Inside the parlous state of state Republican parties

“The whole thing is fucked.” That’s how one former blue-state GOP official describes the current turmoil facing state Republican parties. Numerous reports have laid bare the financial struggles, leadership turnover and abject chaos that have ensnared the GOP’s state parties. State parties in Arizona and Pennsylvania, unable to make rent, have sold off their headquarters. There are active battles for control of the party in Michigan and Colorado. Arizona also recently pushed out its chairman and in Georgia the party chair stepped down. Meanwhile, multiple former state-party officials are under indictment in cases related to January 6.

In an attempt to understand what is driving the tumult, The Spectator spoke to half a dozen individuals whose political careers have revolved around their work with state parties. They include four former high-ranking state party officials, a state-level GOP consultant and a current state elected official. All concur that things have gone terribly, horribly wrong. Most blame a long-running power struggle between grassroots activists and old-school party bosses in which the activists finally won out.

“It was a war of attrition,” a former senior Michigan GOP official said. “They first chipped away at local and county parties and eventually outlasted everyone else. The old guard got tired of the constant petty battles picked by the crazies and bowed out.” Many observers are quick to blame former president Donald Trump, describing Trump-loving cultists forcing their way into power and carrying out Bolshevik-style purges of party officials who didn’t swear fealty to MAGA. This is a convenient explanation for Trump skeptics, but the truth is more complicated. Insiders say the upheaval is less about “MAGA” and more about an activist class that has “insatiable bloodlust for anything that sniffs of the establishment.” Trump’s victory might have emboldened some of them, but their complaints predate the former president and are probably more personal than political.

“It’s not really about Trump. These people were all crazy ten years ago,” the former blue-state official said.

A western GOP consultant and former high-ranking state party official pointed out, “These same people who are now running the party were the NeverTrumpers of 2016, were the Ron Paul supporters back in the day.

“They’re just now flying their flag under the Trump banner. And I don’t think you can fault the president for that,” they continued.

In Arizona, for example, a recent state party casualty was a longtime Trump ally. Former chairman Jeff DeWit was the state treasurer and served in high-level roles on both Trump campaigns as well as in the president’s administration.

“Jeff DeWit was like the day-to-day money guy,” the western consultant explained. “You quickly learned in the Trump world that you didn’t have money for anything unless DeWit signed off.”

Despite his proximity and loyalty to Trump, DeWit would only last a year in his role as state party chairman, which he took over after the chaotic reign of Kelli Ward to bring stability and unity back to the Arizona GOP.

But in a leaked audio recording from March 2023, DeWit is heard warning Senate candidate Kari Lake, who had previously lost a run for governor against Katie Hobbs, that “powerful people” were working against her and offered that it might be financially beneficial for her to forgo the 2024 Senate race. Lake claims DeWit attempted to bribe her. DeWit claims the recording was “selectively edited” and that he was looking out for Lake’s best interests as high-level party officials sought to nominate a more electable candidate.

“The conversation that is now being scrutinized was an open, unguarded exchange between friends in the living room of her house,” DeWit said. “I genuinely believed I was offering a helpful perspective to someone I considered a friend.”

DeWit nonetheless stepped down from leadership in January. This reportedly infuriated Trump allies, who viewed DeWit as a trusted and dedicated friend to Trump (Lake was still working as a news anchor by the time DeWit had joined his second Trump campaign). The former president himself was surprised, too. “She records everything? That’s good to know,” Trump reportedly said when he heard about the incident.

Similar issues of alleged self-promotion over party loyalty have taken place in other states. In Colorado, former state representative Dave Williams, who was elevated to party chair by the grassroots “ankle-biters,” as one consultant describes them, is facing calls to resign over claims of self-dealing. Williams was allegedly a member of the “Never Trump Cruz Crew” during the 2016 primary before undergoing a political conversion and becoming a vocal Trump supporter.

“As the 2020 campaign progressed it became very clear that Dave Williams was not interested in working to help President Trump,” the western consultant explained. “He was interested in using President Trump to do things that were helpful to himself.”

Williams was purportedly keen on only doing “public-facing” gigs and was pushed out of his volunteer position with the Trump campaign for taking political advantage of his affiliation with the president. He went on to lose his congressional primary in 2022 but managed to get elected Colorado GOP chair not long afterward thanks to strong support among party activists.

One of the first things Williams did was to institute massive filing fees for presidential primary candidates to get on the ballot in Colorado. Williams claimed the new rules, which required candidates to pay up to $40,000 to appear on the ballot, were meant to “professionalize” the organization. Some suspect that Williams more likely had to make up for the party’s fundraising shortages and cover the expenses of his own 2024 campaign for the House nomination in Colorado’s 5th district. The Colorado GOP spent about $20,000 on political mailings for Williams’s unsuccessful primary bid against another Republican. The party treasurer claimed the organization isn’t “out any money,” but it’s generally a no-no to spend valuable resources on intra-party challenges.

“He is a total grifter who used the Trump campaign and the state party for his own benefit,” the consultant declared. “I wouldn’t imagine that if you ask any of these presidential candidates in their wildest dreams how their filing fees for the Colorado GOP were going to be used, it would be in a Republican congressional primary for Williams to send mail for himself.”

State Republican officials are now moving to fire Williams over his personal use of party funds, his poor endorsement record in the Colorado GOP primaries and a bombastic email he sent about Pride Month on the party’s behalf.

Party insiders say these stories are emblematic of the larger problems wrought by the takeover of state parties by activists. While it’s not an issue to have strong principles, the grassroots often struggles with coupling their devotion to ideological movements with the broader functions of state parties: things like party unification, message discipline, fundraising and effective ground games.

“I think that in elections there’s four things that I always say matter: it’s money, manpower, messaging and messenger, which is the candidate. The party typically would facilitate all or most of those things,” a Pennsylvania state elected official said.

Without much experience in leadership, though, the grassroots members have found themselves ill-equipped to actually run parties.

“There is no other organization where someone walks into their first meeting and says, ‘I should be the guy in charge.’ But it happens all the time in GOP committee meetings,” the former blue-state party official offered.

“It’s the classic tale of catching the tiger by the tail. Now what the fuck do we do with the tiger?” the western GOP consultant said. “They were always complaining about how they could do things better and could win more elections. Now all of a sudden you look across the country and they’re in charge of more parties than the establishment. At some point, the results are going to speak for themselves.”

Multiple officials told The Spectator that attempts to train up the grassroots activists or even give them advice were often met with scorn and derision.

“They don’t want to listen to anything. It’s just a big giant purity test of whatever they believe at the moment,” a former Michigan GOP official said. “I think that’s undermined a lot of places, but it’s especially evident in Michigan.”

“In short, the collapse happened because state parties are now beholden to grassroots activists and grassroots activists are retarded,” a former senior Michigan official said bluntly.

Last year, Kristina Karamo was chosen to serve as Michigan’s GOP chair despite having little political experience, because she sold her leadership to pro-Trump party activists. But she was quickly proven to be “incompetent,” the former senior Michigan GOP official said. “She racked up several hundred thousand in debt” and her allies turned on her when they realized she sucked at her job. Karamo, however, refused to vacate her seat until a circuit court affirmed the party’s vote to remove her. She is still appealing the decision.

The former Michigan officials noted that Karamo was hardly an anomaly, describing constant fights with volunteers who were convinced they knew best how to win elections. A bevy of Trump supporters in 2016, for example, refused an ask to knock doors for their candidate.

“They only wanted to do sign-waving,” one official said. “This was for a candidate with nearly 100 percent name ID!”

Former Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock bucked advice on how to gain more credibility with the party’s establishment operatives and donors as she was running for the top spot in the party in early 2021.

“I recommended she fill a couple busloads of her supporters and go knock doors in the Georgia Senate runoff,” the official recalled. “I later found out she did not follow up with the National Republican Senatorial Committee because Trump was going to have a rally in DC the next day — January 6. If half of the people at the January 6 rally had knocked doors in Georgia, we would probably have control of the US Senate.”

That’s not to say that the grassroots activists had no legitimate complaints about party management. As a Pennsylvania-based consultant noted, the Pennsylvania GOP “didn’t think Trump had a chance” and “wasn’t engaged” in the 2016 election, which greatly diminished the party’s power in the commonwealth.

“Our endorsement has been irrelevant in statewide politics. You didn’t really have anybody step up and build our bench, either for candidates or donors. There is a huge political realignment happening in Pennsylvania and these guys are playing with a playbook that’s outdated,” the consultant asserted.

“They haven’t been able to raise the money that they need to perform in really any capacity,” the Pennsylvania elected official concurred.

The western GOP consultant agreed that Republican Party bosses have to be in touch with the party’s base and deliver some policy wins in order to keep activists and donors engaged in the political process.

“That’s where I don’t think you can say the grassroots folks are wrong,” they said. “At some point, those people who invest in that message are going to expect a return on that investment.”

However, as these party insiders are also quick to mention, the grassroots activists who spend their weekends at county meetings or conventions are not representative of the GOP base.

“Activists are not our base. They are a super-motivated subgroup,” one of the former Michigan officials said. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the activists of someone’s party can get a little distant from the rest of the electorate. In states with nominating conventions, the problem gets even worse. Convention participants make the typical primary voter look like a little bitch.”

In order to avoid alienating base GOP voters, officials say, state parties need to get more “normal” people involved. Unfortunately, they argue, the proliferation of hardcore activists who refuse to compromise has made it exceedingly difficult to recruit people who have better things to do with their time.

“Even if you can convince them to spend Saturday at a local party function, they come in and see an hour of idiocy from conspiracy theorists and wingnuts who want to talk about unpasteurized milk and adding ‘born and unborn’ to the Pledge of Allegiance. They drive away normal people who turn away in disgust,” the former senior Michigan official said.

The former blue state official agreed. “All of the normal community-minded people frittered away because crazy infiltrated. Why does somebody want to give up an hour of their Wednesday night to sit in a room full of lunatics? It’s a hard sell to say, ‘I know you love going to your kids’ Little League games, but wouldn’t it be fun to go to Convention and get screamed at for three hours?’”

“Do I want to go to a GOP party meeting and bang my head against a wall on Saturday morning? Or do I want to go hunt ducks? Hard choice,” the western GOP consultant echoed.

At this point, many longtime party officials aren’t sure if the problems plaguing state parties can or even should be fixed. Instead, many are using outside entities to elect candidates rather than relying on fractured and cash-poor state parties. “Everybody would love for it to get better,” the western GOP consultant admitted, but added that the situation is not “dire straits” enough for anyone to take on the hard task of clearing out the dead weight.

“Do you think these people are going to go away quietly? You’re just going to get slandered and lied about and everything under the sun,” they said. “Maybe it costs 10 or 15 percent more to work with a super PAC or a consulting firm, but at least there’s competent and normal people willing to do it who won’t try to destroy your life.”

The Pennsylvania consultant agreed that “outside groups have become the main campaign arms because the party wasn’t doing its job and nobody cares enough to challenge it.”

Without a strong statewide elected leader willing to take responsibility for state parties, like in Florida, most agree it’s too much to ask anyone to take on that kind of risk. But even in Georgia, Governor Brian Kemp has chosen to operate his own shadow party rather than trying to take on the official state party, a tacit acknowledgment that things might be too far gone.

“I don’t think this is a solvable problem,” the former blue-state official declared. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2024 World edition.