Sitting in a holding room at the Baird Center in the heart of downtown Milwaukee in the Wisconsin Center District convention campus, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley said he is pretty focused on one thing: winning.

And he says their plans to win can handle any candidate switch by the Democrats just as well as it can handle President Joe Biden as the chief opponent.

“Winning is the only thing,” he said with a broad smile in a 25-minute comprehensive interview after leaving the morning RNC Rules Committee meeting in Milwaukee.

Whatley is a North Carolina native, father of three, and former chairman of the North Carolina state party. He said the RNC and Trump campaign will get there by developing together a strong get-out-the-vote apparatus that includes a mail in ballot program, a cohesive message that is united up and down the ballot, and a concerted effort led by the presidency but also for governors’ seats and the majorities in the U.S. House and Senate.

Here are the highlights of the interview:

Washington Examiner: Why did you want to be the chairman? What was important to you? What did you want to bring to this job?

Whatley: Well, I think focus. And I think that for too long, the Republican National Committee has tried to be too many things to too many people. In fact, I think they’ve tried in the past really to be all things to all people. And so, when we look at this election cycle, it is readily apparent that if Donald Trump wins, the Republicans across the country, up and down the ballot, are going to do dramatically better. So, the focus needs to be on making sure that this committee is doing what it needs to do to help get him elected. And so, we need to be in lockstep in a way that we haven’t been really since George W. Bush and the RNC were synced up.

So, my very first initial conversation that I had with the president, I told him, “We’re going to do two things, and we’re only going to do two things. We’re going to get out the vote and we’re going to protect the ballot.” And I fundamentally believe that if we can get those two things done, everything else will take care of itself. So, our fundraising is so that we have the resources to get out the vote, protect the ballot. Our digital, our data, our communications, all of our messaging, are really focused on those things from an operational standpoint.

Right now, from a messaging standpoint, the president has really, truly, I think, galvanized the messaging front end. And yes, it’s Make America Great Again, but how? It is restore the southern border. It is restore the economy. It’s restore our standing in the world. … The messaging is going to be his messaging. The operational side is going to be what we need to do. So, we have merged our operations with President Trump’s campaign and that’s why somebody like Chris LaCivita, who is not only a senior person in the Trump campaign, is my chief of staff. … We don’t need two different messages. We don’t need two different messengers. We certainly don’t need to be paying for two different apparatuses.

Washington Examiner: There have been previous chairs that often make the position about themselves; you seem more behind-the-scenes logistic focused and getting a cohesive message across.

Whatley: Winning is the only thing. We have to win this election cycle. And look, the best thing that can happen for Michael Whatley is for Donald Trump to be the president of the United States. It’s the best thing for my kids and it’s going to be the best thing for their kids. This election cycle is truly an inflection point for the country. And I think we’re not just going to set the direction of the country for the next four years, we’re setting it for the next several decades.

I was talking with the president not too long ago and I told him that we have an opportunity for his presidency to be as transformational in terms of redirecting this country and the world as Ronald Reagan’s was in 1980. I fundamentally believe that. So, no, this is not about Michael. … It’s not about us. It’s about what can we harness and what can we do operationally that is going to help the president be able to win in all of these states? You know as well as anybody that we’re running 50 different elections, and it’s not just one national campaign. … What matters is, is there any slippage in a state like Ohio or Florida? And obviously, we’re not seeing it. But those are the things that we want to pay attention to.

Washington Examiner: In terms of infrastructure, you talked about get out the vote. What about early voting or mail in voting is there a program at all? Does the RNC do that, or are you relying on these different entities that have built up individual state infrastructures?

Whatley: We are absolutely focused on that. So, 50% of the votes are going to be cast before Election Day, this cycle, and we absolutely positively need to talk to those voters before they vote. And that’s not just Republican voters, it’s all voters. So, we are absolutely having a national conversation about early voting and absentee voting, and putting the infrastructure in place. We call it “Trump Force 47,” which is the campaign’s grassroots arms for it.

What we want to do is, we really want to focus on two things that we’ve not always focused on. One, the low-propensity voters, the true low-propensity voters, and then these are people that are going to vote for us as long as they vote. So, we dynamite them off the couch. We’ve got to identify them, and then we have to get them the information that they need to understand how to vote, where to vote, when to vote. And we know that they’re going to vote the right way, so we’ve got a huge push in that direction.

And the second thing is the communities that the Republican Party has not ever really focused on effectively. So, we are now seeing black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian American voters that are coming across from the Democratic Party by the thousands across the country, because Joe Biden’s policies are absolutely strangling their families. When you think about the inflation, it’s not just the statistic. Its gasoline prices are 50% higher; grocery prices are 20% higher. It cost twice as much to buy the same house today as it did four years ago, and rent prices are through the roof. So, yeah, it’s hurting every American family, and so that’s why we’re seeing those people who are giving us a fresh look.

Washington Examiner: Democrats and the press are pushing the story that Trump supports Project 2025 and that Nikki Haley will not be [at the convention].

Whatley: Well, I think it shows you how desperate they are to talk about anything other than the meltdown that’s taking place in the Democratic Party and the fact that Donald Trump not only hit his marks in that debate but he has hit his marks in this campaign every single day. He is running a very disciplined campaign and a very disciplined message that we’re doing.

But the fact is, for the last 14 days since this debate, there has not been a single other story that has headlined on any network. CNN, MSNBC. It’s not just Fox News and Newsmax; it’s ABC, the fact that Joe Biden is not capable of leading this country going forward. And I would argue this: There are two things that Democrats have fundamental problems with. One is the messenger, obviously. The second is the message.

You think about the policies that he has unleashed on the American people, particularly focused on the immigration. This is not an accident. This is not him looking the other way. His administration took 94 executive actions to weaken the border and invite 10 million illegal immigrants to come across the Southern border, that we know of. It was a very proactive thing that they did. They bragged about it. It’s not an accident. So, that’s real.

And you think about inflation, the overall government spending that they unleashed on the American economy, which caused inflation, which is why we have all these higher prices. Not a single other candidate is going to change a single one of those policies. Joe Biden said in the debate and throughout his campaign he’s going to double down on every single one of these policies. Every other candidate, whether it’s Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or Kamala Harris or anybody else, they’re not going to backtrack off of these policies.           

Washington Examiner: You’ve been prepared to run against Joe Biden. How do you prepare if that changes?

Whatley: It doesn’t change it. It absolutely doesn’t change our approach because every single other candidate … it’s clear that they’re going to adopt the same policies. They’re going to double down on Joe Biden’s agenda, and they’re going to continue to drive America in a direction that the American voters don’t want to go.

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The Democratic Party right now is just completely beholden to these liberal elites, the academics, and the people from New York and California that they think of America as a social experiment. It’s not. This is about American families. And if they can’t afford gas and they can’t afford groceries and they can’t afford housing, that’s real. And so, what Donald Trump has done over the course of his entire career is had a better finger on the pulse of America and American voters than any other politician…. He has reshaped the Republican Party in a way that really goes back to working families. It goes back to the blue collars, the folks that supported Ronald Reagan. This is really Ronald Reagan’s coalition, and it’s peace through strength. American people do not want a weak America. They don’t want a weak Southern border. They don’t want a weak economy. They want an America that does really well for them. And you think about the four years under President Trump, they got that.

We had the best economy in history before COVID. We had a recovering economy coming out of COVID. Inflation for all four years was under 2%. We had more blacks in the workforce, more Hispanics in the workforce, more women in the workforce than we had ever had before. And then Joe Biden took over and look where we are today.