LANSING — As we begin the New Year, we wanted to make sure to highlight a critical piece out in last Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, detailing the downfall of the Michigan GOP under Chair Kristina Karamo.
Beginning with the embarrassing Mackinac conference and ending with the growing calls for Karamo’s resignation, the article walks us through the infighting, bankruptcy and long list of broken promises Karamo made when she assumed the position of Chair.
Now, in letters, constituent town halls, and interviews conducted by the Times, members of the MIGOP are expressing their dissatisfaction with current leadership as Michigan enters the presidential election year.
Don’t just take it from us, here are a number of high-level Michigan Republicans who – in their own words – are throwing their own party under the bus:
- State Rep. Mark Tisdel: “The Michigan Republican Party is on the verge of imploding; I have more money in my campaign account than the state party has in its.”
- Vance Patrick, Oakland County Republican Party Chair: “[there is] a new controversy every week, distracting from the important business of organizing the party to win elections.”
- Mark Forton, Macomb County Republican Party Chair: “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no way that we can observe the happenings of the last nine months and defend this administration by using comments like ‘inexperience,’ or ‘incompetence,’ … Simply put, we have been had.”
- Jeff Timmer, former Executive Director of the Michigan GOP: “It takes people doing the shoe-leather kind of things in campaigns on top of the money, and that’s where I think that Michigan is going to be hampered…You can’t replace everything with money. Some things still take people on top of it, and they can’t buy mercenaries to do that.”
- Eight congressional district party chairs in a joint letter to Karamo asked her to “put an end to the chaos” by stepping down.
If the efforts to remove Karamo are successful, it would mark the first time in decades that a leader of the MIGOP was removed by the party. And they’re not exactly floating winners as options to replace her – one such name being former Ambassador and Congressman Pete Hoekstra, who made headlines last year for his hypocrisy opposing the Gotion plant after lobbying for a lumbar company connected to the Chinese Communist Party.
Whether Karamo manages to cling onto power or if the MIGOP replaces her with another controversial and ineffective figurehead, one thing is clear – their issues run deep, and we are not sure there is anyone in today’s MAGA GOP that can fix them. Read more of the New York Times’ report below:
New York Times: Mutiny Erupts in a Michigan G.O.P. Overtaken by Chaos
- The Michigan Republican Party’s revered two-day policy and politics gathering, the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, was an utter mess. Attendance had plummeted. Top-tier presidential candidates skipped the September event, and some speakers didn’t show. Guests were baffled by a scoring system that rated their ideology on a scale, from a true conservative to a so-called RINO, or Republican in name only.
- For some Michigan Republicans, it was the final straw for a chaotic state party leadership that has been plagued by mounting financial problems, lackluster fund-raising, secretive meetings and persistent infighting.
- Before the state Republican Party can help try to flip the state red, it must clear out its debt, which stood around $620,000 as of early December, according to bank records released in a report by state Republicans targeting Ms. Karamo. The party will have to raise money on its own simply to pay down its ledger.
- With major donors fleeing, Ms. Karamo pitched a new direction for the state party: trying to persuade nearly 500,000 small-business owners in Michigan, who she claimed were right-leaning, to contribute $10 to $50 every month. After a “60-day infrastructure ramp-up time,” she projected that the party would raise as much as $60 million annually. It did not.
- By November, Ms. Karamo was trying to sell the party’s former headquarters, a building blocks from the State Capitol in Lansing that had been 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 chairs.
- “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no way that we can observe the happenings of the last nine months and defend this administration by using comments like ‘inexperience,’ or ‘incompetence,’” Mr. Forton wrote in his November letter. “Simply put, we have been had.”
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