Things Are Getting Real Weird Within the Michigan GOP

It’s a fun time to live in Michigan, and not just because its flagship university’s unanimously admired football team just won a national championship. There’s also the near-daily drama provided by the state’s Republican Party—or should we say its two Republican parties. The competing GOP factions in the mitten operate rival websites (MIGOP.org and MI-GOP.org) and have faced off in a physical altercation, and both claim to have selected an official state chair. Heartwarmingly, though, they do agree that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump (he didn’t). Let’s dig through some coverage—the Bridge Michigan site has been following the affair especially closely—to figure out exactly what’s going on here.

Two Republican parties? Isn’t one of them enough of a dang soap opera already?

Ha-ha, yes. But no. In Michigan, a yearlong conflict between members of the 107-person Republican state committee came to a head this month as rival factions each held meetings purporting to declare an official leader of the state GOP. (Members of the state committee, incidentally, are selected by a vote of delegates from each precinct in the state.)

One of the factions, which met on Jan. 6, voted to remove a woman named Kristina Karamo from her position as state chair and replace her on an interim basis with a woman named Malinda Pego. The other faction met on Jan. 13 to reaffirm its belief that Karamo is the rightful chair and to ban Pego and her co-conspirators from membership in the party for five years.

Jan. 6, ha. Did anyone in the pro-Karamo faction notice that significant date?

Yes, and they have compared what the splinter faction did to Karamo on Jan. 6 with what Mike Pence supposedly did to Donald Trump on the original Jan. 6.

But we’re not finished: On Friday, the anti-Karamo faction filed a request for injunctive relief in state circuit court, essentially asking a judge to declare it the rightful Michigan GOP. And on Saturday, the anti-Karamo group met again, selecting former U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra, who served as the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands under Donald Trump, as its permanent choice for state chair.

Going back a minute, who is Kristina Karamo, and what is her deal?

Karamo, as features in Mother Jones and CNN have documented, was a part-time community college instructor, local party activist, and host of a “one-woman Christian podcast” when she came to prominence in state politics after the 2020 presidential election. Karamo claimed at the time, in public appearances and an affidavit, that she had seen fraud taking place as a poll watcher at Detroit’s TCF Center, a vote-counting center that was the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. In 2022 she ran to be Michigan’s secretary of state after receiving Trump’s endorsement—losing her race by 14 points but, naturally, arguing that the election had been stolen from her. Last February, she was elected state chair.

And then the trouble began?

Yes. Traditional Republican donors in Michigan’s business community have been hesitant to give money to a state GOP apparatus that is controlled by election deniers—candidates similar to Karamo also lost races for governor and attorney general—and in June, the party’s former budget committee chair wrote in an open letter that the organization’s spending was “so far out of proportion with income as to put us on the path to bankruptcy.”

It seems like he knew what he was talking about: In August, the Detroit News reported that the party had only $35,000 left in its bank account, and according to legal filings, it has since defaulted on a $500,000 loan from Comerica Bank. (Karamo’s regime contests the validity of the loan. If you’re not sure what that means, well, the bank didn’t either. In a filing dated Jan. 10, Comerica described the party’s legal claims about the matter as “longwinded and perplexing,” “contradictory,” “befuddling,” “superfluous,” “factually inadequate,” and “like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.”) Karamo is also attempting to sell the party’s former headquarters in the city of Lansing, despite evidence that it does not actually own the property. Amid all of this, she authorized a $110,000 payment to Passion of the Christ and Sound of Freedom star Jim Caviezel for his September appearance at a conference on Mackinac Island. (Karamo and her supporters say the party’s financial issues are the fault of previous leaders.)

So this is what Karamo’s rivals are upset about.

Yes, and that she’s responded to questions about money by removing the people asking them from their party committees. So, on Jan. 6, Karamo’s critics—among them Pego, a committee member named Bree Moeggenberg, and an attorney named Matthew DePerno, who ran against Karamo in last February’s race for chair—helped organize a meeting of 45 committee members who “selected” Pego to replace Karamo. As you’ll recall, there are 107 members of the committee. The splinter group argues that party bylaws allowed it to assign proxy votes to absent members in order to establish a quorum. Naturally, the Karamo faction disagrees; in its press release about the subject, Pego’s and DePerno’s names were misspelled.

DePerno, Moeggenberg, Pego, Hoekstra—are these men and women voices of reason?

Only from a very particular perspective. Moeggenberg is a county chair for the “grooming”-obsessed school activism group Moms for Liberty; she got her start trying to recall school board members who supported mask mandates during COVID. (See her here, holding a sign that says “Protect KIDS NOT PEDS”—pedophiles—at a press conference.) Pego, as a county commissioner in the Muskegon area, once tried (and failed) to pass a resolution honoring a Black slaveowner during Black History Month. DePerno is under indictment for allegedly breaking into voting machines in an effort to prove that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. (DePerno denies having done anything illegal.) Hoekstra, for his part, made headlines during his tenure in the Netherlands for having once claimed that Muslim extremists controlled “no-go zones” inside the country and had set local politicians on fire (not true) and infamously ran a racist campaign ad during the 2012 Super Bowl.

You said there was an altercation?

In April, a county Republican official who does not support Karamo was caught on video slapping a cigarette out of the hand of a county official who does support Karamo the night before a leadership meeting. The second woman responded by pushing the first woman’s face with her hand. Additionally, in July, a state committee member named Mark DeYoung told the Detroit News (and the police) that a local GOP activist with a history of violent behavior had given him the middle finger and kicked him in the testicles after knocking repeatedly on the door of a closed meeting about party finances. (The activist, whose name is James Chapman, claims to have acted in self-defense but has since been charged with assault. While DeYoung had voted for Karamo in last February’s leadership election, it appears that the closed nature of the meeting, rather than support or opposition to Karamo’s chairship per se, was what had motivated Chapman to attempt to break in.)

That’s great, all of it, just great. What happens next?

The Republican National Committee still lists Karamo as its Michigan chair but has said it is reviewing records of the competing January meetings; the circuit court that was asked to intervene by Karamo’s critics has not yet set a timetable for responding to the request. In the meantime, Karamo seems to have the support of the national far right, including, let’s see here, an internet personality named Mr. Sausage and this group, which says she was “ordained by God to put an end to Human Trafficking.” (In today’s Republican Party, stuff like that is important!) Whatever the outcome of the conflict, the party is scheduled on March 2 to hold a convention in Detroit at which the majority of its presidential nomination delegates will be awarded—and, in a thoughtful tribute to the imaginary voter fraud that kicked off this entire chain of events, that meeting will be held at the venue formerly known as the TCF Center.