David M. Shribman
Come for the stunning Great Lakes views. Come for the strawberries, just beginning to appear on roadside stands. Come for the planked whitefish dinners, fresh from the cool waters of Lake Michigan. Come for the biking on miles of flat trails. Come for the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park.
Come for the vicious infighting that is tearing apart what once was one of America’s great state Republican parties.
Donald Trump came the other day, and the Oakland County Republican Party named him “Man of the Decade.”
This is the industrial state — the prototypical target of New Deal and Great Society entreaties — that nonetheless sent Republicans Arthur Vandenberg and Robert P. Griffin to the Senate in Washington, D.C., and installed William G. Milliken and George Romney in the governor’s chair in Lansing.
But wait. This is no longer Mitt Romney’s father’s Michigan Republican Party.
The new chair of the state Republican Party believes public schools are “government indoctrination camps.”
A group called Ottawa Impact asked candidates for local office to oppose what it calls “unconstitutional orders” such as mask and vaccine mandates.
In Grand Rapids, home of Michigan’s only president, the Republicans spurned an incumbent GOP lawmaker who voted to impeach Trump and paved the way for the election to the House of the first Democrat in 110 years.
All three of the party’s statewide candidates last year ran on average 10 points behind their Democratic opponents — an unusual level of poor performance.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are united. They control both houses in the state Legislature for the first time in four decades, but their control is slim: two seats in each chamber. They have a Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, and, because they can’t afford to have a lawmaker defect, have displayed great discipline.
They are looking at their Republican rivals — who over the past dozen years came to think of themselves, with some justification, as the natural party of governance in the state — and cannot believe their good fortune. They seem to be wondering: Where is the old Republican Party we used to like to beat up?
The answer: Like the power of the automobile industry, which disappeared decades ago, and like the influence of the labor movement, which once held an iron grip on the Democratic Party, the old Republican Party has, like Joe DiMaggio in the old Simon and Garfunkel tune, up and gone away.
Actually, it is maybe more like down and gone away.
Seven of the 11 Michigan Republican House members voted to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As governor and as a presidential candidate, George Romney was an ardent supporter of civil rights.
Milliken, the longest-serving governor in the state’s history, led amid deep economic distress and distressing racial conflict. Nonetheless, he supported affirmative action; appointed Blacks such as Roy Levy Williams, later an NAACP chair, to his administration; and had a warm relationship with Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, whom he considered a supporter.
In its 2019 obituary of Milliken, The New York Times cited his “soft-spoken graciousness and decency and (his) talent for building political bridges.”
“This used to be a place where Republicans were the kind of people who looked at problems and tried to fix them,” said Field Reichardt, a longtime Republican activist who worked on the presidential campaigns of George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush. “Now Republicans here are prioritizing an extremely conservative social agenda based on Christian nationalist views. These are not the moderate Republicans I grew up with. That type is gone. The party has become extreme and nutty.”
Reichardt, who counted former President Ford as a family friend, has left the Republican Party.
Thousands of people who had no Republican affiliation, and in some cases no history of voting, have joined it.
The result is a complete makeover of a party that once claimed the site of the first official Republican event, in Jackson, Michigan, in 1854, about two years before Abraham Lincoln joined what became known as the Grand Old Party.
“Politics in Michigan,” said Charles Greenleaf, who worked for Sen. Griffin and was deputy director of polling and research in Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign, “are almost unrecognizable from the time I was involved in them.”
Ford, who became president when Richard Nixon resigned in 1974, was — until recently — the symbol of Michigan Republicanism. Though he was capable of back-room battles (that’s how he climbed into the Republican hierarchy in the House of Representatives) and was no pushover for the Democrats who had a lock on House power (which is why he remained minority leader for nine years), Ford is remembered as a conciliator and, in the White House, sought bipartisan solutions to the country’s mid-1970s challenges of inflation and post-Vietnam fatigue.
That Michigan moderation is out of style. Michigan Republicans now have a new style of politics.
Conciliation in this tense atmosphere is in the past tense only. Indeed, when former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and millionaire Republican donor Bill Parfet announced an effort to raise money for the state House and Senate caucuses, party chair Kristina Karamo described the initiative as “horrific,” arguing, “People are tired of the squishy, wishy-washy Republicans.”
While the state party still has some old-fashioned country-club Republicans, some evangelicals and a handful of former Democrats, the party infrastructure is firmly in control of Trump supporters.
“The most Trumpian parts of the party have emerged as powerful elements,” said Matt Grossman, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University. “That meant the party has been running uncompetitive candidates.”
One of them is Karamo, who was defeated by 14 percentage points in last year’s Michigan secretary of state race. Less than four months later, she won the leadership of the state party, prompting Trump to describe her as “a powerful and fearless Election Denier.”
She has since argued that Democrats and Gov. Whitmer are “hard at work trying to make Michigan’s and America’s economy dependent on the Chinese Communist Party,” adding, “These are the actions of traitors.”
That term is tossed around promiscuously in Michigan politics today.
“Today, being a ‘small-C’ conservative is not enough in Michigan Republican politics,” said Richard Norton Smith, author of a new biography of President Ford. “You have to be a ‘big T’ Trumper to fit in.”
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
