By any fair measure, Michigan is among the nation’s biggest battleground states, and next year, it’ll host a series of competitive contests, including an open U.S. Senate race. It stands to reason that Republicans at the national level are counting on the state GOP having its act together ahead of the 2024 cycle.
That clearly hasn’t happened.
In April, police were called after a physical altercation at a state party meeting, and as HuffPost noted, there was a similar incident at another Michigan GOP gathering over the weekend:
A Republican meeting in Michigan turned into fight night on Saturday when two local GOP figures got into a physical brawl over access to the event. James Chapman, a Republican from Wayne County, told The Detroit News he was outside the meeting at the Doherty Hotel in Clare. He was hoping to get inside and jiggled the door handle. Clare County Republican Party Chair Mark DeYoung came to the door to see what was going on.
“He kicked me in my balls as soon as I opened the door,” DeYoung told the local newspaper during an interview conducted from the emergency room.
Not surprisingly, the details are a bit murky — one man said he was threatened, the other said he suffered a broken rib after having been slammed into a chair — and I suspect local law enforcement will try to sort things out.
But stepping back, incidents like these might be easier to overlook if they weren’t emblematic of a larger problem the Michigan Republican Party is struggling to resolve.
The state GOP is currently led by Kristina Karamo, a notorious election denier who fell far short in her Michigan secretary of state campaign last year. She’s perhaps best known for sharing concerns about “demonic possession,” which she said can spread from person to person through intimate relationships.
Karamo also spread Jan. 6 conspiracy theories, rejected vaccines, derided transgender women, condemned evolutionary biology, and suggested that cohabitation before marriage opens the door to normalizing pedophilia.
At Donald Trump’s urging, Michigan Republicans nevertheless chose Karamo to lead the state party. That hasn’t turned out especially well. The Washington Post recently reported that Karamo has struggled to raise money; party insiders deemed insufficiently right-wing are being pushed out; and much of the party apparatus appears to be at war with itself. The state GOP also recently invoked the Nazi Holocaust while condemning efforts to prevent gun violence. It’s against this backdrop that there have been literal fights at two recent Michigan Republican Party gatherings. Michigan Democrats have reason to be pleased.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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