‘We can’t afford to lose Michigan’: Inside the chaotic Republican rivalry that could swing the 2024 election

Michigan residents will on Tuesday help decide whether Donald Trump or Nikki Haley will represent the Republican Party in this year's presidential election.

After the public has its say, local Republican officials will meet at a party convention on Saturday 2 March to add their own votes in a two-stage primary process.

But this year, there will be not one but two duelling conventions, convened by two rival party leaders – both of whom claim they are the real one.

Such is the chaos that has engulfed the Great Lake State's GOP since its disastrous showing in the 2022 midterm elections, which saw Democrats take both houses of the state legislature and the governor's seat for the first time in decades.

In one corner is Kristina Karamo, the first Black chairperson in the state party's history, who insists that she is still the rightful leader of the organisation and retains control of its finances, website, and official social media.

In the other is Pete Hoekstra, a former US ambassador to the Netherlands under Donald Trump, who was elected to replace Karamo in a closed vote last month and has been accepted by the national Republican Party as the one true chairman.

That vote, which is now the subject of a lawsuit between Ms Karamo's camp and Mr Hoekstra's, was the culmination of months of infighting that at times grew so vicious that it broke out into physical brawling.

All of which could have serious consequences for the general election this November, in a state that swung for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and was retaken by Joe Biden by a margin of only 154,188 voters in 2020.

«We can't afford to lose Michigan,» Bree Moeggenberg, a member of the Michigan state GOP's executive committee who led the push to