A lengthy review published Monday by the Washington Post concludes the Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan state Republican Parties are all but defunct due to an array of interconnected reasons such as leaders listening to Steve Bannon’s advice on how to manage things, legal bills from the aftermath of the 2020 election, purges of “RINOs” for thoughtcrimes such as – you guessed it – not believing the 2020 election was stolen, and a lack of support from Chair Ronna Not-Romney.
Which is to say it’s all Trump’s fault one way or another. Interestingly it’s his problem too as his 2024 campaign is going to have to do the fundraising and field work that the state parties would have handled in past election cycles. This might be less of an issue in Georgia since “RINO” Governor Brian Kemp’s political operation has effectively taken over for the MAGA-brained state GOP and Kemp has publicly said he’d rather see Trump than Biden win in 2025. Who knows how it’ll play out in practice when they actually have to work together given all the bad blood since 2020 though.
There are no such backstops for the Arizona and Michigan GOPs gutted by infighting and piss-poor money management. Arizona GOP Chair Jeff DeWit took a lot of shit from fanboys after he was forced to back out of a plan to circumvent the state government-run presidential primary election and have the party run its own one-day, in-person vote with paper ballots that would have been counted by hand because they simply didn’t have the money to do it. When DeWit asked Ronna for some cash to help prop up his party back in July, RNC officials referred him to what the Post describes as “a program intended to incentivize state parties to build out their own finance, data and political operations,” like a wealthy aunt giving a used copy of a Suze Orman book to the nephew who needs $1,400 for a new transmission on his 2009 Mustang so he can get to work at Applebee’s.
QAnon freak Michigan GOP Chair Kristina Karamo at least has a plan to raise the scratch needed to fund the party’s operations and cover its legal bills ahead of an “imminent” default on a line of credit while they’re more than $640,000 in the hole: selling the party’s headquarters building in Lansing. In fact it would’ve been done by now if not for a recently-departed budget committee member’s nagging about how the party doesn’t actually own the building. Moving to a smaller space and taking care of the money problems would give Karamo more time and bandwidth to focus on ideological purges. Like the one implied by a leaked list rating attendees of a recent party conference by a scale that ranged from “patriot who might volunteer” to “Me First or RINO or Concerning Affiliations.” Lots of “RINOs” who have long funded and organized for the party weren’t happy about their names being on that list, which means Karamo must be “right over the target.”