BURLINGAME, California — California incoming RNC National Committeewoman, Harmeet Dhillon, spoke exclusively to Breitbart News during the California GOP Convention at the Hyatt Regency near the San Francisco airport.
Dhillon said she believes states like Iowa and New Hampshire shouldn’t be picking the GOP nominee and that caucuses aren’t democratic.
“Even though we have the highest population in the country, we typically haven’t held a lot of influence at the RNC because, number one, our state doesn’t usually go red, but number two, it’s a factor of energy and personality,” Dhillon said of California and the Republican National Committee (RNC). “I’m a young person at the RNC. We went there last week and I’m definitely among the youngest people there.”
Dhillon, who is going to be the California representative to the rules committee, said it’s time to change some of the Republican Party’s outdated rules.
“The way things have been done over the years is not the way that I, a younger, efficient businesswoman, like to see things done. For example, four days of meetings with two days of content? Business people don’t do that, so I would like to see shorter meetings,” she said.
Some of Dhillon’s top concerns were the way the GOP primary debates were handled and the schedule of state primaries.
“The RNC people were congratulating each other about how wonderfully the debates went. Nobody outside the RNC thought the debates went very well,” she explained. “I thought they were a catastrophic waste of time in terms the way they had all these candidates on stage, the way that they picked the candidates. It seemed to be more geared towards profits for news networks than for Republicans selecting the best candidates.” Dhillon went on to say:
I think that we lost some people in that process through a flawed process, so I’d like to see top to bottom reform of that process. It should not be about ratings and prime time. It should be about informing Republican voters about the positions of these people, not 30 second soundbites and attacks. I thought it was pathetic. It was not informative to me.
“Another thing that I thought is outdated by like a century, is the schedule of the states and the way the primaries are handled,” Dhillon continued, explaining why she doesn’t think Iowa and New Hampshire should be the first two state primaries.
I don’t think it’s any longer making any sense at all in a 24-hour news cycle […] to have Iowa and New Hampshire with the [same] number of votes as San Francisco county selecting the nominee or eliminating people early on, so I think that’s a travesty. That is a function of older guys at the RNC having influence over the younger guys, otherwise nobody would logically design that system. So, I’ll be talking very strenuously about, ‘Hey, we’re the state with 172 delegates. We don’t want to be at the tail end. This is nonsense. We need to reconfigure the whole thing.’
“It’s also all white people,” she said of Iowa and New Hampshire. “It’s a low population state. It has nothing to do with technology. It doesn’t reflect what America is and what the average Republican voter is. God bless them, they’re a state. But are they the most important state?” Dhillon continued:
I went to school in New England. I lived in New Hampshire for four years. I love New Hampshire. It should not be selecting the next president. Dixville Notch with nine voters should not be having all of you guys standing there wondering how these people [voted] compared to San Francisco or Los Angeles or some places that have lots of people.
“I think caucuses are again 100 years out of date,” she added, when Breitbart News asked her what she thought of state caucuses versus primaries. “People are busy. I like walking into my polling place…and walking out five minutes later.”
“I don’t have time to go hang out all day and if you’re a mom or you’re working a shift at a factory, you don’t have time to do that. So, who has time to do that? Retired people, activists, crazy people. These are not representative of the average people, so I don’t think caucuses are democratic,” she explained.
Dhillon commented on California’s late primary having an impact in this year’s election, saying,“It’s a great opportunity for California.”
She added that updating rules at the RNC is “all about forming alliances.”
There are other states that have the same interests as us. Oregon, these other states, they’re also at the tail end. Nobody cares, although we have significant population, but we have much less influence generally. Now, I think it’s looking like California may push a candidate across the finish line. We’ll see what happens in Indiana. It’s been 40 or 50 years since that’s happened. It’s exciting for us.
Dhillon predicted a record turnout for Republican voters for California’s June 7th primary. She said:
We have seen 30 to 40 percent higher voter turnout in other states as a result of the phenomena of a contested election this late in the race and accordingly we’re expected to see a higher than usual voter turnout in our June 7th primary, probably on the Democrat side too, for Bernie Sanders frankly. I don’t know how that’s going to play out in terms of a net. Bernie may drop out. I mean Bernie is firing people. Bernie is cutting back. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Bernie drop out by June 7th.
“I think we’re going to have higher than usual Republican turn out, which should help our down ticket candidates,” she said of Republicans running for local and state office in California.
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