Editor’s note: This essay is part of a series looking at the upcoming 2024 election cycle from different political perspectives.
In January, I was honored to be reelected for a record fourth term as chairwoman of the Republican National Committee. I campaigned on a simple platform: unity.
As the great Ronald Reagan said during his 1966 gubernatorial campaign, it benefits our party to adhere to an 11th commandment: “thou shall not speak ill of other Republicans.”
Now, that doesn’t mean we can’t disagree. It doesn’t even mean that we can’t disagree vigorously. But it does mean that at the end of the day, we join together and focus our efforts on defeating Democrats at the federal, state and local level.
Disagreements within our party highlight our breadth of ideas and personalities. No movement should be bereft of debate, and iron sharpens iron. However, when it’s time to win, it’s time to come together. And we have serious work to do as we seek to make Joe Biden a one-term president.
At the Republican National Committee, my role is to lead and build the national party infrastructure in the months and years leading up to Election Day in November 2024. Think about it this way: if Republican candidates were a football team, the RNC builds and maintains the stadium in which they play. Regardless of who triumphs in the primary —throughout which the RNC will remain entirely neutral — our candidate will receive the keys to an already built political operation immediately after they receive the nomination.
That means hiring staff, opening offices and training volunteers across the country to knock on doors, make phone calls and register voters. It means developing cutting-edge data to ensure that our voter turnout efforts are targeted in the right place at the right time.
During the 2022 midterm cycle, we engaged 1 million volunteers who made 100 million “voter contacts” — meaning knocking on a door, making a phone call or otherwise getting in touch with potential voters. We built the largest ground game in the history of the party to flip the House and fire Nancy Pelosi as its speaker. As we look ahead to 2024, we’re going to build even bigger. We’ll need to break more records to defend the House, flip the Senate and put a Republican in the White House.
Reaching out to new voters — especially those who aren’t historically associated with the Republican Party — has also been a key part of our strategy at the RNC. At my direction, the RNC made a multimillion-dollar commitment in the 2022 cycle to increase our organizing efforts in minority communities in key states across the country.
We opened 38 brick-and-mortar community centers in 19 states to make inroads with Hispanic, Asian/Pacific, Black, Native American, Jewish and veteran voters. Our community centers worked to deliver historic wins for diverse candidates including Monica De La Cruz in Texas, Michelle Steel in California, Juan Ciscomani in Arizona, Anna Paulina Luna in Florida, Jen Kiggans in Virginia and Tony Gonzales in Texas. We will continue to build on that progress as we reopen community centers and build new ones in the months leading up to 2024.
Crucially, we must also make gains in the youth vote. To do so, the RNC is hiring a youth engagement director and establishing a Youth Advisory Council made up of young conservative leaders and influencers to spread our winning conservative message to younger generations. Our team will prioritize working with colleges, universities and high schools to ensure that participants and graduates can begin receiving class credit for their participation in our programs. To expand our efforts on college campuses, we plan to begin recruiting and hiring GOP Campus Team leaders nationwide.
In addition to broadening the Republican Party’s big tent, we will continue our unprecedented progress on protecting the vote. We saw success in this arena in 2022: we deployed 80,000 poll watchers and poll workers, filed 100 cases of election integrity litigation and secured key legal victories in battleground states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada.
There is room to improve, however. We are laser-focused on finding ways to increase Republican participation in early voting, absentee voting and ballot harvesting, where legal. We’ve already filed our first election integrity lawsuit since my re-election, suing a town in Vermont for allowing noncitizens to vote.
Soon, primary season will be in full swing and our party will showcase its deep bench of quality candidates for president. Unlike in previous cycles, they’ll do so on debate stages that are fair and free of bias. In April 2022, the RNC withdrew from the Commission on Presidential…
Read More: 2024 election: how the GOP is preparing to win | Opinion