GRAND RAPIDS, MI — In Michigan, the last time an incumbent state attorney general lost a bid for reelection was in 1950. But Republicans thought former state Speaker of the House Tom Leonard had a golden opportunity to defeat Dana Nessel this year.
As speaker, Leonard, now 41, won bipartisan praise (a rare thing these days) when he successfully worked to get mental health and school pension reform. He ran for attorney general four years ago, but narrowly lost to Nessel.
However, that was a big Democratic “wave” year in Michigan, and he ran far ahead of his party’s candidates for governor and attorney general. He is seen as strongly ethical; his conservative credentials are beyond question; he is firmly anti-abortion, and in 2019 President Donald Trump nominated him to serve as U.S. District Attorney for the Western District of Michigan.
The appointment was blocked for political reasons by Michigan’s two Democratic U.S. senators (much as Republicans blocked the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland) but there’s little question that Leonard would have been a formidable attorney general candidate, especially if 2022 shapes up, as many expect, as a strong Republican year.
But we will never know, because Republicans aren’t going to nominate him. Instead, they are going to run a man named Matt DePerno, who was fired from a law firm after being accused of padding his billings and blatant “dishonesty.”
DePerno, who is in his 50s, also has a long trail of court-imposed sanctions, unhappy clients, one of whom claimed the lawyer physically assaulted him, and questionable financial dealings.
Last year, the Michigan Senate Oversight Committee — which was and is controlled by his fellow Republicans — accused him of making false claims about election fraud in order to profit off them.
Meanwhile, the Daily Beast, a national online newspaper, called DePerno “the original election fraud grifter” and posed questions about what happened to more than $300,000 he raised to allegedly investigate fraud in the 2020 election.
Nolan Finley, the conservative editorial page editor of the Detroit News, wrote that the Republican Party put “its stamp on a disreputable huckster as its attorney general candidate.”
Why in the world did it do so?
“Because Donald Trump demanded it,” the editor said. Current Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey all but wrote off the party’s chance to win that race, saying DePerno would be “a weight all the way down the ticket.”
Indeed, DePerno came to prominence by trumpeting the discredited theory that Trump had really won Michigan (President Biden carried the state by 154,188 votes) and filed lawsuit after lawsuit to that effect, all of which were thrown out of court. Earlier, he sued the Detroit News for “defamation” for its reporting; a judge dismissed the case and ordered him to pay the newspaper nearly $80,000 in sanctions.
But all that mattered to the delegates at the GOP’s endorsement convention in Grand Rapids late last month is that former President Trump wanted DePerno, clearly because of the candidate’s support for his election fraud claims.
In Michigan, candidates for the statewide posts of attorney general and secretary of state are not chosen in primary elections, but formally selected by the parties at their state conventions around Labor Day. But in recent years, both Republicans and Democrats have designated their choices in spring “endorsement conventions” to give them more time to campaign.
Republicans also had some hopes of beating incumbent Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who angered them by sending absentee ballot applications to every voter in the state in 2020, triggering a huge turnout that was seen as good for Democrats.
Many voters were also unhappy even before the pandemic began, when Benson ended walk-in service at secretary of state branch offices in favor of online appointments only.
But the candidate Republicans chose to run against her is, if anything, more bizarre than DePerno. Kristina Karamo, a 36-year-old resident of the older Detroit suburb of Oak Park, has no government experience whatsoever. Instead, she has a master’s degree in Christian apologetics from tiny Biola University in California, and teaches part-time at a community college in Detroit.
She is a militant anti-vaxxer, and has proclaimed that all LGBT people are going to face eternal damnation. In Michigan, the secretary of state is primarily responsible for running elections and issuing licenses for motor vehicles, and candidates traditionally promise to improve service in one of both areas.
Karamo, on the other hand, says she is running to thwart “authoritarian leftist plans about sharing the joys of sex with elementary students and aborting kids 40 weeks in the womb.”
That would not appear to be part of the secretary of state’s job description, but she got the nomination anyway, because, you guessed it, she had the endorsement of Donald Trump, likely because she too, claims that the election was stolen.
She also opposes teaching evolution, and says the Democratic Party “has been totally taken over by a Satanic agenda.”
Those aren’t views likely to appeal to independent voters. The question is, how badly will these candidates hurt the entire GOP ticket? Bill Ballenger, a noted expert for decades on Michigan elections doesn’t think they have any chance to win, but doesn’t think they necessarily will affect other races.
In his Ballenger Report, he noted that GOP incumbents for secretary of state and attorney general survived a strong Democratic tide in the state in 2006, and Democrats in those jobs survived the Republican landslide year of 1966.
Perhaps. But it does seem that Republicans may have had a chance to capture these two key posts, and have likely thrown it away.
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