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Why The Republican Co-Host Seat On The View Is Cursed

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The most combative seat in daytime television has been empty since July 2021, and ABC still hasn’t found anyone willing to sit in it full-time.

Since The View premiered in 1997, one chair at that famous table has chewed through more occupants than any other: the designated conservative co-host slot. Elisabeth Hasselbeck held it for a decade before Meghan McCain’s four-season run turned it into a near-daily flashpoint. When McCain walked away in the summer of 2021, she left behind a seat that, as of early 2022, ABC still hadn’t permanently filled.

• Elisabeth Hasselbeck occupied the conservative seat from 2003 to 2013, a run defined by public clashes with Rosie O’Donnell.
• Meghan McCain’s tenure ran from October 2017 to July 2021, marked by viral “Hot Topics” confrontations with Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.
• As of early 2022, the seat remains officially unfilled, with producers rotating guest commentators alongside Goldberg, Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Sara Haines.

A Chair Built for Friction

Hasselbeck set the template. Her decade at the table established what the conservative seat was actually for on The View: not consensus, but collision. Her running battles with O’Donnell became some of the show’s most replayed moments, and they set an expectation that whoever sat in that chair next would need to bring the same appetite for on-air combat, night after night, opposite a panel stacked in the other direction.

That expectation proved hard to sustain. After Hasselbeck’s 2013 exit, ABC cycled through Nicolle Wallace, Candace Cameron Bure, Jedediah Bila, and Abby Huntsman, none of whom lasted more than a couple of seasons before network repositioning or personal burnout ended the run. Each departure reinforced the same pattern: the seat demanded a specific, punishing kind of stamina, and few candidates had it for long.

Meghan McCain’s Four Seasons

McCain’s arrival in October 2017 raised the stakes considerably. Over four seasons, her “Hot Topics” exchanges with Goldberg and Behar became a recurring viral engine for the show, the kind of clips that got clipped, shared, and argued over long after the segment ended. She was combative by design, and for a while that combativeness was exactly what the seat seemed to require.

Officially, McCain cited her family’s move to Washington, D.C., and the birth of her daughter as the reasons she left in July 2021. But she later gave a blunter account of the environment she was leaving behind.

McCain described the workplace as marked by “toxic, direct and purposeful hostility.”

That description reframed her exit for a lot of viewers. It wasn’t just a scheduling decision tied to a newborn and a cross-country move — it was someone naming, on the record, the kind of pressure the seat generates behind the cameras as much as in front of them. That kind of on-air friction has made its way into how politicians and pundits alike get treated on live television, a dynamic covered in depth in Inappropriate Things Politicians Said On Live TV.

The Search That Followed

McCain’s departure left ABC News executives facing the same structural problem that had dogged the show for years: how do you find a conservative pundit who can hold up under relentless ideological combat against a majority-liberal panel, stay compelling enough to keep the segment watchable, and not alienate the mainstream audience that tunes in for the rest of the show? Nobody has solved that equation for long.

Through the back half of 2021 and into early 2022, the seat sat empty in any permanent sense. Producers instead rotated a series of guest commentators through the chair, testing chemistry alongside Goldberg, Behar, Hostin, and Haines rather than committing to a full-time replacement. It’s the same audition-by-attrition approach the show has leaned on before, and it says something about how hard the role actually is to cast that ABC has been in no rush to lock in a name.

The pattern of public figures burning out under this kind of sustained on-camera pressure isn’t unique to The View — it’s the same dynamic that turns friends into rivals once cameras and politics get involved, a theme explored in Celebs Who Started Out Friends And Ended Up Enemies.

High Employee Turnover Rates

Line up the tenures and the pattern is stark: Hasselbeck’s ten years is the outlier, not the norm. Wallace, Bure, Bila, and Huntsman each left within a season or two. McCain made it four years and called the environment toxic on her way out. Whoever ABC eventually installs full-time inherits a chair with a track record that speaks for itself — and a panel across the table that isn’t going anywhere.

Until ABC names a permanent replacement, the rotating door of guest hosts keeps testing out candidates on live television every week, which means the audition for the most exposed seat in daytime TV is still playing out in real time, one “Hot Topics” segment at a time.