Michigan Republican Party leader stokes fears party will blow more winnable races
Sarah Westwood
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Swept out of power at every level for the first time in nearly four decades, Michigan Republicans have found themselves struggling to regain their footing after the midterm election.
Their controversial state party chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, has not helped.
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Karamo’s hard-line views on everything from election fraud to human evolution have raised concerns among some Michigan Republicans that the state party will retreat further into the political wilderness.
“The titular head of the Republican Party in Michigan is somebody who lost an election by over 600,000 votes and denies that she lost that election,” Dennis Lennox, a longtime Michigan GOP activist, told the Washington Examiner.
“Unlike Stacey Abrams, who at least can grift, Kristina Karamo can’t even raise a penny,” Lennox added, referring to the Georgia Democrat who refused to concede defeat in the first of two gubernatorial races she lost.
Karamo ran for Michigan secretary of state in 2022 and lost by 14 percentage points.
Her margin of defeat was larger than GOP losses in the governor’s race and the attorney general’s race.
Even so, Karamo has maintained that election fraud cost her the contest.
“Conceding to a fraudulent person is agreeing with the fraud, which I will not do,” Karamo said last month when she won the race for Michigan Republican Party chair.
Karamo found herself under scrutiny again this week after she appeared to compare gun control measures to the Holocaust in a social media post.
Rather than apologize, she doubled down on the sentiment amid a public backlash.
And she has made a string of bizarre comments during her month at the helm of the state party, including that “the encroachment of the World Economic Forum” is one of the greatest threats to Michigan.
“To her credit, she’s one of the few Republicans in the country who has slayed the Trump-endorsed candidate for intraparty leadership posts,” Lennox said, referring to her victory over Matt DePerno, the 2022 attorney general candidate who received former President Donald Trump’s endorsement in the Michigan GOP chair race. “But the simple fact of the matter is, she has no idea how to win an election for dog catcher, let alone win an open United States Senate seat in 2024 or carry Michigan for whoever is the Republican presidential nominee.”
David Trott, a former GOP congressman from Michigan, suggested state Republican leadership does not deserve donations in its current condition.
“I don’t think I would put them in charge of a Popsicle stand,” Trott told the Detroit Free Press last month, referring to the state party leaders.
The institutional struggles could imperil a key battleground state for Republicans in 2024, when Sen. Debbie Stabenow’s (D-MI) retirement will leave an open Senate seat and both parties will target the state in the presidential race.
Fundraising had already started to dry up for Michigan Republicans in 2022. Donors did not open their pocketbooks to candidates perceived as too closely aligned with Trump.
“In what many of them saw as sending a message to Donald Trump and his supporters, longtime donors to the Party remained on the sidelines despite constant warnings of the possibility of the outcome we saw come to fruition on Election Day: A statewide sweep and one-party Democratic rule in Lansing, something that has not been seen in nearly 40 years in Michigan,” the state party’s chief of staff, Paul Cordes, wrote in a memo about the election outcome in November.
The inability to raise money has hobbled the Michigan GOP so severely that its headquarters in Lansing recently shut its doors because the organization could not afford utilities and taxes despite needing to pay only $1 per year to the trust that owns it.
The state’s biggest political donors are not interested in supporting the Michigan GOP under Karamo.
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The DeVos family, a powerful and wealthy Michigan family whose members include former Education Secretary Besty DeVos, has reportedly stopped giving to the state party amid the troubles.
The Michigan Republican Party did not respond to a request for comment.