State Parties Are Falling Apart-- And In Republican World They're Being Take Over By Fringe MAGAts

Trump cultists DePerno & Karamo... He's probably going to prison for election fraud; she's the head of the disintegrating Michigan GOP

Democrats certainly know what happens when state parties fall to pieces. Neither Ohio nor Florida has an effective statewide party, just little ghettos in blue areas. Democrats can’t field competitive statewide candidates in either state. Sherrod Brown learned long ago that he has to have his own machine to win in Ohio. Debbie Wasserman Schultz gutted the Florida Party and concentrated some kind of version of it in Broward, Dale and Palm Beach with satellite offices in Orange, Leon, Duval, Alachua, Osceola and Hillsborough. And now, as we saw yesterday, Trump’s MAGAfied GOP is experiencing its own state parties disintegrating. A team of Politico reporters focused on Michigan and also took a look at Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Massachusetts… states where the GOP was far more competitive that they are today.

With the MAGAts in full control of a party with no statewide elected officials to hold them together, Michigan’s GOP is just plain broken and coasting downhill. And not just broken, also broke. As in without funds. They abandoned their party headquarters. At the same time the Colorado GOP can’t afford its rent and, until recently the Minnesota GOP was down to $53.81 in the bank. Politico noted that “around the nation, state Republican party apparatuses— once bastions of competency that helped produce statehouse takeovers— have become shells of their former machines amid infighting and a lack of organization. Current and former officials at the heart of the matter blame twin forces for it: The rise of insurgent pro-Donald Trump activists capturing party leadership posts, combined with the ever-rising influence of super PACs. ‘It shouldn’t surprise anybody that real people with real money— the big donors who have historically funded the party apparatus— don’t want to invest in these clowns who have taken over and subsumed the Republican Party,’ said Jeff Timmer, the former executive director of the once-vaunted Michigan GOP and a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.” A current party operative described the party as “defunct.”

The Politico team wrote that “The demise of the GOP state parties could have a profound impact on the 2024 election. Operatives fear that hollowed out outfits in key battlegrounds could leave the party vulnerable, especially as Democrats are focusing more on state legislative races. Traditionally, state parties perform the basic blocking and tackling of politics, from get out the vote programs to building data in municipal elections.”

No doubt… but Democrats have similar dysfunction to contend with. Since Eric Bauman was fired as chair of the California Democratic Party, it has floundered without effective leadership. Let me just point out that the party has allowed the incompetent DCCC— which Bauman had banished— to take over congressional recruiting, which always means one thing: corrupt conservatives get the party nominations. For all the cheering among Democrats that they prevented a red wave in 2022, in California they didn’t. One blue district after another fell to the GOP, almost always because of unelectable DCCC candidates like Rudy Salas, Adam Gray and Christy Smith. Salas and Gray will run again and lose again— in districts with, respectively, D+10 and D+7 partisan leans. In CA-27, Mike Garcia’s district, Republican-lite fake Dem Christy Smith ran against him for the third time— and lost for the third time. In a Los Angeles County district that Democrats should win relatively easily, Garcia, a Trump-loyal conservative, took 104,624 votes (53.2%) to her 91,892 (46.8%). At least she isn’t running again.

The Politico article doesn’t cover California, though the state GOP is even worse here than the state Democratic Party. One national GOP operative told them that state parties don’t matter anyway. “In this modern Super PAC era, the state parties just don’t really matter. There’s a lot of hand-wringing and bullshit about the parties being weak… At the end of the day, the Michigan GOP being a train wreck is not going to have any real impact on whether or not we win Michigan.”

It may not matter in Senate races but Democrats are seeing GOP weaknesses in some states as opportunities in down-ballot races, especially in state legislatures. “‘It means Republicans have enormous missed opportunities for early organizing and investing in a strong ground game,’ said Jessica Post, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, whose efforts to defend and make inroads in statehouses saw its best in a presidential midterm since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s era, creating three Democratic trifectas and losing no Democratic majorities.”

Perhaps no state provides as great a microcosm of the current political moment as Michigan. There, the state party has been caught in infighting between Kristina Karamo, the party’s new chair and a failed 2022 secretary of state candidate, and Matt DePerno, the GOP’s 2022 attorney general candidate whom Karamo defeated for party chair.

There have been multiple physical altercations at party meetings in the state as tension boils over about the direction of the party. A proxy fight between the two sides over control of a county party has spilled out into court. The Michigan GOP appears to be flat broke as well, with a bit under $147,000 in its federal campaign coffers as of the end of June.

“Everything has fallen off a cliff,” said Jason Watts, a one-time local party leader who was ousted from his post after criticizing Trump and party Covid protocol in 2021. He added that the state party has been reduced to “basically” a “UPS Store P.O. box and an email blast account.”

While Michigan may be the most vivid example of a GOP state party in decline, GOP officials say it’s far from alone.

In Pennsylvania, the state party sold its headquarters last year, sparking concern among some Republicans in the state about its finances. The Democratic state party’s main PAC also outraised its equivalent nearly two-to-one in 2022. One plugged-in Pennsylvania Republican said that the hard-right activists who have won state committee seats in recent years aren’t able to tap wealthy friends for cash in the same way the party’s more establishment-minded foot soldiers in the past could.

“The state committee members are more and more pro-Trump,” the person said. “But they don’t have the money.”

Earlier this spring in Colorado, the state GOP didn’t pay a single employee— if it had any at all— for the first time in 20 years, according to the Colorado Sun. It had just $158,000 banked in its federal account as of last month.

…In deep-blue Massachusetts, where moderate Republican governors have reigned for the better part of the last 30 years, a hard-right push by a pro-Trump state committee chair destroyed the state GOP’s ability to recruit mainstream candidates and sent donors fleeing, bankrupting the party and costing Republicans their last two statewide offices. The party has now racked up more than $400,000 in debts to vendors and has less than $70,000 between its state and federal campaign accounts to pay it with.

…[W]orking around a state party has its limitations, especially if other political entities are trying to do the same. That’s been the case in Arizona, where the state party has been infiltrated by precinct committee leaders affiliated with the [neo-fascist] youth organization Turning Point USA. The group is at odds with the state’s moderate-minded, establishment GOP officials and has enthusiastically backed unsuccessful statewide candidates like Kari Lake for governor and Abe Hamadeh for attorney general.

Those losses didn’t leave it chastened. Instead, the organization has announced plans to expand its efforts in both Wisconsin and Georgia ahead of 2024. In a pitch deck for the group’s new Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin ballot chasing initiative, obtained by Politico, Turning Point estimates spending $108 million in those three states as part of its “ballot chasing army field operation.”

Turning Point says it has recruited 3,000 state party precinct leaders around the nation since 2020, a key component of its efforts to influence state parties away from traditional GOP leadership.

“It has become quite difficult to rely on state parties,” said one national Republican operative, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “Because people who are involved for the right reasons don’t feel appreciated and are pushed out, and now you’re stuck dealing with fringe characters who don’t know how to win elections, can’t be trusted to manage resources, and play with people’s worst instincts.”