LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Donald Trump will appear in Michigan on Sunday as he seeks to reclaim territory that helped propel him to the White House but slipped from his grasp four years later.
Campaigning for a return to the presidency while facing a federal indictment over alleged mishandling of classified documents, Trump will speak in suburban Detroit, where he lost ground between 2016 and 2020 and would have to regain it if he becomes the Republican nominee in 2024. It should reverse a recent trend in Michigan that has seen Democrats make some of their biggest gains nationally since Trump’s re-election loss.
Trump is scheduled to speak at the Oakland County GOP’s Lincoln Day dinner, where the party is honoring him as its “Man of the Decade.”
It will be his first campaign appearance in Michigan, one of three states, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that swung in 2016 to put Trump in the White House and went to Democrat Joe Biden four years later.
Trump’s popularity in Michigan has taken a hit since 2016.
“By Trump’s calculations, he has to win back Michigan to be president. But he’s been very disruptive here,” said Dave Trott, a former GOP congressman. “Trump is largely the reason the Michigan Republican Party is dead.”
Last year, Trump’s endorsed candidates in Michigan were among the loudest in repeating their baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matthew DePerno, spent the final months of his campaign investigating whether he should be criminally charged for trying to access voting machines after the 2020 election. ‘state Kristina Karamo, a former community college professor, was tapped by Trump to run for secretary of state after she said she saw voter fraud as a rival to polling in Detroit.
In November, the statewide candidates he supported were soundly defeated, including Tudor Dixon, who lost by more than 10 percentage points to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Michigan Republicans controlled every level of state government from 2011 to 2019. Now, they are powerless for the first time in 40 years. The shift has been particularly evident in Oakland County, home to the state’s largest number of Republican voters.
“People who know Michigan electoral politics would say it’s pretty important that if the Republicans are going to carry the state, they have to win Oakland County,” Trott said.
While Trump lost the county in 2016 and 2020, Biden received nearly 100,000 more votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton there and won the state by about 155,000 votes, or 2.8 percentage points.
Trott, who represented Oakland County in the U.S. House from 2015 to 2019, initially endorsed Trump in 2016 but later said Trump was “unfit for office.” Trump’s support among Republicans in the Legislature has declined, with 25 lawmakers already publicly backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president.
Among state GOP officials, however, support for Trump has not wavered. In February, Republican district delegates selected Karamo to lead the party after it lost 14% in the midterms. One of the first moves by the new party leadership was a vote to change the state’s traditional process of allocating all presidential delegates to an open primary.
Under a new plan expected to help Trump, Michigan will award just 16 of the state’s 55 delegates based on the results of the Feb. 27 primary. The distribution of the remaining 39 delegates will take place four days later in closed-door caucus meetings, led by the same party members who selected Karamo to lead the party.
“The plan gives Trump a significant advantage over the rest of the field. He is a grassroots favorite in the state and has made Michigan his political playground for the past seven years,” said Jason Cabel Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan GOP.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Karamo said he will remain impartial in the primaries. He claims the party was forced to make the change after Michigan Democrats voted to move the state’s primary from the second week of March to Feb. 27, a violation of Republican National Committee rules that could have caused the loss of delegates.
Asked if Trump or his team had pushed for the change in the presidential primaries, Karamo declined to answer. He said he does not “discuss conversations with the various campaigns.”
“We want to protect the voice of Michigan voters. So whether it can help one candidate or not, that’s totally irrelevant,” Karamo said.
According to Karamo, the Michigan GOP “worked” on the plan with the RNC and expects the national party to approve the new set of primaries.
The RNC said its talks with the state party “focused on the rules and the process rather than the substance and language of the Karamo-specific plan — the kind of guidance they provide to each state party as they begin to formulate their individual paths for the selection of delegates”.
“We look forward to reviewing each state and territory’s plans,” RNC spokeswoman Emma Vaughn said in a statement.
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