FORMER U.S. REP. Pete Hoekstra on Saturday in Lansing after being elected to chair the Michigan Republican Party faction against Kristina Karamo. (Anna Liz Nichols/Michigan Advance)

Pete Hoekstra, a former U.S. House member and ambassador to the Netherlands, was chosen Saturday in Lansing as the new chair of the Michigan Republican Party by a faction that earlier this month voted to oust Chair Kristina Karamo over the party’s dwindling finances.

Control of the party’s leadership is still a contested issue as Karamo and her followers maintain the Jan. 6 meeting where attendees voted to remove her didn’t comply with the party’s bylaws and therefore wasn’t legitimate.

The Karamo faction had its own meeting on Jan. 13 in Houghton Lake, where members voted to reaffirm her leadership and boot several members of the state committee who opposed her. Her faction has now taken legal action.

Hoekstra, who won with 50-22 votes against former 2018 GOP congressional candidate Lena Epstein on the second ballot, said his chairmanship will be defined by transparency, with the media and with Republicans who have questions about their party.

“We’re one of the last ones to leave the room. Anybody in the state committee who had a question or comment was free to ask it. … They were smiling,” Hoekstra said. “They haven’t had that involvement with the Karamo team at all. They never heard from Karamo and here it is, if you want to stay and you’ve got a question for Pete. He’s here.”

KRISTINA KARAMO, then the Republican nominee for secretary of state, speaks at a Macomb County Trump rally on Oct. 1, 2022. (Laina G. Stebbins/Michigan Advance)

Karamo, the 2022 GOP secretary of state nominee, was elected MIGOP chair out of a crowded field in 2023 to replace retiring Chair Ron Weiser. Hoekstra had considered running but opted against it.

Oakland County Republican Party Chair Vance Patrick had also put his hat in the ring to be the party’s new leader, but part-way through the election he hadn’t fared well, he said he got a call from Mar-a-Lago. At former President Donald Trump’s prompting, Patrick put his support behind Hoekstra.

“They called me, they said, ‘We need to support Pete,'” Patrick said, adding that the gist of the call conveyed, “It’s probably the best situation to manage the state of Michigan’s GOP Party right now.”

Hoekstra, who unsuccessfully ran for both governor and U.S. Senate after leaving the U.S. House in 2010, has strong ties to Trump. The Republican appointed Hoekstra ambassador to the country of his birth, the Netherlands, in 2018.

Karamo had won Trump’s early endorsement for secretary of state after being a staunch defender of his false claims of election fraud in 2020 and praised her election as chair, even though she wasn’t his pick for the job. However, many Republicans have become increasingly concerned about the financial health of the MIGOP under her leadership.

Trump’s team doesn’t need to call anyone in Michigan to find out what happened or have the vote on Saturday explained, Hoekstra said, his team is hyper-aware of what’s going on in the Michigan Republican Party.

“Obviously, the president and his team are very interested in Michigan. We win Michigan, we get Donald Trump as president. We saw it in 2016. We’ll see it in 2024,” Hoekstra said.

Trump won Michigan over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by roughly 11,000 votes in 2016, but lost the state to President Joe Biden in 2020 by more than 154,000 votes.

Karamo took to social media Saturday saying that as chair of the Michigan Republican Party, she won’t allow the party to be stolen and Republicans need to focus on winning the presidential election this year, not this “charade.”

“It’s no surprise that Pete Hoekstra (who signed the unconstitutional Patriot Act) is attempting to usurp the Michigan Republican Party. He seems to believe he is above the law, the will of the precinct delegates, and the will of the majority of State Committee,” Karamo wrote.

Michigan is just over nine months out from the presidential election and has two major factions asserting their claim to leadership — which has caused concern.

Malinda Pego, the former party co-chair to Karamo, has served as acting chair of this faction since Jan. 6. She helped lead the charge to remove Karamo from the party, and said after the meeting that she’ll remain as co-chair of the party.

Hoekstra said it’s time for the National Republican Committee to recognize the legitimate Republican Party in Michigan, whether it’s him or Pego as leader “or whatever.”

“We are the legitimate party of Michigan. … I know they’ve been watching … and I’m confident they will make a determination,” Hoekstra said. “The number one thing is to make sure that we get this group legitimized in the eyes of the RNC.”

The RNC hasn’t asserted public support for either side as of Saturday, but Karamo remains the listed chair for Michigan on its website.

The now Hoekstra-led group filed legal action against Karamo on Friday in the Kent County Circuit Court looking to secure legitimization under the law as the state’s party.

Today marks a realignment to a Trump-led Republican Party in Michigan, Warren Carpenter, a metro Detroit Republican said.

Carpenter sponsored research used in a 140-page report titled which came out in December calling Karamo a failure who has essentially driven the party to bankruptcy.

“The last time that the party didn’t take Donald Trump’s endorsement for a candidate, that got us into the situation where we had to remove the one that the grassroots picked,” Carpenter said.

Trump endorsed 2022 state Attorney General Candidate Matt DePerno not only in the 2022 election. After losing to Democrat Dana Nessel, he endorsed him to be the party’s chair. But the party voted in Karamo.

“I think that we course corrected like never in history before the State of Michigan and not very many times across the country where we get a second bite at the apple. … A lot of people don’t get to say that in life,” Carpenter said. “I’m praying that moving forward, we’re in this not to fight Republicans, but to win elections and work against Democrats. That’s the party I signed up for.”

Republicans in Michigan can’t go into the Feb. 27 presidential primary with two factions, Hoekstra said, adding that the party has to unite.

Hoekstra said he’s engaged people from the Republican state central committee and is treating them as state committee members who are welcome to engage with this group.

Patrick told the Advance before the meeting that however the faction decided to vote Saturday, it’s time for the party to get to work and stop infighting.

“All this mudslinging, we gotta be on the same team in November. We’re all in the boat together, start rowing,” Patrick said.

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