Bankruptcy, fistfights and leather couches
Rachel Maddow’s staff noticed a sprawling story that while not exactly headline news ought to be. (I’d missed it until her show Monday night.) Multiple state Republican parties are at or near bankruptcy. The headline for Jim Geraghty’s National Review column last week dubbed it a “quiet collapse” in four key states.
Political donations follow power. Especially in the states. Especially in non-general election years. So it is not surprising that in four states with Democratic governors that state Republicans are not seeing their coffers as full as when the GOP holds the governor’s mansion. What Geraghty sees in that less is something more. In Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota Republicans are “going broke and devolving into infighting little fiefdoms.”
Arizona Republicans are down to their last $23,000 in their federal account while their failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake barnstorms the country as “real” governor in exile. She could be raising money to help her fellow Arizona Republicans, but no. Four years ago at this point in the cycle, the party had nearly $770,000 in the bank.
Colorado Republican Chair Dave Williams is attacking his own legislators and threatening to disenfranchise from the primary process “more than 900,000 Republicans” and “more than 1.8 million unaffiliated voters, 47% of the electorate,” reports the Colorado Gazette:
Stolen election conspiracist Dave Williams, the new state chairman, has announced the Colorado Republican State Central Committee (CRC) will vote on August 5 on whether to cancel the 2024 Republican primary election. And to accomplish this act of political suicide, they want to make a change in the committee’s voting rules that would make the old Soviet Politburo proud.
(What was it I wrote about the Republicans’ Soviet leanings yesterday?)
Minnesota Republicans have “barely $54 cash on hand” and “more than $335,000 in debt, according to the FEC paperwork filed in late June.“
Four county Republican parties in Michigan are at odds with one another, Geraghty recounts from a June Washington Post story:
At least four county parties in Michigan have been at open war with themselves, with members suing one another or putting forward competing slates that claim to be in charge. The night before an April state party meeting, two GOP officials got into a physical altercation in a hotel bar over an attempt to expel members. The state party’s new chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, has struggled to raise money and abandoned the party’s longtime headquarters.
Michigan Republicans have but $93,000 in their account under 18 months ahead of the 2024 elections. Donors who’d rather their money was well spent are closing their wallets.
Then there is Georgia. Gun-toting Republican Brian Kemp is governor and Republicans have a firm grip on the legislature. Yet the party’s accounts are bleeding for the legal defense of its “alternate” electors in the scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential results. They still have $1.4 million banked after raising $722,000 through June this year. But they’ve spent over a half million in legal expenses, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, more than $340,000 of it defending the fake Trump electors.
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson called it five years ago: “Everything Trump Touches Dies.”
Geraghty laments:
In these states, we are seeing the self-marginalization of the Republican Party. No outside force came along and forced these state parties to spend money, alienate traditional supporters and donors, pick nasty fights with their own lawmakers, turn loyalty to Trump into the preeminent litmus test on all issues and disputes, and alienate and repel once-persuadable swing voters. No, the people who took over these parties chose this path.
Political operatives who handle the boring day-to-day of party operations do some things right: “get more money coming in than is going out, pay attention to down-ballot races, and avoid infighting and messy public squabbles.” The MAGA Republicans who have replaced them are “blustering nutjobs” in the mold of Dear Leader, himself not exactly a paragon of financial or managerial competence.
As zealots (the left has its own), they are more interested in ideological purity and “not interested in attracting the votes of anyone they deem insufficiently dedicated to the MAGA vision.” Geraghty concludes, “The MAGA crowd now running these state parties insisted they didn’t need anyone else. And now we see where that got them.”
Truthfully, there was an outside force. It was not a boat accident. It wasn’t any propeller, it wasn’t any coral reef, and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper. It was Donald Trump. And even he was not the cause. Just the catalyst.
Consider the now regularly scheduled, near-unintelligible culture-war freakouts on the right. Over BLM. Over CRT. Over DEI. Over “woke.” Over “grooming,” drag shows, and kids’ books. The right has been slowly melting down over losing its cultural dominance for decades. Trump was an accelerant.
Consider Tucker Carlson’s and Josh Hawley’s embarrassingly public insecurity over manliness. Consider Ben Shapiro’s extended-cut rant — excuse me, rants — over the Barbie movie. These men don’t need more testosterone, bigger audiences, bigger guns or bigger penises. They need therapy.
The Republican Party as well. Not that they’d fund it.
Maddow’s segment is here: