Opinion: Rick Snyder is fundraising for Michigan GOP. Oy.

I'll say this for Michigan GOP Chair Kristina Karamo: She's never poisoned a city.

It's no secret that the party Karamo leads is in disarray, after a hard-right takeover of the party's apparatus and a subsequent rout in the 2022 statewide elections. Michiganders re-elected Democrats to the state's top three offices, which most people expected, and won majorities in the state House and Senate, which most people didn't.

It didn't help that Republicans nominated un-electable candidates, of whom Karamo is one (she ran for Secretary of State, and believes yoga and Beyoncé are agents of Satan), or that the party's go-to donors were, let's say, hesitant to donate, a wound that time has not healed.

Long story short: No one with two dimes to rub together is donating to the Michigan GOP. The state GOP has about $93,000 in the bank, The Detroit News reported earlier this month; insiders told the News that the party should have closer to $4 million on hand less than a year before a contentious election, and will need $30 million to $40 million for next year's election cycle. This is, we can objectively note, relatively grim.

Some Republicans are counting on former Gov. Rick Snyder to change that.

The House Republican Campaign Committee has tapped the former governor to lead fundraising for its efforts to retake that chamber, where Democrats hold a two-seat majority.

Snyder had largely (and wisely) retired from public life after a disastrous stint in the governor's office. His return to politics seems to have been fueled by Lansing Dems' repeal of the right-to-work legislation passed during the 2011 lame-duck legislative session. Snyder, then a first-term governor, insisted that right-to-work had never been his priority, but still signed the bills into law.

The House Republican Campaign Committee, where Snyder is focusing his attention, is doing better than the party itself, raising about $1.26 million in the first half of this year, Bridge Michigan reported last month.

The man who presided over the poisoning of Flint apparently strikes Republican donors as comfortable. Reliable.

Oy.

When we consider what happened to the GOP, we tend to focus on Donald Trump. And that's understandable. Trump has the twin talents of sucking all the oxygen out of any given room, and making nearly anyone else look good in comparison.

But we really ought to talk about Snyder.

The former accountant and CFO won election in 2010 and re-election in 2014. His self-proclaimed apolitical focus on sound business principles — pledging to lower the corporate tax rate and balance the state's books — appealed to a coalition of Republican and even some moderate Democratic voters in a state hard-hit by the Great Recession and legislative gridlock.

For some voters, electing someone to political office who's not a politician has a certain allure; one can assume those same folks don't have a penchant for plumbers with no plumbing experience, or doctors who haven't gone to med school.

When the self-proclaimed nerd promised to focus on finances, it sounded safe.

It was anything but.

Snyder unleashed a torrent of cuts in his first term, to schools and pensions and tax credits, and reshaped the state's tax code, delivering a hefty tax break to businesses while raising taxes on people, to the tune of about $1 billion.

But there was more to come.

From 2013 to 2015, an automated system wrongly labeled tens of thousands of Michiganders as having fraudulently received unemployment benefits. State government hounded these falsely accused Michiganders for repayment with steep penalties that exceeded the value of the benefits they had supposedly illegally obtained, and there was little recourse for these Michiganders, the vast majority of whom hadn't committed fraud. So great was financial and psychological burden that a law clinic devoted to helping the falsely accused had to add the number for a suicide hotline to its website.

For any other governor, the unemployment insurance agency false-fraud scandal would have been career-ending. But we're talking about Rick Snyder, so it was only the second-biggest scandal of his administration.

This is the guy who presided over the poisoning of Flint, appointing an emergency manager who, in concert with Snyder's Department of Environmental Quality, failed to authorize proper treatment of the city's drinking water supply, exposing thousands of Flint residents (including about 6,000 kids under 6) to lead, a dangerous neurotoxin.

For months, Snyder and his team insisted the water in Flint was fine, blowing past the news that the water was too corrosive for GM to use in its plants, and relying on flawed data over residents' repeated pleas to simply look at or smell the yellowy, malodorous water running from their taps. When a respected doctor's analysis showed that the blood-lead level of kids in Flint had risen, his administration attempted to discredit her.

And it turns out that he wasn't even particularly good at the money part. The state's failure to invest in schools precipitated a crisis, and before the COVID-19 pandemic sent waves of federal cash to Michigan, most economists agreed that the state budget was headed back to deficit territory. He didn't even fix the damn roads.

Snyder showed us who he was: A data guy who promised to fix Michigan's bottom line, with few other considerations.

That's the problem.

Snyder has said he's jumping back into the political fray because he's worried Democrats are taking the state in the wrong direction. (Seriously, sir?) But what it comes down to is, his party needs him. Compared to the folks repping today's GOP, Snyder represents a return to saner, greener pastures, or at least a return to winning.

That's also the problem.

Winning isn't the only thing, or even everything. But as long as winning — being right — is detached from policy and its consequences for real people, I fear the GOP is no closer to redemption.

Nancy Kaffer is the editorial page editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters. Become a subscriber at Freep.com.

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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Opinion: Rick Snyder fundraising for Michigan GOP in next year