The Republican National Committee’s top attorneys have declared they believe the Michigan Republican chair, Kristina Karamo, was legitimately ousted from her position earlier this month, ending weeks of silence from the national party on a leadership crisis that has engulfed state Republicans.
The factional split within the Michigan Republican party, over ideological differences as well as personal ones, has sown chaos with just months to go before the 2024 presidential election. In recent weeks, tensions escalated, with two feuding groups within the state party claiming to be its legitimate leaders.
RNC general counsel Michael Whatley and chief counsel Matthew Raymer wrote in a letter obtained by the Guardian that they believed that an early January vote by state party officials to remove Karamo, who made her mark peddling election conspiracies after the 2020 election, as their chair was indeed legitimate – in spite of Karamo’s insistence that it was not.
“Based upon its initial review, it appears to the counsel’s office that Ms Karamo was properly removed in accordance with the Michigan GOP bylaws on January 6,” they wrote in a letter to Karamo and Pete Hoekstra, who was elected to replace her by party members who engineered her ouster. They noted that the issue was not yet settled and that the RNC’s position was not final or binding.
The RNC attorneys’ opinion offers Michigan and national Republicans guidance as they head to their winter meeting in Las Vegas at the end of the month. But it is not a definitive resolution in the factional dispute that has festered over the last year within their state party. The letter also declared that neither Karamo nor Hoekstra would be “credentialed as Michigan GOP chair” when those meetings convene.
Until now the RNC had remained silent over the feud, especially since its current chair, Ronna McDaniel, is herself a former chair of the Michigan Republican party.
But Karamo and her allies insist that even a ruling from the RNC won’t remove them from leadership. In a 25 January email to precinct delegates, the Michigan GOP general counsel – a Karamo ally who was also removed in the 6 January vote – wrote that he acknowledged the RNC letter was “authentic”, but added: “I do not care because their opinion is irrelevant to any resolution.”
When Karamo took office nearly a year ago, she inherited an organization that was broke and divided – and in her year as chair, the party’s problems have worsened. Karamo, who embodies the GOP’s shift into stranger and more extreme political territory, made a name for herself as a vocal proponent of Trump’s false election claims, pushing election conspiracy theories as well as even wilder ideas (like claiming Jay-Z is a “satanist” and yoga is a “satanic ritual” ) during her 2022 run for secretary of state.
She was defeated in the general election but refused to concede, then beat a Trump-backed nominee for state party chair who had voiced similar campaign conspiracy theories last February after she promised to revitalize the state party’s moribund fundraising operation.
But the flow of grassroots cash Karamo promised never came. Divisions deepened in county chapters over the growth of extreme factions on the right, with physical altercations breaking out on multiple occasions. The party under her leadership got wrapped up in litigation. Even though the party was nearly broke, under Karamo’s leadership state GOP took out a loan to cover a more than $100,000 speaking fee to bring Jim Caviezel, a celebrity figure in the QAnon movement and the starring actor in The Passion of the Christ, to the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in September.
By the time a group of Michigan GOP committee members moved to oust Karamo on 6 January, tensions had been brewing for months.
As the RNC stayed silent, other powerful Michigan and national Republicans weighed in.
The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the official party organization for Republican House candidates, expressed frustrations about the party’s spending last week in a letter to the Michigan GOP general counsel under Karamo, Daniel Hartman.
“I will not deny that we are growing increasingly alarmed by reports that the Michigan GOP is in dire financial straits and grossly mismanaging their limited funds,” wrote NRCC general counsel Erin Clark, in a letter obtained by the Guardian. The Michigan GOP, Clark admonished, was not acting like a party that “adheres to conservative principles; or frankly, one that has the desire or ability to elect Republicans to office”.
Congressman John James, a Michigan Republican up for re-election in a contested district in 2024, nodded to the leadership crisis on X on Saturday.
“Congrats to Pete Hoekstra on being elected as the chair of MRP,” wrote James. “I look forward to working with you to put America First, hold our battleground #MI10 seat, and deliver victories for conservatives up and down the ballot this November.”
Karamo’s opponents say they believe a new party chair will bring unity, and, most critically in an election year, the return of major donors such as the DeVoses, a Michigan family that lavishes donations upon conservative causes, into the party’s good graces. They are betting on Hoekstra, the former ambassador to the Netherlands under the Trump administration, to bridge the divide between the party’s activist base and its more traditional donor class.
But if one goal of Karamo’s challengers is to reunify the party, they may have to assuage local dissent.
“They should have come to us and asked for our opinion,” said Mary Harp, a precinct delegate in the Oakland county Republican party, the largest Republican party chapter in the state. Harp said she did not support Karamo in her run for GOP chair last year, but expressed frustration in the way Karamo was removed, saying it lacked the input of lower ranking members of the party.
“A lot of us are going to have a hard time going forward supporting the state party,” she warned.
