Ronna McDaniel’s NBC Dismissal Shows How Election Denial Weighs on GOP, Media

The decision by NBC News to cancel its on-air-analyst contract with former Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is a stark reminder of how election denialism remains a divisive and burdensome topic for the GOP as it fights to win the White House and other contests this year.

That weight is also on members of the media who try to present both sides in a presidential race expected to be fiercely competitive and featuring one participant—former President Donald Trump—who continues to insist falsely that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Navigating that terrain, as both McDaniel and NBC discovered, is tricky given the fact that polls show as many as a third of Americans think President Biden wasn’t legitimately elected. That number surges to close to two-thirds among Republicans who have participated in some of this year’s caucuses and primaries.

McDaniel, whom NBC dismissed just days after announcing what was believed to be a three-year deal valued at nearly $1 million, has had her share of Trump-associated ups and downs. Trump elevated her to the national stage, but she was still booted by him from the RNC even after years of kowtowing. She then crossed him by suggesting Biden was fairly elected and got booted again, by NBC.

“It’s an indication that, going forward, that if you are a messenger of election denialism that you may not maintain the credibility to be given a voice in many places in the public square,” said Rob Stutzman, a GOP consultant who has done work for the third-party No Labels movement. “The awful lie of the election being stolen is going to continue to limit who will take them seriously in the future.”

Trump weighed in on his social-media platform Tuesday evening to mock his former ally: “She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear. It leaves her in a very strange place, it’s called NEVER NEVERLAND, and it’s not a place you want to be.”

At nearly every rally and appearance, Trump repeats his claims of election theft, even after his own Justice Department concluded there was no widespread fraud and his campaign and allies lost dozens of court cases challenging the results.

McDaniel’s role in the events between the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol by a Trump-aligned mob on Jan. 6, 2021—as well as her past support of his false claims about the 2020 election—have long made her a target for many Democrats.

She also triggered an on-air mutiny this week among NBC and MSNBC talent critical of her hiring, the latest example of how news networks wrestle with how or whether to represent the views of Trump’s base supporters on the air.

Until her appearance Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press”—when she declared Biden had won the election “fair and square”—McDaniel had always walked a fine line in relation to Trump’s election denialism. She often talked about the need to resolve election-integrity issues before the 2024 election, but typically stopped short of endorsing conspiracies pushed by others.

In a July 2023 interview on CNN, McDaniel didn’t acknowledge that Biden was legitimately elected when pressed. “I don’t think he won it fair,” she said. “I’m saying there were lots of problems with the 2020 election, and we need to fix it going forward.”

Shortly after the 2020 election, McDaniel made accusations about irregularities and purported problems with vote counting in her home state of Michigan, a battleground that helped decide the outcome. State officials debunked the claims.

She also was on a call with Trump on Nov. 17, 2020, when he pressured two Republican election officials not to certify 2020 vote totals in a key Michigan county, according to a recording of a postelection phone call that was reported by the Detroit News.

“Democrats waged war on election transparency, security and integrity undermining our elections, and we at the RNC are using every tool at our disposal to protect the vote,” McDaniel said at an RNC meeting in August 2021.

McDaniel also supported an RNC resolution in 2022 calling Jan. 6 “legitimate political discourse” that censured two Republican lawmakers who sat on the House select committee that investigated the attack. Polls show majorities of Americans believe the Jan. 6 riots were an attack on democracy.

She said in her deposition to the select congressional committee investigating the attack that the Trump campaign asked the RNC to help gather “contingent electors” for the Electoral College to help him win, in case legal challenges of the 2020 election results in certain states succeeded.

Before her departure earlier this month from the RNC, McDaniel had been fiercely loyal to Trump, who helped install her to the post shortly after he was elected in 2016.

Her love for him, however, wasn’t ultimately reciprocated. He began the process of pushing her out of her leadership post earlier this year after she stuck to the RNC’s mandate of remaining neutral in the presidential nomination process, including hosting debates that Trump didn’t attend and didn’t think should be held.

A person close to McDaniel said NBC was appealing to her as a destination because she has family members who watch the network and she had gained a comfort level with some of its executives during planning of a primary debate held in Miami in November.

“As a suburban mom from a swing state and a former chair of the Republican Party, Ronna has a unique perspective on American politics,” the person said. “It is a view that is sorely missing from a lot of television media. NBC News recognized the need for her voice and her views on the most pressing issues that matter to every voter and will decide this election.”

Write to John McCormick at [email protected]