Florida Governor Ron DeSantis weighed in on the RNC leadership race Thursday as he was interviewed by Charlie Kirk. It is time for fresh blood and a change in leadership for the RNC.

DeSantis didn’t hold back. He pointed to the 2022 midterm cycle and called it “sub-standard.” The RNC is gathering this week for its winter meeting. RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel is up for re-election. She is running for her fourth term. She has two challengers. Her most serious challenger is Harmeet Dhillon, a RNC committee member and CEO of the Center for American Liberty, and co-chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The other challenger is Mike Lindell, the My Pillow CEO.

“We’ve had three sub-standard election cycles in a row – ’18, ’20 and ’22 – and I would say of all three of those, ’22 was probably the worst given the political environment of a very unpopular President Biden,” DeSantis said. “Huge majorities of the people think the country is going in the wrong direction.”

“That is an environment that is tailor-made to make big gains in the House and the Senate and state houses all across the country and yet that didn’t happen, and in fact, we even lost ground in the U.S. Senate,” DeSantis continued.

“And so, I think we need a change. I think we need to get some new blood in the RNC,” he said.

Let’s be candid here. McDaniel will be re-elected. She’s going into the vote with enough commitments from RNC members to secure a win. She has more than 100 endorsements from RNC members. She needs a simple majority of the 168 members to win her fourth two-year term. The vote is by secret ballot.

DeSantis said he likes the idea that the RNC headquarters be moved out of Washington, D.C. as Dhillon has suggested. DeSantis said it should be in “real parts of the country.” “Why would you want to have your headquarters in the most Democrat city in America? It is more Democrat than San Francisco is.” He said it is time for some fresh thinking.

DeSantis is right, though. A shake-up at the top would probably be for the best. But, as we are moving toward a presidential election that Republicans should be able to win, is it the best time to get a new RNC chairperson? McDaniel is a skilled fundraiser, that is without question, but DeSantis is concerned if grassroots supporters will donate if changes are not made. He said that in his own re-election campaign, he didn’t count on the RNC and instead, he did it on his own.

“I think it is going to be very difficult to energize people to give money and to want to volunteer their time with the RNC if they don’t see a change in direction,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis said that for his second successful gubernatorial campaign in 2022, his team assumed they “weren’t going to be involved with the RNC at all, because they weren’t raising the kind of money they needed to be raising.”

“Our get-out-the-vote and ground operation – we funded that. We focused a lot on low-propensity voters,” DeSantis explained, saying they were “very successful.” “But that was really being driven by our agenda, our accomplishments, and us putting a lot of dollars behind this important ground game.”

That is what the RNC traditionally does for campaigns – it helps with get-out-the-vote efforts and ground operations for campaigns. McDaniel touts her success in establishing ground operations and get-out-the-vote operations for campaigns and Republican voters have turned out to vote. But, it looks like she isn’t focusing on bringing in voters who don’t traditionally vote or don’t vote for Republicans. That may be the fault of the consultants, too. DeSantis criticizes the RNC for being too consultant-driven and that is a common complaint heard about the RNC. Consultants make lots of money whether the candidates win or not. It often ends up being quite a grift.

“This money that’s going in needs to go to ultimately winning elections, and not to be lining the pockets of so many consultants,” he said. “So, we need huge transparency on that.”

DeSantis said one of the reasons he was successful was because his voters trusted him.

“There is not a lot of trust between the grassroots and the RNC up in D.C.,” DeSantis said, noting that when he has held fundraisers for the GOP, he has done well, but when he holds fundraisers for himself, instead of the party, “we raise much more money.”

He’s right. However, I’m concerned that Dhillon has teamed up with Mike Lindell, kind of a two-for-one ticket. Lindell doesn’t belong at the RNC.

McDaniel has plenty of RNC members that are happy to vote for her re-election. They say she listens to them and is always available to them.

“This has really been kind of member-driven,” Michael Whatley, chair of the North Carolina GOP, told NBC News last year, saying he signed a pro-McDaniel letter without hesitation after the November elections because she has been responsive to state party leaders’ needs.

“For me, it was not a close call,” he said. “Every single time I called her, the answer was yes. I’m not surprised that folks coalesced behind her or around her as quickly as they did.”

The vote is on Friday.