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MAGA Republicanism has a pretty simple recipe for success: untested political novice with celebrity appeal, plus right-wing populism, equals election victories.
Herschel Walker. Dr Oz. Kari Lake. Donald Trump. Even Mark Robinson, the embattled GOP candidate for governor in North Carolina, is a product of a viral video who vaulted him to political relevance.
On Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the local Republican Party is hoping that strategy will deliver a long-awaited victory in a bid to erase Democrats from the region entirely. Their target: Jenn Hill, state house representative for the 109th district, and the last Democrat representing the Upper Peninsula in Lansing, where her party is defending a rare bicameral majority this fall.
Enter Karl Bohnak, MAGA’s latest and greatest shot at taking the district. He fits the mold perfectly — an ex-weatherman, described as a “veteran of a couple marriages”, fired in 2021 after he refused to get the Covid vaccine in violation of Gray Television company policy. Bohnak is something of a weather fanatic who became regionally famous both for his obsession with Michigan weather patterns, which he would share on air, as well as his broadcasted frustrations with the network’s technical troubles. A memorable video from his WLUC days still can be found on Google where Bohnak, clearly out of his technological depth, mutters a string of curses as he attempts to operate a Facebook Live.
But it was his firing that picked up national attention, including a Washington Post profile. Bohnak, at the time described as “perhaps... the most famous” living resident of the Upper Peninsula by a local newspaper based in the region, was suddenly out of a job after more than 30 years in front of the cameras. And he let his employers have it on social media, blasting Gray Television for contributing to the “abrogation of our liberty and freedom under the guise of a pandemic”.
“We are being bludgeoned with fear, I believe, in an effort to control us,” Bohnak declared.
He was far from alone in those beliefs, especially among the conservatives who dominate much of the Upper Peninsula’s politics. Covid “lockdowns” and state laws requiring social distancing and the shuttering of some businesses were a massive political battleground in the 2022 Michigan statewide elections, including the hard-fought governor’s race between incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer and her MAGA-style Republican challenger, Tudor Dixon. Whitmer’s re-election victory was a brutal rebuke for Covid deniers and opponents of the public health measures put in place during the pandemic to protect vulnerable Americans.
Two years later, Karl Bohnak is trying to stamp out the last refuge of Democratic representation on the Upper Peninsula, centered around the college town of Marquette, on a very similar message. The message has evolved — slightly — but the roots are still the same: a massive dose of skepticism for any kind of government oversight or regulations, and disdain for lawmakers in Lansing in general. It comes after a moderately successful bid to make it back on the air — no longer delivering weather reports, Bohnak was picked up by local station WZMQ in 2022 to provide historical weather analysis, a gig he dropped in early 2024 when he announced his bid for the state house.
And like so many other MAGA Republicans both presently and in past cycles, Bohnak exemplifies the kind of novice political firebrand whom GOP primary voters love but don’t translate so well to voters in general elections. That phenomenon was pretty directly blamed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in 2022 for his party’s inability to capture the upper chamber of Congress, when Republicans also did worse in House elections than its members had publicly predicted.
Bohnak’s team did not respond to a request for an interview for this piece. Instead, he has given a handful of interviews to local state outlets, where he has been open about his climate change denialism and in one discussion with a local news reporter described how he finally entered the race after hearing plans to turn the Upper Peninsula into what he called “the Saudi Arabia of wind and solar [energy]”.
Yet, in some appearances, Bohnak has played himself off as a middle-of-the-road candidate, clearly cognizant of the number of Democrats who still vote in Marquette. On Facebook, he has embraced a decidedly centrist hashtag: #PeninsulaOverParty.
“I am the alternative because basically, I’m a moderate, I am a centrist,” Bohnak said at his campaign launch event, according to Upper Michigan Source. “I believe in the Upper Peninsula and that’s what I’m going to be really working toward. It’s time to restore some balance in Lansing and it’s time also that the U.P. state representatives work together again.”
But his January 2024 campaign kick-off was merely the beginning of the construction of a new character. This image of a “centrist” candidate who just wants government to work better is a far cry from the rhetoric that Bohnak was putting forward in 2021, in the wake of his firing from Gray. At the time, the former newsman — clearly holding onto some resentment for his ouster — was embracing a QAnon-adjacent, hyper-online, doomer libertarian view of the supposed global powers he saw coming for his freedom and the freedoms enjoyed by his fellow Americans.
“It’s just incredible how our standing in the world has gone down. I don’t believe that this is just incompetence. I think that it’s a coordinated attack to bring down America’s standing in the world. Which then will lead to ‘The Great Reset.’ Which will then lead to global technocracy, and we’ll become digital slaves,” Bohnak ranted, fully seriously, to the host of The Slightly Serious Show on Facebook in 2021.
“That’s the endgame,” he continued. With some self-awareness, he went on: “And of course I can bring that up now [on your show], but like, for instance, tomorrow I’ll be doing a local PBS television interview… If I bring up that sort of thing, those people will think I’m running around with a tinfoil hat.”
He’s right: it’s the kind of theory one would be more likely to hear on InfoWars or any of the many programs hosted by right-wing conspiracy peddlers who have taken over the online far-right of American political discourse, in some ways overlapping with the “manosphere” world of Joe Rogan and others like Dan Bilzerian.
In that same interview, Bohnak expressed confidence in a belief that the 2020 election had been stolen by Joe Biden via “massive fraud”. There was also an oblique reference to vaccines being related to Nazi experiments, as Bohnak opined about how infamous war criminal Josef Mengele “injected poison” into his subjects while claiming that the state’s vaccine mandate was “a violation of the Nuremberg Code of 1947.” These beliefs date back to at least the early Trump era, in 2018, when he also made comments on a political site accusing the Obama family of wanting to bring about a “new world order”.
“Karl Bohnak is the embodiment of MAGA chaos, spouting extremist conspiracy theories left and right with no attachment to reality. He has become an embarrassment to the UP who is no longer fit to be a weatherman and certainly isn’t fit to represent Michiganders in the state House,” state Democratic Party chair Lavora Barnes commented to The Independent.
Jenn Hill, his incumbent opponent, added that Upper Peninsula residents deserved better than “getting dragged backwards by extremist conspiracy theories, chaos and lies.”
The problem with Bohnak just an issue of vetting, either. While he’s publicly espoused a desire to go down to Lansing to work with his fellow lawmakers — even Democrats — his Facebook campaign account liked several replies to a post which explicitly endorsed the Upper Peninsula secession movement, a long-defunct effort to turn Michigan’s upper portion into the 51st state: “Superior”. Despite having been largely abandoned as a serious movement decades ago, the secessionist ideal still has its own web page on the site of the Michigan Libertarian Party, with whose politics Bohner said in 2014 he aligned.
“We need to be the 51st state,” reads one Facebook reply liked by Bohnak’s official campaign account. Another read: “Another reason for the UP being the new State of Superior.”
Marquette’s state House seat hasn’t gone to a Republican in decades. It’s looking like that trend will continue: Jenn Hill’s total primary election vote count was several thousand higher than Bohnak’s, about the same gap that Hill won her 2022 general by. If Bohnak’s going to win, he likely needs to come up with about 3,000 votes in the next 30 days.
And it’s hard to see how he does that. The dirty secret of MAGA Republicanism is that it has only really worked for one candidate: Donald J. Trump. With the exception of Florida, where Ron DeSantis’s ascension coincided with the utter collapse of the state Democratic Party, candidates who emulate the celebrity image often flop when their less-tested political instincts are exposed to sunlight.
They themselves occasionally admit this — in Bohnak’s case, it’s a foray into “tinfoil hat” views he readily acknowledges are unpalatable to normal people. Yet, they seemingly can’t help but keep trying it out as a strategy.
