, you’re going to have to do a recount. You should have a canvass and it’s going to go to the courts and then everybody has to accept the results,” McDaniel told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” when asked for a yes or no answer on whether all the candidates of the GOP. must accept the upcoming election results.
Asked by Bash about Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson refusing to commit to accepting the midterm results, McDaniel tried to compare his remarks to previous comments from Democrats.
“Well, I’d say the same thing to Stacey Abrams, right. Or Hillary Clinton, who is already saying, in 2024, we’re going to rig the election. That’s not helpful,” he said, before later adding, “We’ll let the process play out and then accept the results.”
The comments come two days before crucial midterm elections in which Republicans hope to regain control of the House and eliminate the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. Already, some GOP candidates have questioned the legitimacy of the upcoming results, similar to what then-President Donald Trump and his allies did in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Johnson, who is in a competitive re-election race for a third term, would not commit last week to accepting the upcoming election results, telling reporters in Wisconsin, “Let’s see how that goes.”
“I certainly hope I can, but I can’t predict what the Democrats might have planned,” he said.
“I think Ron Johnson and Stacey Abrams in the end, once they’ve exhausted all avenues, will accept the results,” McDaniel told Bash on Sunday, referring to the Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, whose initial refusal to ” concede” after her defeat. to Republican Brian Kemp in their 2018 showdown was seized upon by Republicans seeking to challenge electoral legitimacy.
Abrams has argued that Kemp, who was then serving as Georgia’s secretary of state, and other GOP leaders used the state’s tools to suppress the vote four years ago. But he recognized Kemp’s certification as governor and that he no longer had legal recourse.
Clinton said last month in a video for a progressive group: “Right-wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election, and they’re not hiding it.”
He went on to add that a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court could give state legislatures more power to overturn elections.
McDaniel also defended the poll-watching practice when asked about cases of voter intimidation across the country, but added, “We absolutely want them to follow the law, and if they don’t, then they shouldn’t be allowed to.”
“No one should bully or break the law, no one should. But watching polls is not scary,” he said. “If you’ve been to a polling place, you see, they’re just observing and it helps us, in the end, reassure the voters (and) say, ‘look, we were there, we watched it, it went well.'”
McDaniel also predicted that Republicans will retake both houses of Congress in the midterm elections and stressed that if they do, President Joe Biden will have a mandate from the American people to work with Republicans.
“If we win back the House and the Senate, it’s the American people saying to Joe Biden, ‘we want you to work for us, and we want you to work across the board and solve the problems we face.’ Bill Clinton did that, right? After ’94, when he lost those in-betweens, he met and said, “Let’s work together.” It would be interesting to see if President Biden does that,” he said.
And McDaniel avoided weighing in on Trump’s plans to potentially announce a 2024 White House bid later this month, saying simply, “I’m just focused on 2022.”
CNN reported last week that top Trump aides discussed the third week of November as an ideal launch point for his 2024 campaign if Republicans do well in this week’s elections, according to sources familiar with the matter.
