by The mutiny took hold on Mackinac Island.
The Michigan Republican Party’s revered two-day politics and policy gathering, the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, was a complete disaster.
Attendance had plummeted. Top-tier presidential candidates did not attend the September event and some speakers did not show up. Guests were baffled by a scoring system that rated their ideology on a scale, from a true conservative to a so-called RINO, or Republican in name only.
And the state party, already deeply in debt, had taken out a $110,000 loan to pay the keynote speaker, Jim Caviezel, an actor who has gained a large following among the far right after starring in a hit film this summer about the child sex trafficking. The loan came from a trust tied to the wife of the party’s executive director, according to party records.
For some Michigan Republicans, it was the final straw for a chaotic state party leadership that has been plagued by mounting financial problems, lackluster fundraising, secret meetings and persistent infighting. Blame has been focused on the fiery president, Kristina Karamo, who shot to the top of the state party through a combative style of electoral denialism, but has failed to deliver on her promises of new fundraising streams and armies of activists.
This month, internal dissent erupted in an attempt to unseat Ms. Karamo, which, if successful, would be the first ouster of a Michigan Republican Party leader in decades. Nearly 40 Michigan Republican Party state committee members called a meeting in late December to explore the possibility of ousting Karamo. Just before Christmas, Malinda Pego, Karamo’s running mate for state party presidency and co-chair of the committee, joined that effort, in an ominous sign for the embattled president. And on Thursday, eight of the 13 Republican congressional district chairs called on Karamo to resign in a joint letter, imploring him to “end the chaos” by resigning.
But that meeting has now been delayed and there is no set date on the calendar. Karamo has vowed to fight back, criticizing the effort as illegitimate.
The pitched battle for state party control in a preeminent presidential battleground is the most extreme example of the conflicts brewing in state Republican parties across the country. Many state parties, once largely dominated by wealthy establishment donors and their allies, have been taken over by grassroots Republican activists energized by former President Donald J. Trump and his broadsides against the legitimacy of the election.
These activists, now in positions of state and local power, have elevated others who share their views, prioritizing electoral denialism over experience and credentials.
The result has been fundraising problems and division. The Arizona Republican Party spent much of this year in debt.
The Georgia Republican Party have had similar difficultiescaused primarily by legal fees related to efforts to subvert the 2020 election. The state’s governor, Brian Kemp, a rare Republican leader who opposed Trump, had been forced to form his own political apparatus outside the state party to his re-election campaign in 2022. Party leaders in both states have aligned themselves with the election-denying movement.
Veterans of Republican politics say state parties play vital roles in winning elections, acting as a clearinghouse to distribute large donations from national groups unfamiliar with the local terrain and offering discounts on costly campaign costs, such as mailings. . They help identify potential candidates and winnable races. They are a source of the types of activists and volunteers critical to driving state campaigns. And they raise money.
All of that is at risk in places like Michigan.
“You need people to do things like leather shoes in campaigns in addition to money, and that’s where I think Michigan will be hampered,” said Jeff Timmer, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. “You can’t replace everything with money. “Some things still require people to take care of, and they can’t buy mercenaries to do that.”
This could have a significant impact in Michigan, where recent survey has shown Trump with only a slight lead over President Biden and where, in 2022, a Democratic wave swept the state.
But before the state GOP can help try to turn the state red, it must pay off its debt, which was around $620,000 in early December, according to bank records released in a report by state Republicans to Ms. Karamo . The party will have to raise money on its own simply to pay its bills.
The precarious finances have left national Republicans uncomfortable giving money to the state party for election-related activities, fearing it would simply go toward debt, according to two people familiar with the Republican National Committee’s deliberations.
Republican state lawmakers are increasingly frustrated.
“The Michigan Republican Party is on the brink of implosion; I have more money in my campaign account than the state party has in theirs,” state Rep. Mark Tisdel said at a public meeting in December. “Sooner or later, the creditors will come calling.”
Karamo did not respond to requests for comment, but published a letter two days before Christmas proclaiming that “we will not be deterred” and denouncing “infighting.”
“These deceptive and underhanded efforts jeopardize the Michigan Republican Party’s momentum toward victory in 2024,” he wrote. “They also shake the resolve of Republican men and women who work tirelessly to win the spiritual war being waged on a cultural battlefield.”
Daniel Hartman, a lawyer for the Michigan Republican Party, described the effort to remove Ms. Karamo as “about 15 agitators,” adding that “another 15 people out of 120 are committee members who have been opposing the administration since the first day”.
Party rules, he added, do not allow the removal of any official unless 50 percent of the state party delegates sign a petition requesting a vote and 75 percent of the state committee votes to remove the official.
The Republican National Committee declined to answer questions about the Michigan GOP.
With major donors gone, Karamo proposed a new direction for the state party: trying to persuade nearly 500,000 small business owners in Michigan, who she said were right-leaning, to contribute between $10 and $50 each month. After a “60-day infrastructure preparation time,” she projected the party would raise up to $60 million a year.
It did not.
In July, the party had less than $150,000 in the bank. Under siege, the state party leadership began holding meetings in private. A meeting that month escalated into a fistfight that broke a county president’s dentures and left him with stress fractures in his spine. The Detroit News reported.
Karamo soon began expelling dissident officials from the party. The vice presidents began Complaining in the media that they felt marginalized.. Two members of the budget committee resigned for fear of liability, according to the report by anti-Karamo Republicans. And her dissolved the party’s conflict resolution committee.
Mackinac’s tumultuous meeting left Michigan Republicans even further apart.
“We were rated as solid Republicans (one, two, three or four) and number four as RINO,” said Pete Hoekstra, a former ambassador to the Netherlands during the Trump administration and a former Republican congressman from Michigan. “We are supposed to build a party, not divide it into our own categories.”
In November, Karamo was trying to sell the party’s former headquarters, a state Capitol building in Lansing that had been paid for by two wealthy donors. Ms. Karamo and the State party do not own the building; It is owned by a trust controlled by former state party chairmen.
Mrs. Karamo had left the headquarters months before, arguing that their maintenance fees They were an unnecessary cost. When he left, Karamo allowed the power to be turned off, releasing the building’s electronic locks and leaving it open to the public, according to the report by Republicans opposed to the president.
The report’s lead author, Warren Carpenter, is a local Republican leader and former Karamo ally. With the help of a former state attorney general, he compiled the 140 page document, titled “The Failed Leadership of the Karamo Administration.” The New York Times obtained a copy of the report.
The report details Karamo’s favors to her political allies, such as paying nearly $90,000 to a company run by the man who made her president; sloppy accounting; and the party’s growing debt.
Soon, prominent county chairmen were urging Karamo’s ouster.
Mark Forton, chairman of the Macomb County Republican Party, who had been a key force in Karamo’s rise, called in late November for “a complete change in leadership” in a letter to the state committee obtained by The Times. .
In early December, Vance Patrick, chairman of the Oakland County Republican Party, the state’s largest county party organization, encouraged his ouster, citing “a new controversy every week, which distracts from the important task of organizing the party to win elections. “
Carpenter said in an interview that he had enough votes to unseat Karamo, but that he and like-minded Republicans were proceeding cautiously because they believed she might sue.
At the same time, anti-Karamo Republicans are searching for a new leader. One of the people mentioned is Mr Hoekstra, who said that he was not considering such a move “until there is an opportunity”, but that he had indicated a “clear willingness over the past few months to help the party”.
“To win Michigan, you need Republicans, you need independents and you have to attract Democrats,” he said, pointing to Trump’s coalition in 2016, when he won the state by about 10,000 votes. “We need everyone to feel welcome at the game.”
Meanwhile, many of Karamo’s former allies are feeling disillusioned.
“Ladies and gentlemen, there is no way we can look at the events of the last nine months and defend this administration using comments like ‘inexperience’ or ‘incompetence,’” Forton wrote in his November letter. “Simply put, we have been deceived.”
kitty bennett contributed to the research.
