GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — One of Donald Trump’s two hand-picked candidates for Michigan government positions won an endorsement at the state’s Republican convention to run in November and another is in a close run-off, a sign that the former president still has sway with voters.
Secretary of State candidate Kristina Karamo won her race and Attorney General hopeful Matthew DePerno was facing a second ballot to see if he will run on the Republican ticket. Karamo and DePerno both deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.
Trump held a rally earlier this month in Michigan and has endorsed 15 other candidates in the state, whose nominations will be decided by August in GOP primaries.
The results from the two-day convention in Grand Rapids suggest that Trump still has a strong hold on the the state’s Republican Party and that the state’s GOP voters are willing to back candidates that are pushing the debunked idea that the 2020 election was stolen.
Karamo is a part-time community college professor who was a poll challenger in Detroit during the 2020 election and falsely claims she saw votes stolen from Trump and given to Biden, an accusation that the courts have refuted. DePerno sued in state court alleging fraud in Antrim County, Michigan. He lost the suit and an appeal of that decision.
In response to Karamo’s win, the Michigan Democratic party sent out an email saying, “the Michigan Republican Party today endorsed an inexperienced extremist for Secretary of State who denies the results of the 2020 General Election, peddles debunked conspiracy theories, and calls mainstream Republicans who don’t agree with her, ‘traitors’.”
Trump issued a statement congratulating Karamo.
