By Jack Van Hecke
In the five years ending in 2023, 58 percent of all Michigan Republican Party funding came from two billionaire families: the DeVoses and the Weisers. However, as of 2023, neither family has provided funding for the Michigan GOP, which was captured by the MAGA wing of the Republican Party following the January 6 insurrection.
Both the Devoses and Weiser cited the Michigan takeover of the GOP by Kristina Karamo, a Qanon devotee, as the reason they’ve turned off the party’s financial spigot. Although Karamo, a former community college instructor and host of her own Christian podcast, was ousted in February, the state party has yet to recover. While more-moderate Republicans are hopeful that direct funding by donors to their campaigns will help them break the Democrat’s trifecta, continuing turmoil in the GOP could well hurt those efforts. (The Democrats won the Michigan State Senate and House, as well as the Governor’s seat, in 2022.)
“I’ll put it this way: everything that has happened is incredibly embarrassing,” said Emerson Silvernail, the legislative director for Republican Representative Sarah Lightner of Michigan’s 45th District, which includes townships like Springport and Tompkins. The state’s GOP is “not associated with the most positive of things at the current moment,” Silvernail added. “Nobody wants to be associated with it; no sane person I would say.” That said, Lightner is up for reelection in November, and is not worried about her seat flipping. District 45 has voted Republican in every election since 1965. Lightner won in 2022 with 68 percent of votes.
Hugely influential in the state GOP, the DeVos family funneled more than $20.6 million into the party between 1989 and 2016. Betsy DeVos served as education secretary in the Trump administration, but resigned after January 6, calling Trump’s election denial “unconscionable.” Her husband Dick Devos is the scion of Amway, a health, beauty and home-care products company, who ran for governor against Jennifer Granholm in 2006 and lost.
Ron Weiser is a businessman who made his fortune in real estate and served as ambassador to Slovakia under President George W. Bush. In July of 2023, Weiser halted his funding to the GOP after offering more than $4.5 million during the most recent midterm cycle. He does not support Trump loyalists and calls the election fallacies they push “ludicrous.”
Initially, many Michigan Republicans believed Karamo would bring a much-needed grassroots energy to Michigan’s GOP — and wrest it from the control of big donors. However, after the 2020 election, Karamo spoke at Qanon conferences. Then, when she ran for Michigan Secretary of State in 2022 with a campaign focused heavily on false claims about the 2020 election, she lost by a whopping 14 points to Democrat Jocelyn Benson.
“When it all started, I was very much for the new leadership” of Kristina Karamo, said Mark Forton, the former Republican chair of Macomb County. However, Forton said he has since come to believe that Karamo was “a fraud.” Forton himself was ousted as county chair in 2022. “The people around her were absolutely terrible and their goal was to destroy the party,” he added.
Karamo lasted less than 12 months before she, too, was ousted and replaced by Pete Hoekstra, who served as ambassador to the Netherlands during the Trump administration.
Healing the divisions of the Michigan GOP will be a challenge, however. Since 2020, the party can roughly be divided into three subsets: the ultra-MAGA wing, which claims that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump; a more-moderate MAGA wing that supports Trump, but not the January 6 insurrection; and the never-Trumpers.
About a month before Karamo’s ouster, the Michigan GOP released a 140-page report entitled The Failed Leadership of the Karamo Administration, charging it with financial mismanagement. “The Karamo administration has driven the Party into an unsustainable financial operating position,” stated the report, noting that the party’s debt had climbed to $619,000 by last December. “The Party cannot continue to operate any longer at this rate. Ms. Karamo’s financial plan has been a complete failure. And she has no new plan to bring the Party back,” according to the report.
One-sixth of the party’s debt was attributed to the purchase of computers, which have gone missing. The Hoekstra administration is searching for them, and is unsure if they were ever actually purchased. No official investigation has begun to find them yet; no charges have been brought against Karamo.
“A lot of money gets wasted like you wouldn’t believe,” said Forton.
Nor could Karamo “cultivate and maintain donors.” Between March and October of 2023, the Karamo administration was only able to raise $185,744, “an historically low amount,” according to the GOP report. During the same period, two years earlier, the party raised nearly 10-times as much.
“Karamo refused to meet with donors,” said Forton. “There were people who approached her with big money, and they wanted to help, but she would not meet with them.”
Turmoil in the GOP has already had a huge impact on election-year fundraising. The biggest race in Michigan this election year is for the seat of retiring U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat. Although Mike Rogers, a Republican who chastised Trump for his election denial, won the state primary; as of March, Rogers has raised only $2.8 million, less than one-fifth of the $15.8 million raised by his Democratic challenger Elissa Slotkin. Rogers was recently endorsed by Trump.
As of May, Slotkin is leading Rogers in the polls by three points. The same poll shows Trump leading Biden in Michigan by 4 points. In the past four presidential elections, whoever won Michigan was ushered into the Oval Office.
Voters are aware of the party’s disarray and wary of the state’s GOP.
Tammy Juroff, a factory worker from Benton Harbor and a registered Republican, said she thinks “we’re all in trouble,” with the current state of the GOP, noting that the Karamo fiasco was “absolutely crazy.” She is unsure how she’ll vote come November, but noted that at the local level, elected officials — most of whom are Democrats — are doing a good job. For the presidency, she will most likely vote for Trump.
Tess Ulrey, a city commissioner for St. Joseph who calls herself a “staunch Democrat,” comes from a long line of conservative voters. Her father, she said, had voted red his whole life, but now feels “alienated” by the party, and “cannot support what is happening with the GOP.” She said he will vote for Biden and Democrats down ballot.
St. Joseph is historically a Republican town that has been turning “more and more blue” because of the current state of the GOP, said Ulrey.
Voters “don’t trust Republicans to govern,” said Joey Andrews, state representative for District 38, which includes St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. This district was Republican from 1993 to 2020, and while his is still considered a swing district, Andrews said: There would have to be an “extreme swing” for the Democrats to lose districts like his. He remains “optimistic” about the likelihood that the Democrats will retain their majority in the Michigan House of Representatives come November. In 2021, Michigan gave responsibility for redistricting to a commission of randomly selected citizens, creating more competitive voting districts that helped the Democratic Party win its trifecta.
Pete Hoekstra’s hands are full as he works to right the party’s listing ship. “The Michigan GOP is working a little better with a new leadership that’s only been in place for a couple of months. They’re raising money,” and paying back some of its debt, said Forton.
Hoekstra looks to bring major donors back to the Michigan GOP. He has been in discussion with Ron Weiser, and says he has a “good relationship” with the DeVos family.
But with just six months left until the election, Forton, for one, isn’t optimistic about the state GOP’s prospects.
“We’re in a bad mess and we have to hope and pray and work our butts off,” he said.