LANSING, Mich. — The Republicans who lost their races for Michigan’s top three statewide offices after promoting falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election are not planning to go quietly.
Two of the candidates who denied President Joe Biden’s victory in the state have announced plans to run for the position that leads the state GOP, while the third has said she is considering a challenge for the top post.
That is raising concerns within the party after it suffered a drubbing in Michigan, a perennial political battleground that is poised to play a pivotal role in the 2024 presidential race. Their attempts to gain control of the party apparatus also show how far-right conservatives are trying to maintain their grip on the party’s grassroots at a time the GOP nationally is wrestling with its direction after lackluster midterm results.
Kristina Karamo, a community college professor who lost her race for secretary of state after mounting a campaign filled with election conspiracies, used the same kind of charged language she had throughout her campaign in announcing her intention to run for Michigan party chair.
In a statement posted this week to social media, she said the state Republican Party had begun operating as “mini-gangs instead of soldiers fighting for freedom,” and that the state was on “the precipice of tyranny, which voting alone will not be able to overcome.”
Instead of being afraid of attacks, she wrote, “we must strike fear in the heart of the enemy at the gate.”
The race for Michigan GOP chair, which will be decided at a February party convention, comes after Democrats took control of all levels of power for the first time since the 1980s. Democrats won control of both houses of the Legislature and defeated Republicans by significant margins for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.
Many state and national Republicans have expressed concern that similar defeats could become commonplace without a course correction within the state Republican Party.
“It’s hard to think of a state where Republicans lost more than in Michigan,” said Stu Sandler, a national Republican consultant. The state party wasn’t the traditional partner it had been in the past, he said, in part due to a chair he described as not very active.
“The chair could be very important, particularly, because they have no statewide elected official or prominent Republican as a voice, and that’s…
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