Republicans have forgotten how to win a presidential election

In seven months, Americans will head to the polls to choose the next president. In football terms, it’s still early in the first quarter.

But it’s not too soon to call a timeout on the Republican side and have a talk about how we’re playing the game, because it doesn’t look good right now.

Polls show President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in a dead heat. But the Trump campaign and the GOP are making some baffling strategic decisions that could squander any advantages and hurt candidates down the ballot.

Trump has overhauled the Republican National Committee’s leadership, naming his inexperienced daughter-in-law co-chair and forcing key staffers to reapply for their jobs when they should be focused on work. Fundraising is withering, as Republicans have drained small donors and Trump has focused on his mounting legal fees. Instead of pivoting to woo swing voters, the campaign is doubling down on red meat.

In its fealty to Trump and his supporters, the once-great Republican Party has forgotten how to win elections.

So, how can it turn things around?

First, the party of fiscal responsibility needs to apply that principle to the hard-earned money given by its small donors. 

Not only has the Republican National Committee fallen woefully behind its fundraising totals from this point in the last presidential campaign, but Trump’s newly installed acolytes have worked out a deal to help pay for Trump’s legal fees. Rather than spending money on putting Trump back in the Oval Office, the party is spending donor dollars to keep him out of the prison yard.

But with Trump’s name at the top of the ticket, it’s no surprise that these funds are being used to benefit him personally, as he’s not known for being careful with campaign donations. During the 2020 campaign, Trump and the Republican Party returned more than $12 million in donations after misleading tactics steered unwitting supporters into weekly recurring contributions. 

If Republicans can’t respect small donors, how can they ever claim to be fighting for the little guy?

And speaking of the little guy, the state parties in charge of building a Republican ground operation in crucial swing states are mired in dysfunction.

The state party chair in Arizona resigned after a conversation was leaked of him trying to lure Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake out of the race. In Michigan, ousted party chair Kristina Karamo refused to leave her post and allow her successor, Pete Hoekstra, to access the party’s bank email and social media accounts. It took a court injunction barring Karamo from conducting party business before the party could move on.

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Biden leads Trump by 10 points in key swing state, poll shows April 4, 2024 / 07:36

This past week, a judge in Georgia fined the state GOP’s vice chair, Brian Pritchard, $5,000, concluding he’d voted illegally not once, not twice, but nine times. This led even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to call for his resignation.

Keep in mind the Georgia Republican Party footed over a million dollars in legal bills last year in Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis’ fake electors suit, including for its own indicted former chairman.

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It also doesn’t help that, according to Axios, about a third of the RNC officials ousted during the recent pro-Trump purge of the committee were state directors and regional political directors. 

If that self-sabotage isn’t enough, Republicans are fighting not to get out the vote.

Trump spent years sowing distrust of the century-and-a-half-old institution of voting by mail, a key component of his ongoing election denialism. Now, Republicans are having trouble convincing their supporters to vote by mail.

Even as the party scrambles to catch up to Democrats in voting by mail, it’s seeking to restrict mail-in voting through the courts. Republicans have fought against extended deadlines for voting by mail, while the RNC has targeted voting by mail in crucial swing states like Arizona and Georgia.

As national chairman, I made a concerted effort with every state party to create vigorous coalitions beyond our traditional base of support. So, it is political malpractice for the RNC to continue to repel minority voters. While there have been some efforts to recruit minority candidates — and please spare me the “Black men moving to Trump” narrative — these are undermined when Republicans show who they are by scapegoating diversity, equity and inclusion programs — criticisms that have regularly veered into outright racism.

There’s no significant effort to expand minority support because the party only talks to its base voters. We recognized in 2010 that there are constituencies that are ready to receive a new message, a fresh perspective on solving old problems. These were the individuals and groups with whom we would build new coalitions that led to some of the party’s largest victories in almost a century. The 2018, 2020 and 2022 midterms have consistently shown that the rhetoric Republican primary voters find appealing isn’t well received by large swaths of persuadable general election voters.

Of course, this once-great party has ceded all its common sense and self-preservation to Trump and the MAGA movement. My half-time talk here is sure to fall on deaf ears. So perhaps the RNC should take a page from the NFL’s book and start checking its players for head injuries.

For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders-Townsend and Alicia Menendez, watch “The Weekend” every Saturday and Sunday at 8 a.m. ET on MSNBC.