Former Representative Hoekstra to Lead Divided Michigan GOP

Abandoned by most of its major donors, forced to borrow money to pay a speaker at a recent conference, and the subject of national news reports about its fierce infighting, the Republican Party of Michigan Saturday elected former Rep. Pete Hoekstra as its new state chairman.

At a meeting of the GOP state committee, Hoekstra, 70, won on the second ballot over two opponents. A past candidate for governor and U.S. Senator, Hoekstra has long been a familiar figure throughout Water Wonderland Republican circles.

But ousted State Chairman Kristina Karamo insisted that the meeting that elected Hoekstra was illegal, and that she still considered herself the party’s leader. A strong supporter of Donald Trump’s charges that the 2020 election was stolen for him, Karamo won the GOP nomination for secretary of state in 2022 with Trump’s endorsement. Beaten badly in November, she refused to concede the election and went on to win the chairmanship.

But many of the party’s biggest contributors refused to work with her and, rather than continue to financially back the state party, they began setting up independent committees to support candidates in 2024. Earlier this year, the state party was forced to take out a $110,000 loan to pay actor Jim Caviezel to be the dinner speaker at the Mackinac Leadership Conference — an annual event that usually attracts national figures and presidential candidates but this year featured only now-withdrawn presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.

The state party’s estimated $641,000 debt prompted a meeting of the state committee January 6 to remove Karamo and set the stage for the meeting that chose Hoekstra for the party helm.

“And Kristina can say this is all illegal, but, at this point, no one cares what she thinks,” former Ingham County (Lansing) Republican Chairman Tom Klunzinger told Newsmax.

Days before the vote, Hoekstra told us that he was already speaking to the independent committees supporting Republican candidates and “I think we can bring them back into the fold.” He emphasized that he has long believed “the party has to reach a point where it stops all the intra-party fighting and comes together to elect a U.S. Senator, win some new House districts, and take control of the state legislature.”

After losing a bid for his party’s nomination for governor in 2010, Hoekstra immediately backed nominee Rick Snyder and helped him win the governorship. In 2016, he supported close friend and onetime U.S. House colleague John Kasich for the GOP presidential nomination. But after Kasich lost, Hoekstra campaigned hard for Trump and appeared with him at rallies in Michigan. Trump later appointed the Michigander as ambassador to the Netherlands. Kasich refused to endorse Trump in ’16 and in 2020 supported Joe Biden over the GOP president.

Recalling his close association with Newt Gingrich in Congress and the “Contract with America” that Republicans rode in 1994 to winning the House for the first time in 40 years, Hoekstra emphasized that “we realized that Republicans had sharp disagreements on issues from abortion to term limits. So, we worked out ten points on which most could agree and simply promised an up-or-down vote on all of them. And we kept that promise. That’s the kind of thing we need to be doing here to win the state House and Senate.”

Despite Karamo’s refusal to accept Hoekstra’s election, the new chairman is soon expected to get the blessings of his state’s U.S. House delegation and of Republican National Chairman Ronna McDaniel.