Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Tuesday said organizers planning the Republican National Convention will likely have to decide in the next week or so on where parts of it will be relocated.
She mentioned Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida, Texas and Tennessee as states that have lobbied to host it after North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said he couldn’t guarantee full use of an arena in Charlotte amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ve been traveling,” Ms. McDaniel said on “Fox & Friends.” “We will have to make a decision probably within the next week as to where we’re going to have this celebration.”
Planning a national party convention is a monumental, multi-year task under the best of circumstances, and officials are scrambling to shift gears in less than three months after President Trump said last week that Mr. Cooper’s moves were forcing them to scout other locations.
The RNC has said it still hopes to conduct at least some convention business in Charlotte even if the celebration surrounding Mr. Trump’s formal nomination takes place somewhere else.
Ms. McDaniel also said it’s important that Mr. Trump starts holding campaign-style rallies again as he looks to get back on the road in the coming weeks.
“I think they’ll be full rallies,” she said. “When we went to North Carolina and I spoke to the governor talking about the convention, we were talking about doing temperature checks, testing everybody before they came in.”
“Lots of precautions to make sure we’re putting the safety of convention-goers first,” she said. “I think that will be the same with the rallies — they’ll make sure that they’re putting safety procedures in place to make sure that every attendee is taken care of.”
“It is so critical that he gets out on the road and starts having these rallies and hearing from his voters,” she said.
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