Election conspiracist to lead Michigan GOP through 2024

Election conspiracist Kristina Karamo, who was overwhelmingly defeated in her bid to become Michigan's secretary of state, was chosen Saturday to lead the state's Republican Party for the next two years.

Karamo defeated a 10-candidate field dominated by far-right candidates to win the Michigan GOP chair position after a state convention that lasted nearly 11 hours. A former community college professor, she lost her secretary of state race in the 2022 midterms by 14 percentage points after mounting a campaign filled with election conspiracies.

Karamo inherits a state party torn by infighting and millions in debt. She will be tasked with helping win back control of the Legislature and flipping one of the nation's most competitive Senate seats, while attempting to help a presidential candidate win the battleground state.

Addressing delegates before the vote, Karamo said that “our party is dying” and it needs to be rebuilt into “a political machine that strikes fear in the heart of Democrats.”

Karamo rose to prominence following the 2020 presidential election when she began appearing on conservative talk shows saying that as a poll challenger in Detroit, she saw “ballots being dropped off in the middle of the night, thousands of them.”

The decision to elect Karamo, who will lead through the 2024 elections, solidifies the hold that far-right activists have on the state party after Michigan Republicans suffered sweeping electoral losses last year.

It took three rounds of voting at the convention in Lansing for locally elected delegates to pick Karamo over former attorney general candidate Matthew DePerno, who had been endorsed by Trump in the race.

With a field dominated by grassroots activist candidates running on far-right messaging, many longtime Michigan Republicans had given up on a state party before Saturday's vote even took place.

“We lost the entire statehouse for the first time in 40 years, in large part, because of the top of the ticket. All deniers. It turned off a lot of voters,” former longtime Republican U.S. Rep. Fred Upton said recently. “As I look at the state convention, it looks like it could well be more of the same.”