Is there such a thing as Chronic Wasting Disease among political parties? Because if there is, an epidemic is brewing among state Republican parties. Suddenly, in several key states, GOP coffers are alarmingly empty in a way that calls to mind the Vermont GOP’s underperformance over the last several years.

Last week, the conservative National Review published a piece called “The Quiet Collapse of Four Key State Republican Parties” that chronicled the woes of the GOP in Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota — states “that would be tantalizing targets in a good year.” In addition, the Georgia GOP “is spending a small fortune on the legal fees of those ‘alternate’ Republican electors from the 2020 presidential election.”

The problem, according to the National Review’s Jim Geraghty, is “the replacement of competent, boring, regular state-party officials with quite exciting, blustering nutjobs” more concerned with culture war and ideological purity than the tedious work of party-building.

Sample nutjob: in my home state of Michigan, formerly the home of bland conservatives like Fred Upton and Gerald Ford, the state GOP is now helmed by election conspiratorialist Kristina Karamo, who not only believes that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, but so was the 2022 election in which she lost her bid to become secretary of state by a mere 14 percentage points.

The result of such leadership: Parties in battleground states that are racked by infighting and barely have two nickels to rub together.

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