This weekend presents an important test for former President Trump’s influence on Republicans on the battlefield state of Michiganwhere GOP activists will gather to support candidates for secretary of state, attorney general and other state officials.
Trump has been launched in the middle of the Michigan GOP nomination process. She supports two candidates who have accepted her false claims that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election: Kristina Karamo, who is running for secretary of state, and Matthew DePerno, who is running for attorney general.
The former president went to Michigan in early April to run for the pair of candidates and will have a video message that will support them in a party on the eve of the convention vote. Trump also held a town hall phone call Wednesday night for DePerno.
“This election is not just about 2022,” Trump said during the call, according to The Detroit News. “It’s about making sure the state of Michigan can’t be robbed of Republicans in 2024 or ever again.”
It will not be the voters who will weigh in on whether these candidates are advancing in the general election. In Michigan, state party activists nominate candidates for secretary of state, attorney general, state supreme court, state board of education, and university boards.
That means about 2,500 Republicans will decide whether Trump’s chosen candidates will represent his party in the fall. The former president remains incredibly influential with grassroots members of the state GOP, and the convention will test his influence among some of the party’s most active members.
This is especially true in the Attorney General’s career, where DePerno faces a tough challenge against former Michigan House Speaker Tom Leonard, who narrowly lost the Attorney General’s career in 2018. state Ryan Berman is also running for attorney general.
“It’s a huge milestone for the Michigan GOP, but it’s certainly a milestone for Trump because he made it a test of his influence,” said John Sellek, a Republican public relations consultant and owner of Harbor. Strategic. “A loss of convention in the Attorney General’s career is likely to be seen nationally as a sign that his adherence is not as strong as before.”
EMILY ELCONIN / REUTERS
The candidates
DePerno was the lawyer for a case that tried to challenge the results of the 2020 election in Antrim County, Michigan.
The unofficial initial results of the traditionally Republican county suggested that Mr. Biden won the county of Antrim. But human error had caused county tabulators to incorrectly report election results to the county’s central election management software. When the team was rescheduled, the results found that Mr. Trump had won the county by nearly 4,000 votes, and a manual ballot count later confirmed that result.
Some GOP activists and leaders used the mistake in Antrim County to spread the conspiracy theory that domain voting machines were changing votes. Mr. Trump was one of those who repeated the false claims about Antrim County after the election and during his telephone rally on Wednesday night called the ongoing litigation “explosive.”
A report from a Republican-led Michigan Senate committee in June 2021 he stated that “ideas and speculations that Antrim County election workers or outside entities manipulated voting by hand or electronically are indefensible.” That same report said the committee “found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s 2020 election process.”
On Thursday, a Michigan court of appeals dismissed the claims in DePerno’s legal challenge, saying his client “did not allege any” clear and positive “factual allegations that” highlighted a clear case of law. “.
“Instead, the plaintiff merely raised a number of questions about the election without making any allegations of specific facts as necessary,” the court wrote in a unanimous opinion. “There are no allegations in the complaint that support the alleged irregularities in Antrim County” could have affected the outcome “of the presidential election, as the case law clearly requires.”
DePerno undertook to appeal the decision to the Michigan Supreme Court. He and his campaign did not respond to requests for comment from CBS News. In a statement following the court’s decision, he said, “I will continue to fight for electoral integrity at the highest levels and that includes me as Michigan Attorney General.”
Michigan Republicans believe Karamo is in a more comfortable position to win his career at the nomination convention. She faces state representative Beau LaFave and Chesterfield City Secretary Cindy Berry for being the Republican candidate running for office.
Karamo gained supporters after the 2020 election, when he claimed to have witnessed fraudulent activity where Detroit counted absentee ballots and then testified before a state Senate committee. He made several appearances in the cable news to spread unfounded claims of widespread fraud and filed an intervention in the Texas case in the Supreme Court seeking to annul the 2020 election.
EMILY ELCONIN / REUTERS
One of Karamo’s central allegations of fraud was on a ballot paper that had direct voting bubbles for Democrats and Republicans. He claimed that a worker wanted to count the ballot for the Democrats and a supervisor told the worker to “take care”.
Chris Thomas, the long-time Michigan election director who was at the absentee counting facility in Detroit, told CBS News that “passing it” meant that the vote would be recorded as overvote and would not count for either party.
“(The supervisor) might have been a little clearer with her if her interpretation is accurate and said,” Look, we agree with what you’re saying and they’ll pass it on, it’s an override. “Biden won’t get a vote,” Thomas said. “This may have worked a little better, but it’s not such a good story.”
Kararmo’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
The political landscape
Conservatives are embracing the two Trump-backed candidates. Michigan GOP co-chair Meshawn Maddock, who has close ties to Trump, endorsed both DePerno and Karamo in person.
“Having these two champions, Karamo and DePerno, in office will ensure that we stop the stolen elections and will be important for a real forensic audit of the 2020 elections,” he said in a statement. statement. Several Michigan state and federal courts rejected attempts to revoke the results of the 2020 election, and more than 250 state audits said the election results were accurate.
Gustavo Portela, the communications director of the Michigan Republican Party, stressed that the endorsement was made in a personal capacity and said that the party leaders have already weighed in before. Ultimately, he said, “it is the delegates who will choose who will be successful in receiving the endorsement of the party.”
The Michigan Conservative Coalition, which has worked to get Conservative delegates elected to the state convention, also supports the two candidates.
“We think they’re the best people for the job. It’s Trump’s election, and we’re aligned with President Trump,” said Rosanne Ponkowski, president of the Michigan Conservative Coalition. Ponkowski also works with the Karamo campaign.
But some Republicans worry that DePerno and Karamo could cost the Republican general election in November in a year when the political environment is favorable to Republicans.
Tony Daunt, a member of the Michigan Republican Party State Committee and former executive director of the Conservative Michigan Freedom Fund, said he could not vote for either candidate in November at this time, although he said he could support Karamo if do it “. a lot of my fault”. He said it should be a “warning” that Republicans like him do not want to vote for these candidates.
“People who are in a position to help reduce a portion of it, instead of doing so, are feeding on it. And they are pushing these cancerous and evil figures to the delegate base,” said Daunt, who he will. be at the convention. “Unfortunately, the lesson will have to be learned in the hardest way that if they nominate people like this, they are likely to give up a career that is otherwise extremely lucrative because Democrats have been such failures.”
Republicans will officially nominate candidates for their convention in August, but 75% of delegates at this event would have to cancel the results as of Saturday.
Saturday’s convention will also feature a manual ballot count, after grassroots party members demanded that there be one to validate the machine-counted results.
“They didn’t want to use Dominion voting machines and they were worried that the voting machines wouldn’t do it properly,” Portela said. “That’s part of the reason we set up an audit committee, to assure our bases that these will be safe elections.”
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- Donald Trump
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