The longtime headquarters of the Michigan Republican Party, four blocks from Michigan’s Capitol and the seat of political power in this state, sits empty and disused.
A trust made up of former party leaders holds the building, and rent is $1 a year, but utilities and taxes are costly and the party remains in debt.
It seems a single headquarters is an unreasonable luxury for the new Michigan Republican Party.
So the party’s new leader, Kristina Karamo, meets MLive at a Clinton Township strip mall, in a small storefront squeezed between a salon and a Jet’s Pizza. The Macomb County GOP has meeting space and a closet office, where a single desk sits under a flickering fluorescent light.
In the span of four years, Republicans have been fully swept from power in Michigan state government, following eight years of trifecta control. Now, as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Democratic legislative majorities swiftly undo many of the keystone conservative policies of the prior decade, Karamo is tasked with reversing the decline.
Unsurprisingly, returning her party to power is the top priority. But what worries her most about a Michigan under Democratic control?
“I have a deep concern with the encroachment of the World Economic Forum,” she says.
For Karamo, the battle for Michigan’s future isn’t about Democrats and Republicans, even though she’s deeply conservative. In her telling, there are “globalists” — folks in cahoots with the World Economic Forum, ready to subjugate America in a purported quest for world domination — and patriots willing stand up to defend the Constitution and everything Americans hold dear.
She’s convinced Michigan is playing a starring role in the “Great Reset” conspiracy theory, which posits the international nonprofit used the COVID-19 pandemic to establish one world government, and has no problem asserting it as leader of Michigan’s Republican party. This means Democrats like Whitmer and President Joe Biden are certainly globalists, as evidenced by trips to the World Economic Forum’s conferences in Davos, Switzerland.
“The goal is to give up our power to a global governing force — that is traitorous to the republic,” Karamo said. “Who is making the decisions? Is it ‘we the people,’ or some global governance system? Who’s making the decisions? That’s what it boils down to.”
Karamo entered the political spotlight by alleging she saw widespread fraud in Detroit during the 2020 election and remained there by championing the ensuing conspiracy theories. With a promise to root out “systemic election corruption” in Michigan, she lost her bid to become secretary of state last November by more than 615,000 votes, 14 percentage points, to Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson.
She never conceded her loss. And three months later in February, 58% of delegates at the Republican state convention chose her to lead their party to the 2024 election.
The transition has been rough. Karamo contends getting valuable party data, held in yet another trust managed by former Republican leaders, has been a struggle. Could there be globalist influence at work there, too?
Karamo considers for a moment, smiles, then says, “I’m sure there probably is. I think so, but I don’t know for a fact.”
She points to the World Economic Forum-affiliated U.S. Center for Advanced Manufacturing, a technology business accelerator in Troy, as an indication some Republicans are also on board with the new world order. The center received a $3 million grant last year through the Michigan Strategic Fund.
“It’s not just within the Democratic Party,” Karamo says. “I think fundamentally they’re spearheading it harder and faster, but again, the World Economic Forum, they got three million state tax dollars when Republicans were in control. So obviously some Republicans had to buy into it.”
This ties into Karamo’s belief in the “uniparty,” a populist argument that big-wig Democrats and Republicans only feign conflict while colluding to keeps wealthy elites in power.
To the thousands of activist delegates that were recruited, trained, elected and have come to make up Karamo’s Michigan Republican Party, her election was the culmination of a struggle to wrest their party from the grip of globalists, the elite, the uniparty and any other undesirables umbrellaed as RINOs, Republicans In Name Only.
“It’s the defeat of the big money establishment in Michigan,” said Mark Forton, who lead a convention revolt to retake control of the Macomb County Republican Party last August. “The DeVos family and all them, they’ve been running this doggone state for decades and running it into the ground and making deals with the Democrats.”
And for the lifelong Republicans who have either been purged or walked away out of distaste, it feels like the beginning of a dark age.
“I’m a constitutional conservative, I always have been,” said Eric Castiglia. He’s the former Macomb Republican leader Forton supplanted. “I’m a William Buckley, a Reagan conservative and I don’t feel like I have a home right now.”
The state party’s problems go beyond an ideological schism. “The DeVos family and all them” — the ultrawealthy donors who formed the Republican party’s financial bedrock for decades — have already stopped giving. Castiglia has been running an outside operation to elect conservatives in Macomb County. It outraised Forton’s county party five-to-one last year.
The political professionals that devoted years to building up party infrastructure are keeping their distance, too. Karamo has hired senior party staff who last worked for the gubernatorial campaign of a U.S. Taxpayer Party candidate, Donna Brandenburg.
Though Karamo emphasizes there’s a place for conservatives of all stripes in her Republican party, she isn’t exactly pleading for everyone’s return.
“They don’t like me because I’m not like them,” she said. “They don’t want the rough-around-the-edges type of person who likes to get on the ground and be involved deeply in the community. They want the arrogant, closed-off private social club Republican and that’s done. We’re finished with that.”
Those in Karamo’s orbit share a “Field of Dreams”-esque belief. That once they build a new, “uncorrupted” state party that’s more populist, more conservative and caters to its base, new money and voters will come.
This outlook has left a lot of longtime Republican operatives flabbergasted.
“I just don’t see how they raise any money because none of the major donors are going to help them and they don’t have the mechanisms for raising small dollars,” Jason Roe, a political consultant and longtime Republican delegate, said. “I think this is going to get really bad really fast.”
’The party was never hijacked’
Karamo’s ascension to lead the Michigan Republican Party was “entirely predictable,” said Dave Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University.
“It’s simply because the makeup of the delegates is so different than it used to be,” Dulio said. “There’s just this huge disconnect between the precinct delegate class and the rank-and-file class.”
Precinct delegates make up Michigan’s major political parties. The state has nearly 4,700 voting precincts, and in every precinct there’s at least one position for a precinct delegate open every two years. Those delegates convene at county conventions, where a selection are chosen to represent each county at the state convention.
For years the vast majority of Republican delegate seats sat empty, but after the 2020 election, far-right activists undertook an effort to recruit “America First” precinct delegate candidates to fill the spots.
“The party was never hijacked,” Chris Arndt, a precinct delegate from Eaton County, said. “They left the keys in the car and the engine was running and the doors were unlocked. Somebody got in the car and drove off.”
The most prominent group, MI Precinct First, offered literature and training materials to prospective delegates. They reported the overall number of Republican delegates increased by 3,400 from 2020 to 2022, to 8,500 delegates.
Ken Thompson, an Ionia County delegate and one of the false electors who cast votes for then-President Donald Trump after the 2020 election, said it was the “precinct delegate movement” that led to a collapse of the party’s “old guard.” In his rural county, the Greenville Daily News reported, 81 Republican delegates were elected in the 2022 August primary, compared to 27 just two years prior.
Bobby Schostak, who was Michigan Republican Party chair from 2011 to 2015, said “the delegates today are very different than the delegates of ‘12, ‘14 and ‘16.”
Even ten years ago, Schostak had come within 100 votes of being unseated as chair when activist delegates united behind a new tea party favorite, Lapeer County attorney Todd Courser at the 2013 convention. It showed just how stridently the newly-engaged grassroots were willing to rebel against leaders they deemed unsuitable.
“Bobby was a poster child for corruption, it was very easy to see that he was everything that the base hated,” Courser recalled in an interview, alleging Schostak only used the role for self-enrichment.
The party had just raised a record $35 million under Schostak for the 2012 election and despite then-President Barack Obama’s win in Michigan, Republicans had emerged with their legislative majorities intact. Although a well-connected businessman enmeshed in the “donor community,” Schostak found it “pretty shocking” just how close the result had been.
“As chairman, I made certain that I spent a significant amount of time meeting the grassroots in addition to donor meetings,” he said. “Donor meetings are important because you need to raise the money and keep them informed. Grassroots folks were doing the work. And it was important to have them pulling from the same direction.”
Schostak said he labored to earn the trust of tea party groups by underwriting events, lending staff and arranging for speakers. He admitted he had to overcome “skepticism” and that for some factions, “no matter what we did, it wasn’t going to be satisfactory.”
Jeff Timmer, a one-time executive director of the party, recalled watching the 2013 vote with alarm from the convention floor. He said Schostak’s approach was a break from how the party had operated in the past.
“We always knew those less-than-savory elements were there and we used them to our advantage, but we never gave them a seat at the table, we never gave them a microphone,” Timmer said. “If they somehow managed to infiltrate, we looked for ways to excuse them from the limelight. … We wanted their votes, but we didn’t want to be associated with them.”
Schostak decided not to seek a third term in 2015. By then the party’s tent had expanded — some tea party factions had been absorbed while others disbanded. Courser won election to the state House, where he was forced to resign amid scandal after less than a year. He maintains the 2013 chair vote and every one that followed it have been shams, even calling Karamo a “sock puppet” in a 900-word statement provided to MLive.
In the intervening years, that tenuous alliance between grassroots delegates and the party’s establishment wing held and the two became more intertwined, an account multiple former party leaders corroborated, but the disunity persisted.
It took Donald Trump’s rise to breathe new life — and anger — into the Republican grassroots. Dulio said the former President motivated politically indifferent Americans to get engaged, albeit indirectly, motivated in particular by 2020 election fraud conspiracies.
“More and more people just got really excited about it and delegates became active in their local and county party organizations and took them over,” Dulio said.
In Eaton County, Arndt watched as as their presence grew and the party emptied of longtime insiders.
“The more (delegates) the American first-type crowd or MAGA or even tea party bring in, the more the other kind of people tend to say ‘I want nothing to do with this,’ and then they just leave,” Arndt said. “It left a vacuum.”
In the run-up to the 2022 election, JD Glaser, who also ran for Republican party chair in February, told MLive he held two to three delegate trainings a week for months on end, estimating he trained roughly 2,000 delegates.
“You have to get enough people engaged in the system to make a difference and our system depends on numbers. You don’t have numbers, you don’t have anything,” Glaser said. “So the end game is to get enough people educated, get enough people participating in the system, that the people are actually taking control of their politics again.”
In the end, their numbers proved overwhelming. In the final round of voting at the February convention, the remnants of the party’s moderate delegates were resigned to choosing Matt DePerno — who had once himself been Michigan’s most prominent election fraud proponent — as Karamo’s more palatable alternative.
But DePerno was seen as having grown too close to the prior leadership, having compromised too publicly, and even receiving Trump’s coveted endorsement wasn’t enough to overcome that, and lost handily.
At the end of this exodus of moderate, establishment Republicans from within the party, Karamo insists the Michigan Republican Party is poised to expand.
“We are growing our party,” she said. “When we talk about the party being more inclusive, there are more people who are ideologically conservative who are now getting involved like never before.”
Karamo said she’ll urge those that left the party to return — “you’re always welcome, I don’t hold grudges against people” — but she has no intention of becoming less outspoken or compromising her principles.
“It is my job as chair to bring all of these factions together and make one beautiful quilt,” Karamo said. “But if some people refuse to participate, good riddance.”
Audacious plans
Karamo has a radically different vision for running the party than her predecessors. She would rather have “more decentralized, smaller spaces” than pay upwards of $100,000 a year to maintain the old headquarters.
“I want to make sure that I’m close to the ground level to hear the concerns of everyday Republicans, to make sure we are responsive to that,” Karamo said. “I can touch the entire state with that amount of funds. "
That said, Karamo said the party is acquiring an office in the state’s capital.
“It would be idiotic to not have an office in Lansing. That would be crazy. Of course we’re gonna have an office in Lansing,” she said. “But the reality is, for that amount of funds, we can have office space all across the state.”
At the same time, Karamo isn’t at all concerned about funding the party.
“I talked to a lot of wealthy, very wealthy people, multimillionaires, who won’t give a dime to the party. They say, ‘I won’t give those people a penny, they never follow through with what they say they’re gonna do, they act like a bunch of cowards,’” Karamo said. “So with leadership who actually is conservative, people will give money.”
Roe was the party’s executive director for only a few months, forced out in 2021 after saying Trump “blew it” in the 2020 election. He said Karamo’s assumption “just demonstrates a complete lack of understanding for what is involved in building a statewide organization and keeping it moving.”
Still, it’s not clear Karamo and her staff or followers have been following the fundraising plan she and her co-chair Melinda Pego ran on, either. Karamo declined to discuss the party’s finances with MLive.
Their financial plan promised in the first two weeks “a marketing blitz will begin making contact with the 500,000 Republican‐leaning business owners in Michigan informing them that MIGOP IS UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT!”
For now, Karamo’s most significant press hasn’t been a public fundraising pitch. Her staff instead convened news reporters (and one rabbi) Wednesday to verbally spar over a party social media post. The tweet compared Democratic efforts to institute gun violence prevention legislation to gun seizures that preceded the Nazi genocide of Jews during the Holocaust.
“We are not the Republican Party who apologizes and runs away from our positions,” Karamo said at the press conference. “It’s a reason the Republican Party has gotten kicked in the teeth the last three cycles. Because it’s been a party that’s always apologizing. We’re done.”
It’s exactly the framing prior chairs like Rusty Hills, a moderate conservative who has been vocally anti-Trump, are strongly advising against.
“Look, if we keep going on the track we’ve been on I can pretty confidently predict that we’re not going to do well because we’ve had three losing elections in a row,” Hills said. “You don’t have to have a PhD to figure this out. We have got to get back to the old conservative blocking and tackling and providing solutions to problems.”
Forton, who hosted Karamo for the press conference in his county office, said the only obstacles Karamo faces now are the vestiges of the former party like Hills.
“They’re still maintaining control of everything in the hopes that she collapses, that the people of Michigan will not rally around her and build this party like it ought to be,” he said.
Macomb County GOP Chair Mark Forton poses at the Macomb County GOP Headquarters, 39099 Garfield Road in Clinton Township on Friday, March 17 2023.Jacob Hamilton | MLive.com
Karamo told MLive it’s clear the longtime Republican patrons who have cut them off are globalists who resist an “America first” message.
Schostak is adamant she received everything she’s asked for from the party trusts. He said the party will need to raise roughly $15 to $20 million to be effective in the 2024 election.
“She’s got all the digital files,” he said. “She might be waiting for some sort of password for fundraising reports but she’s got all the she’s got all the donor data. … now it’s up to (former leaders) to go maintain the (headquarters) and do what we need to do with it.”
Meanwhile Democrats throughout the state, multiple sources relayed, have been delighted by the events of the past month.
Several former Republican leaders indicated to MLive conversations are ongoing about establishing outside groups to aid Republican candidates if the party fails to fundraise. At least one said the discussion included with senior officials who’ve still hold senior roles in the party.
By the end of April, Karamo and Pego wrote in their plan, the leadership’s aims to have donations from 25,000 small business owners, raising as much as $1.25 million.
They suggest that by 2024, as many as 150,000 business owners will be donating $200 a year to the party, an unprecedented level of political engagement. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the state’s largest business group, has approximately 5,000 members.
Castiglia is skeptical that the new party leadership has a way to implement what they’ve promised.
“Your team needs to deliver and I’m not seeing that,” he said. “Could they raise the money? possibly. Do they have a plan? I don’t think so.”
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