Troubled Michigan GOP operations extend far beyond the state

The dysfunction that has been the hallmark of the Michigan Republican Party in the last two years is not just a bug in the GOP state party system. Increasingly, it appears to be a feature.

As the battle over who is the actual leader of the MIGOP continues to play out in dueling press releases and alternatewebsites from Chair Kristina Karamo and Co-Chair Malinda Pego, the core function of the party — raising money to get Republicans elected to office and keeping them there — has been derailed by a fundraising drought and leadership selection process that seemingly caters to an ever more extreme faction within the party.

“[Former President Donald] Trump’s endorsed candidates always win primaries, but the election deniers, they’re making the Democrats’ job easy,” Miles Coleman of the University of Virginia Center for Politics told the Michigan Advance.

Coleman adds that it’s not a surprise that finances have become an issue in those party operations that have lost focus on successfully electing candidates to office.

“If you are the Arizona Republican Party, instead of spending money on voter outreach or ads or field operations, you’re spending potentially millions of dollars on recounts,” he said.

But it’s not just recounts that have left the Arizona Republican Party to fall on lean economic times. While it is true that former chair, Kelli Ward, spent more than $300,000 on “legal consulting” fees in 2022, mostly related to lawsuits contesting Trump’s defeat there in 2020, she also authorized spending more than $530,000 on an election night party and bus tour for Trump-backed candidates, all of whom lost.

Michigan and Arizona are not alone, as similar issues are plaguing state parties across the nation.

In Minnesota, the state GOP at one point last year reported just $53.81 in its bank account amid mounting debt, largely blamed on the fallout surrounding the resignation of former Chair Jennifer Carnahan in 2021 in the wake of a federal sex-trafficking scandal connected to a prominent donor.

Colorado’s GOP was unable to pay for any staff members early in 2023 after incoming Chairman Dave Williams accused the previous leadership of leaving the party in debt to its landlord to the tune of $9,000 in unpaid back rent and “several tens of thousands of dollars in questionable legal bills we are still untangling.”

Williams, an ardent election denier, then sued the state over its primary system, an effort led by attorney John Eastman, who is among those charged in Georgia with conspiring with Trump to try and overturn the 2020 presidential election.

And in Florida, the state Republican Party on Monday ousted Chairman Christian Ziegler amid an investigation of an alleged sexual battery against a woman in Sarasota in October. And while the state GOP has retained a huge fundraising advantage, the scandal has given a ray of hope to Democrats seeking to deliver the Sunshine State to the Biden column this year after only losing by 3 points in 2020.

Dennis Darnoi, a GOP strategist with Farmington Hills-based Densar Consulting LLC tells the Advance that it really isn’t a mystery why the various state parties are having such trouble.

“They can’t raise money because they’re all following pretty much the same playbook, which is to deny the results of the 2020 election and to demand sort of an ideological purity test that if you are not 100% fully behind Donald Trump, then you are not considered a Republican,” said Darnoi. “It’s very hard to either maintain your donor base, attract new donors or even keep a cohesive party structure if that’s going to be your modus operandi.”

Darnoi says even Republicans who support the former president, but want to put 2020 behind them, find that the Trump loyalists in charge of the party structure won’t trust them as being truly committed. More importantly, he says any candidates who aren’t committed to relitigating 2020, won’t get the grassroots support they need for their campaigns.

“Republicans right now, because of those who are in control of the state party, find themselves almost having to agree that 2020 was a stolen election in order to get that support,” he said. “If you had someone who would be able to say, ‘The people who believe that, I hear your voice. Those who disagree and think it was legitimate, I hear that voice and let’s go forward from here.’

“If that person was running a state party, you might be able to find some cohesion. But the problem in almost all of these states, they’re continuing to deal with the 2020 issue. For example, in Minnesota and in Georgia, those state parties are still paying the legal fees for those false electors and all the court cases that came out of trying to defend 2020 as being a non-legitimate election. So they haven’t even been able to move past that on a financial level.”

Echoing that point was Matt Dallek, a political historian with George Washington University’s College of Professional Studies.

Dallek said while there is no single cause for the dysfunction being seen in the state parties, one obvious factor is that Trump has tended to favor loyalty over competency, resulting in chaos and lack of professionalism.

“Voters on the whole have voted against MAGA candidates over the past eight years, and while Trump remains a formidable candidate, he is responsible for many of the defeats, the lies, and the chaos at the state party level,” he said. “Remember that some state parties have been caught up in criminal investigations because they participated in Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election. So it’s unsurprising that some of these same parties would devolve into dysfunction and recriminations.”

However, Dallek says while Trump and his insistence on perpetrating the lie of massive voter fraud is unique to the current state of affairs, there have been similar grassroots takeovers in the past, although most did not end well.

“The John Birch Society tried and sometimes succeeded in taking over local, and occasionally, statewide party organizations or conservative groups in the 1960s. They were often politically toxic and on balance, didn’t help their favorite candidates or causes,” he said, noting that they did help Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater win the 1964 GOP presidential nomination, although Goldwater then went on to one of the largest electoral defeats in U.S. history against President Lyndon Johnson.

“In 1988, Pat Robertson’s grassroots, sometimes extremist forces, tried to take over state parties, but I don’t think they succeeded in the way the Trump forces have done. And my sense is that the Tea Party efforts in 2010 and 2014 were better organized and less fractious/dysfunctional than the MAGA approach today,” said Dallek.

But fractious and dysfunctional is exactly how many have described the Michigan Republican Party, which elected Karamo as chair in 2023. After gaining prominence as an election denier in 2020, Karamo won the GOP nomination for secretary of state in 2022. However, she has never conceded her 14-point loss to incumbent Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

Karamo has had a rocky time leading the party, and a disaffected faction voted to remove her at closed-door meeting on Jan. 6 amid ongoing concern about the MIGOP’s finances, including possibly going bankrupt. A statement from the party released after the vote, called the meeting an “attempted coup” while Pego issued her own release and said she was now the acting chair of the party.

Pego also canceled a meeting Karamo had scheduled for Saturday in Houghton Lake, although Karamo and her supporters contend she remains the lawful chair of the party, pointing to a report by the policy subcommittee that said the Jan. 6 meeting was an unauthorized gathering and thus its results were “null and void.”

Karamo says the Houghton Lake meeting will take place as planned.

Meanwhile, those who want Karamo gone have indicated they will file a suit to get the courts to weigh in on who actually controls the Michigan GOP. They have also reportedly requested the Republican National Committee (RNC) to help decide the issue.

But the RNC has issues of its own, with just under $10 million in cash on hand as of Nov. 30, less than half what the Democratic National Committee reported the same day. Trump’s ongoing legal issues, facing 91 felonies in state and federal courts as well as the possibility of being disqualified from appearing on several state ballots, are believed to have contributed to the lackluster fundraising.

And the turmoil isn’t just confined to the state and national parties. Even at the local level, fights over leadership have been a hallmark of the last two years, from the 2022 dispute over who was really in charge of the Macomb County GOP to a legal dispute over party leadership in Hillsdale County resulting in a contempt citation for both Karamo and the MIGOP. More recently, an effort to oust the head of the Livingston County Republican Party has many similarities to the fight against Karamo.

So, the question remains: What effect will these issues, from the county level to the White House, have on the November elections?

Darnoi says the prognosis is not hopeful for major benefactors to start writing big checks that could make a difference in important state races.

“I mean, if you’re [former MIGOP Chair] Ron Weiser, why would you write Kristina Karamo a $2 million check? Same thing in Arizona, where they’re begging the RNC for money because no one has given to the state party,” he said. “So it’s very hard to constantly rail on certain Republicans as RINOs or traitors because they don’t support Trump, and then come back and say, ‘Hey, by the way, would you please support what we’re doing with a financial contribution?’ That’s why all of these states are struggling for money, because the MAGA Republicans or the Donald Trump-backed Republicans are very happy to attack what used to be the old base conservative Republicans. But the fact of the matter is those were the individuals who propped up financially the state party.”

UVA’s Coleman says one effect, unintentional as it may be, will be to further sideline the influence of state parties.

“Really, in the digital age, what we’ve seen is fundraising, especially for the higher-ticket races like Senate and Congress, is more candidate driven these days,” he said. “So that takes some leverage away from the state parties in general and maybe the good news for some of the Republicans is, if they’re running in a state like Michigan, they may be less dependent on the state party.”

Coleman cautions Democrats not to think they’re immune to state party turmoil, pointing to infighting and leadership challenges in New York state that led to a disastrous showing in 2022 that many believe handed the House of Representatives to Republicans.

But when it comes to this November, Coleman says because it’s a presidential election, the effect might be somewhat blunted.

“It’s something that would probably matter more at the margins,” he said. “I can see this being more of an issue in a midterm year where elections are more state-driven. That was basically the dynamic in 2022 where the Republican Party really struggled. Those were good results for Democrats. But this year, that could sort of matter at the margins. Michigan, for example, that’s a state where we have it as ‘Leans Democratic’ in our forecast for the presidential election. But I think if the Republican Party were in better shape, it would maybe look more like a toss-up.”

Darnoi believes productive change can’t happen for the GOP until they accept the fact that these wounds are mostly self-inflicted.

“Republicans have engaged in self marginalization, they’ve chosen this path,” he said. “They’ve chosen to throw individuals out. They’ve chosen to demonize people within their own party. There’s no one from the outside who’s done this. This is completely something that they’ve done their own. The state party used to have a very simple function. It’s make sure more money’s coming in than is going out, support your down ballot candidates and do the best to attract more persuadable swing voters than the other side. But now, it’s attack your own and demand fealty and then complain when it doesn’t come.”