DETROIT – For many years, under a variety of leaders, the Michigan Republican Party was one of the best and most efficient political organizations in the country.
Raising money was seldom a problem. Most of the time, the party did well at finding good people to run in competitive districts. Past party chairs included Mel Larsen, whose name is on Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen civil rights law, and a young Spencer Abraham, later the only Republican to win a U.S. Senate race in Michigan since 1972.
The GOP hasn’t done well in presidential elections in the state since the 1980s, but they usually controlled the legislature, and at one point had the governor’s office for 34 of 42 years. They also observed what President Ronald Reagan called the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.”
But today, the party is an unholy mess in every possible sense of that term. Instead of having millions in the bank, the Michigan GOP may be on the point of declaring bankruptcy. The party’s traditional September Mackinac Island conference was a costly disaster, with presidential candidates staying away, except the marginal Vivek Ramaswamy, and actor/ QAnon conspiracy buff Jim Caviezel, to whom party chair Kristina Karamo paid $110,000 for a short speech.
That was far from the party’s only disaster. Last July, police were called to a Michigan Republican Party state committee meeting, to find Clare County GOP chairman Mark DeYoung screaming that James Chapman, a Wayne County Republican, “kicked me in my balls.” Chapman said DeYoung had broken one of his ribs.
The next month, police were called again, when two Republican women, one from Kalamazoo and one from Macomb County got into another physical fight at a party leadership conference in Lansing.
Nobody has seen anything like this before, but there seems to be a wide and growing consensus about who is primarily to blame: Kristina Karamo, the woman whose selection as chair of the Michigan Republican Party last February stunned nearly everyone.
Her behavior since has been even more stunning. She began by intentionally alienating the party’s traditional donors, abandoning the Michigan GOP’s sumptuous headquarters in Lansing in favor of a post office box in a UPS store. She has said that demonic possession can be transferred through sexual intercourse.
Then, at the disastrous Mackinac Conference in September, she took the stage to rant that evolution was a hoax and a leftist plot to make children “question other parts of the Bible.” She also gave a “dramatic reading” of the Declaration of Independence.
Dawn Beattie, a member of the GOP state central committee, then wrote an email to her fellow Republicans that was leaked to the media. “If I would have known that Kristina Karamo would have turned out to be such a tyrannical incompetent dumpster fire I would never have worked so hard to get her elected.
“For that I apologize.”
Things continued to get weirder. With more and more members of the Republican inner circle feeling the way Dawn Beattie did, dozens of GOP state committee members called a meeting January 6 in Commerce Township, about 30 miles northwest of Detroit, to discuss firing Karamo.
And decisively fire her they did, with 88 percent of them voting to do so. “We’ve made history today!” a member of the committee said in a written statement.
Malinda Pego, once, but no longer a Karamo supporter, proclaimed herself the “acting” GOP chair.
But there is only one problem.
Kristina Karamo is refusing to go. She called the meeting illegitimate, said it had no legal standing, and proclaimed “I am still chair of the Michigan Republican Party.”
What this likely means is a legal mess, and a drawn-out fight in the courts. Unless, that is, the national party, namely the Republican National Committee, intervenes. That is something that has both special poignancy and relevance here.
The chair of the RNC, Ronna Romney McDaniel, is a Michigan native and former chair of the Michigan GOP. (She is a niece, but not a supporter, of U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney.)
Beyond the drama, there’s the very real question as to what this may mean for Republicans at the ballot box this year. It’s possible that it may not hurt that much. Months ago, realizing that the Karamo-led party was dysfunctional, former Gov. Rick Snyder and Kalamazoo businessman Bill Parfet moved to lead a separate fundraising campaign for GOP candidates.
Bill Ballenger, a longtime Lansing political analyst who was once a Republican legislator, calls the situation unprecedented, historic, and “pretty much total chaos.”
Nevertheless, he adds that “Democrats should eschew getting too jubilant or overconfident.” If voters don’t like what’s been been happening with Democrats in full control of state government, “they might decide Republicans are the only logical alternative. It’s happened before,” he notes.
He could be right. But meanwhile, Michigan’s embarrassing GOP circus is still going on, with no end in sight.
-30-
