Global Courant
By Tim Reid and Nathan Layne
(Reuters) – Real estate mogul Ron Weiser has been one of the largest donors to the Republican Party of Michigan, donating $4.5 million in the recent midterm election cycle. But no more.
Weiser, the party’s former chairman, has cut his funding, citing concerns about the organization’s stewardship. He says he disagrees with Republicans promoting untruths about election results and insists it is “ridiculous” to claim that Donald Trump, who lost Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020, ran the state.
“I doubt the state party has the necessary expertise to spend the money well,” he said.
The withdrawal of bankrollers like Weiser reflects the high price Republicans in the battleground states of Michigan and Arizona are paying for their full support of former President Trump and his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The two parties have spilled money in recent years, undermining Republican efforts to win back the ultra-competitive states that could determine who wins the White House and control of the US Congress in November’s election, according to a Reuters overview of financial documents, plus interviews with six major donors and three election campaign experts.
The Arizona Republican Party had less than $50,000 in cash reserves in its state and federal bank accounts as of March 31 to spend on overheads such as rent, payroll and political campaign operations, the filings show. At the same point four years ago, it had nearly $770,000.
The Michigan Party’s federal bill had about $116,000 as of March 31, down from nearly $867,000 two years ago. It is yet to release updated financial information for its state account this year.
The two parties have “amazingly low cash reserves,” said Seth Masket, director of the nonpartisan Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. voting efforts, pay for advertisements and recruit volunteers.
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“Their ability to help candidates is currently severely limited.”
The Arizona party spent more than $300,000 last year on “legal consulting” fees, according to its federal filings, which don’t specify what kind of legal work it pays for.
During that time, legal fees were paid to a company that filed lawsuits to overturn Trump’s defeat in Arizona, according to separate campaign and legal disclosures. Money was also paid to attorneys representing Kelli Ward, the former party chairman, when the Justice Department subpoenaed her for her involvement in a plan to falsely declare to Congress that Trump, not Democratic President Joe Biden, had won, and then a congressional committee subpoenaed her phone records.
Last year Arizona also spent more than $500,000 on an election night party and bus tour for Trump-backed candidates statewide, the financial documents show. All those candidates, who supported the former president’s election theft, lost in last November’s midterms.
Not only Weiser has had enough.
Five other Republican donors from the Arizona or Michigan parties, who have each donated tens of thousands of dollars over the past six years, told Reuters they had also stopped giving money, citing state leaders’ attempts to overturn the 2020 election. their support for losing candidates who support Trump’s election conspiracy and what they consider to be extreme positions on issues like abortion.
“It’s unfortunate that we let our party’s right wing take over operations,” said Jim Click, whose family has been a major Republican donor to Arizona for a long time. He and other donors said they would give money directly to candidates or support them through other political fundraising groups.
Michigan State Party Chair Kristina Karamo did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In the campaign for her position, she said she wanted to cut ties with established donors, accuse them of exploiting the party for their own gain, and rely more on grassroots support.
Ward, who stepped down as Arizona party chairman in January after four years at the helm, told Reuters that she and her team had always had revenue to cover expenses and her successor had at least three months of operating expenses plus a “robust fundraising operation.” had left behind. .”
Dajana Zlaticanin, a spokesperson for incoming chairman Jeff DeWit, said when he took over, “cash reserves were extremely low and previous bills kept coming in.” Contributions are on the rise, she said, with more than $40,000 raised in May.
The Republican National Committee, which oversees Republican political operations at the national level, did not respond to a request for comment about the finances of the two state parties.
‘I DON’T SEE THE SUN RISING’
Arizona and Michigan, both won by Biden in 2020, are among just a handful of swing states likely to decide the November 2024 presidential race.
Not all Republican parties have fared as badly financially as Arizona and Michigan. For example, the swing state of North Carolina — where Republican leaders haven’t focused as heavily on Trump’s fight to steal the election — ended 2022 with nearly $800,000 in federal accounts, according to filings.
However, it is difficult to get a full picture of parties’ finances given the delays in the disclosures and because not all of their accounts are subject to reporting obligations.
Moreover, state parties are not only dependent on individual donors, they also receive funding from national party organizations, outside groups and political action committees.
Michigan was a hotbed of conspiracy theories after Trump lost the 2020 election, and this month Karamo was fined by a district judge for filing a lawsuit that made baseless claims of voting irregularities in Detroit.
Tensions over transparency are boiling over.
Last week, former state party budget chairman Matt Johnson launched a campaign against Karamo two days after she removed him from office, accusing her of keeping his committee in the dark over the party’s finances.
“As far as we could tell from the fragmentary information we received, party fundraising had been extremely meagre and expenditures were so far out of proportion to revenue that we were headed for bankruptcy,” he said.
Jason Roe, former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, said the financial numbers released so far by the party underline the difficult task of supporting operations without the financial backing of major donors.
“They’re basically broke and I don’t see the clouds parting and the sun not shining on their fundraising abilities,” he said.
‘HARMFUL FOR CAMPAIGNS’
The review of the documents from the two Republican state parties shows that a near closure of the donor tap is contributing to their financial problems.
The Michigan Party’s federal bill raked in $51,000 in the first three months of this year, putting it on track to collect less than a quarter of its loot in the first half of 2019, the same period in the last presidential election .
In March, Karamo told a gathering of local officials that the party had $460,000 in obligations after the 2022 midterm elections. While not unusually large, the debt would normally be covered by new fundraising.
The Arizona party, meanwhile, raised about $139,000 in the first three months of this year, according to state and federal records. In the comparable period in 2019, in the months following the 2018 midterm elections, it grossed more than $330,000.
Arizona’s new chairman DeWit, who was NASA’s chief financial officer in the Trump administration, is working to make the party attractive to donors again by focusing on winning elections, spokesman Zlaticanin said.
Some Michigan donors said they had started talking to each other about how best to bypass the state party and support individual Republican candidates. But the organizational weight of the state party will be hard to replicate, said Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of Michigan’s Republican Party.
“You have to have boots on the ground and you can’t build that kind of infrastructure fast enough to win the 2024 election,” Timmer said.
Jonathan Lines, who preceded Ward as Arizona party chairman until 2019, said he expected new donor money to go primarily to political action committees and other groups that fund campaigns, rather than the state party.
“But the fact that the state party is not well funded is detrimental to many Republican campaigns next year,” he added.
(Reporting by Tim Reid and Nathan Layne, editing by Ross Colvin and Pravin Char)
