Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) is reportedly considering a bid for chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) following his candidacy within the Empire State’s gubernatorial race, based on reports.
Activists and supporters across the country have asked Zeldin to run for the position following his unsuccessful bid to unseat incumbent Recent York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) in blue Recent York. And based on Zeldin’s media consultant, John Brabender, the Republican is exploring the choice.
“It’s likely that he’ll a minimum of explore it. … He’s fielding calls, talking to people, listening to them, but it surely has not gone beyond that,” Brabender said, NBC News reported.
It stays unclear if current RNC chair, Ronna McDaniel, or her cochair, Tommy Hicks, will run for reelection, but Zeldin’s consideration follows a comparatively lackluster midterm election performance for Republicans, despite the proven fact that the GOP had six million more votes than Democrats in House races.
While all signs point to the GOP taking the House, Democrats maintained a slim majority within the Senate, and a few Republicans are demanding change moving forward.
“The people whose job it was to win but didn’t win should go do something else now. We’re speaking specifically of the Republican leadership of the House and the Senate and of the RNC,” Tucker Carlson said last week.
“It’s nothing personal; a few of them are, little question, nice people, but they took tons of of thousands and thousands of dollars to color the map red, they usually didn’t,” he continued, explaining that they “shouldn’t be promoted.”
“Nobody should ever be rewarded for failure,” he said. “If there may be a very conservative principle in life, it’s the principle of the meritocracy. You reward excellence. You don’t reward mediocrity, and once you do, things disintegrate.”
While Zeldin’s loss got here as a disappointment to conservatives, lots of whom hoped that endorsements from big name politicians reminiscent of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) would push him over the sting, he lost by lower than six percentage points, marking one in every of the closest gubernatorial races in 20 years. His bid also paved the best way for other victories across the state, flipping multiple Recent York congressional seats in favor of the GOP, including the seat held by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chair Rep. Sean Maloney (D-NY):
We flipped 4 NY Congressional seats, broke the supermajority within the State Senate, and received probably the most votes of any GOP candidate since Nelson Rockefeller. Team Zeldin put in max effort on daily basis and has no regrets. It was such an honor to steer this 12 months’s ticket. https://t.co/bpOTFBrh9F
— Lee Zeldin (@leezeldin) November 10, 2022
The news follows a recent YouGov poll, which found a plurality, 42 percent, of Republicans expressing the necessity for the Republican party to take a “different form of approach” in the subsequent election.
