IN EARLY JUNE, roughly 250 Michiganders filed into a windowless banquet hall for the Macomb County GOP’s annual Lincoln Dinner. The dining tables were decorated with white tablecloths, tiny American flags, and famous Lincoln quotes, while the silent auction display off to the side featured Trump Wine, a cardboard cutout of Donald and Melania, and 30 mm rounds the size of a baby’s torso that had “Jesus is Lord!” etched into the shells.
After I introduced myself to my tablemates, they were happy to provide an overview of the local political scene. Macomb was home to the middle-class Reagan Democrats who famously broke with their party and their unions. Neighboring Oakland County was home to Rockefeller Republicans who’d become Democrats, and a Muslim woman was now a deputy county executive there.
“A Muslim woman,” Tom, the older white man sitting next to me, repeated in disbelief. “What does she know about America?” The way Tom saw it, the “whole mess” in this country was “coming down to good versus evil.” A lot of people saw it that way—including Kristina Karamo, the fundraiser’s featured guest.
Until a few years ago, Karamo was a single mom stringing together jobs and recording a one-woman Christian podcast. But following the 2020 election, she emerged as a fixture of Michigan Republican politics by alleging in litigation and Fox News appearances that she’d witnessed voter fraud in Detroit while working as a poll watcher. In 2022, she became the party’s nominee for secretary of state. She lost by 14 points—the worst performance of any candidate running for the state’s top offices—but never conceded. In February, the base picked her to run the Michigan Republican Party.
Just seven years ago, Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Michigan since George H.W. Bush. But as the state GOP moved further and further to the right, Democrats capitalized on the extremism to string together major victories in 2018, 2020, and 2022, when they took full control of the state government for the first time in four decades. In the
