Mutiny breaks out in a Michigan GOP overtaken by chaos

The mutiny took place on Mackinac Island.

The Michigan Republican Party’s respected two-day policy and politics meeting, the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, was an absolute mess.

Turnout had dropped. Top presidential candidates skipped the September event and some speakers did not show up. The guests were baffled by a scoring system that rated their ideology on a scale, from true conservative to 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 its keynote speaker, Jim Caviezel, an actor who has built a fervent following among the far right after starring in a hit film about child sex trafficking this summer. According to party records, the loan came from a trust linked to the wife of the party’s executive director.

For some Michigan Republicans, it was the final straw for a chaotic state party leadership plagued by mounting financial problems, lackluster fundraising, secret meetings and persistent infighting. The blame lies with its fiery chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, who rose to the top of the state party through a combative brand of election denial but has failed to deliver on her promises for new fundraising sources and armies of activists.

This month, internal strife erupted in an effort to oust Ms. Karamo, which if successful would be the first removal of a Michigan Republican Party leader in decades. Nearly 40 members of the Michigan Republican Party’s state committee called for a meeting in late December to investigate whether Ms. Karamo could be removed from office. Just before Christmas, Malinda Pego, Ms. Karamo’s running mate as state party chairman and co-chair of the committee, signed the effort, in an ominous sign for the embattled chairman. And on Thursday, eight of the 13 GOP congressional district chairmen called for Karamo to resign in a joint letter, imploring her to “end the chaos” by resigning.

But that meeting has now been postponed, without a definitive date on the calendar. Ms Karamo has vowed to fight back and denounced the attempt as illegal.

The battle for control of the state party in a presidential battleground par excellence is the most extreme example of conflict emerging in state Republican parties across the country. Once largely dominated by wealthy establishment donors and their allies, many state parties have been taken over by grassroots Republican activists, egged on by former President Donald J. Trump and his broadsides against the legitimacy of elections.

These activists, who now hold positions in state and local power, have elevated others who share their views, prioritizing election denial over experience and credentials.

The result is fundraising problems and division. The Arizona Republican Party has spent money spent much of this year in debt.

The Republican Party of Georgia has had similar difficulties, driven primarily by legal fees related to efforts to undermine the 2020 election. The state’s governor, Brian Kemp, a rare Republican leader who antagonized Mr. Trump, was forced to form his own political apparatus outside the state party for his 2022 reelection campaign. The party’s leaders in both states have aligned themselves. with the election denial movement.

Veterans of Republican politics say state parties play a crucial role in winning elections, acting as a clearinghouse for distributing large donations from national groups unfamiliar with the local terrain and offering discounts on expensive campaign expenses such as mail. They help identify potential candidates and winning races. They are a font of the kind of activists and volunteers who are critical to powering statewide campaigns. And they raise money.

All of that is at risk in places like Michigan.

“It takes people doing the kind of shoe-leather thing in campaigns on top of the money, and that’s where I think Michigan is going to be stymied,” said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. “You can’t replace everything with money. Some things still require people, and they can’t buy mercenaries for that.”

That could have a significant impact in Michigan, where recent poll has shown that Trump has only a narrow lead over President Biden and that a Democratic wave swept the state in 2022.

But before the Republican Party can help turn the state red, it must cancel its debt, which stood at around $620,000 in early December, according to bank records released in a report by state Republicans targeting Ms. Karamo. The party will have to raise money itself, simply to pay off its ledger.

The precarious finances have made national Republicans uncomfortable giving money to the state party for election-related activities because they worry it would simply run into debt, according to two people familiar with the House’s deliberations. the Republican National Committee.

Republican lawmakers are growing increasingly frustrated.

“Michigan’s Republican Party is on the verge of imploding; I have more money in my campaign account than the state party has in its account,” state Rep. Mark Tisdel said during a town hall meeting in December. “Sooner or later the creditors will come calling.”

Ms Karamo did not respond to requests for comment, but she released a letter two days before Christmas in which she proclaimed that “we will not be deterred” and denounced the “infighting”.

“These deceptive and underhanded efforts jeopardize the Michigan GOP’s drive for victory in 2024,” she wrote. “They also disrupt the resolve of the Republican men and women who are working tirelessly to win the spiritual war being fought on a cultural battlefield.”

Daniel Hartman, a lawyer for the Republican Party of Michigan, described the effort to oust Ms. Karamo as “about 15 agitators,” adding that “another 15 of the 120 committee members who have opposed the administration from Day 1 to postpone.”

The party’s rules, he added, do not allow the dismissal of any official unless 50 percent of the state party’s delegates sign a petition calling for a vote and 75 percent of the state committee votes to fire the officer.

The Republican National Committee declined to answer questions about the Michigan GOP

With major donors on the run, Ms. Karamo took the state party in a new direction: She tried to convince nearly 500,000 small-business owners in Michigan, whom she claimed were right-leaning, to add $10 to $50 each month to carry. After a “60-day infrastructure ramp-up period,” she predicted the party would rake in as much as $60 million annually.

That didn’t happen.

That was the case in July less than $150,000 in the bank. Under siege, the state party leadership began holding private meetings. A meeting that month degenerated into a fistfight that broke a district chairman’s dentures and left him with a stress fracture in his spine. This is reported by the Detroit News.

Ms. Karamo soon began expelling dissident party officials. Vice Presidents started complain in the news media that they felt sidelined. According to the anti-Karamo Republicans’ report, two members of the budget committee resigned for fear of liability. And they disbanded the party’s conflict resolution committee.

The tumultuous Mackinac meeting further alienated Michigan Republicans.

“They rated us as solidly Republican – a one, two, three or a four – and a number four 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 a party into our own categories.”

In November, Ms. Karamo tried to sell the party’s former headquarters, a building block of the State Capitol in Lansing 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.

Ms. Karamo had left headquarters months earlier, arguing that maintenance costs were unnecessary costs. As she left, Ms. Karamo allowed the electricity 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 chairman.

The report’s lead author, Warren Carpenter, is a local Republican leader and a former ally of Karamo. He put it together with the help of a former attorney general the 140-page document, entitled “The failed leadership of the Karamo government.”. The New York Times has obtained a copy of the report.

The report details Ms. Karamo’s favors to political allies, including paying nearly $90,000 to a company run by the man who appointed her as chairman; sloppy accounting; and the party’s mounting debts.

Soon, prominent provincial chairmen pushed for Ms. Karamo’s removal.

Mark Forton, the chairman of the Macomb County Republican Party, who played a key role in Ms. Karamo’s rise, called for “a complete change in leadership” in late November in a letter to the state commission obtained by The Times.

In early December, Vance Patrick, the chairman of the Oakland County Republican Party, the largest county party organization in the state, encouraged her removal, citing “every week a new controversy distracts from the important task of organizing the party to win elections. ”

Mr. Carpenter said in an interview that he had enough votes to oust Ms. Karamo, but that he and like-minded Republicans were proceeding cautiously based on the belief that she could face a lawsuit.

At the same time, anti-Karamo Republicans are looking for a new leader. One person suggested is Mr Hoekstra, who said he was not considering such a move “until there is an opening” but that he had shown a “clear willingness to help the party” in recent months.

“To win in Michigan you need Republicans, you need independents and you need to attract Democrats,” he said, pointing to Trump’s coalition in 2016, when he won the state by about 10,000 votes. “We want everyone to feel welcome at the party.”

Many of Ms Karamo’s former allies are now feeling disillusioned.

“Ladies and gentlemen, there is no way that we can observe the events of the past nine months and defend this government with comments such as ‘inexperience’ or ‘incompetence,’” Mr Forton wrote in his November letter. “Simply put, we were tricked.”

Kitty Bennett research contributed.