'Collapsing and going broke': Conservative sounds alarm on four GOP swing-state parties

Former President Donald Trump and even some of his key GOP rivals may be raking in money — but at the state level, it's a different story. State Republican Parties in important parts of the country are going broke as they are taken over by extremists who don't know how to organize or win elections, Jim Geraghty wrote for the conservative National Review on Tuesday.

"Even worse for the GOP, these aren’t just any states — Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota all rank as either key swing states or once-purple states that would be tantalizing targets in a good year," wrote Geraghty.

The simple fact of the matter, he wrote, is that if the GOP underperforms for their fourth consecutive election cycle, "a key factor will be the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs who have little or no interest in the basics of successfully managing a state party or the basic blocking and tackling involved in helping GOP candidates win elections."

Many of these parties' struggles have been well-documented. The Michigan GOP has been in turmoil since it was taken over by Kristina Karamo, a QAnon-obsessed election denier who ran unsuccessfully for secretary of state in 2022; party officials have been arguing with her and her loyalists over financial arrangements, and tensions have escalated to the point that two officials got in a physical fight that put one in the hospital. Meanwhile, the Minnesota GOP is down to just $53 dollars in the bank, with hundreds of thousands in debt.

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But more ominously, Geraghty noted, there are cracks showing even in relatively more competent state GOPs, which managed to come away with wins last year. For instance, "the Georgia state Republican Party is spending a small fortune on the legal fees of those 'alternate' Republican electors from the 2020 presidential election."

Before Trump, wrote Geraghty, things weren't this bad — there were embarrassments, sure, but state parties often scored major wins, with Arizona Republicans in particular crushing Democrats in 2014. Now, the chaos is so bad that donors are leaving in droves, all but paralyzing these parties from doing the basics of organizing.

"The MAGA crowd now running these state parties insisted they didn’t need anyone else," concluded Geraghty. "And now we see where that got them."