820: It Wouldn’t Be Make-Believe If You’d Believe In Me

Ira Glass

country, a good place to understand it is a state political party that made a very bold choice this year.

[GAVEL STRIKES]

Ira Glass

The state is Michigan. This is a meeting that happened in February, where the Michigan Republican Party had to pick a new leader.

Ira Glass

They were at a crossroads. They'd gotten killed in the midterm elections, which was just a few months before this-- creamed. They were further out of power than they'd been in 40 years, with Democrats controlling the State House, the Senate, the Governor's Office, most of the Congressional seats.

And why? Well, a big reason was because the Republicans had all these candidates who were pushing the idea that the presidential election had been stolen. And Michigan voters are not into that. They do not want to elect candidates who are obsessed with the election being stolen, apparently.

So at this meeting in February, the party needed to elect a leader who's going to rebuild and take the party forward. And if you think about it, one logical path they could have taken is, they could have picked somebody who renounced the whole election fraud thing. Right? All the conspiracy theories about voting machines and just all that stuff that Michigan voters are rejecting.

But there were no candidates like that at all, nobody who said, let's drop all this election fraud stuff. Because a candidate like that would not have a ghost of a chance with the Republicans in this room, who are the ones who actually pick the new party leader. In the last few years, election-fraud stop-the-steal enthusiasts have driven out the regular, old-fashioned conservatives, and even other MAGA-loving Trump enthusiasts.

Those people have been ousted, if they didn't care enough about election fraud or if they have ties to the old party establishment that this new guard sees as completely corrupt, compromising RINOs. So in the end, at this convention, there were nine candidates. And just to give you a sense of the range of this group, the most traditional Republican of this bunch was a guy named Scott Greenlee.

And he's somebody who thought like, OK, election fraud is a problem. But he also came with connections to donors, to old-school pre-January 6 Republicans. In fact, Greenlee's an experienced political consultant, which, by the way, in this crowd, is not an asset. He talked to one of the producers on our show, Zoe Chace.

Ira Glass

So that's Scott Greenlee, the most traditional Republican. The least traditional candidate for party chair was a complete political outsider in every way, somebody whose involvement in politics started in 2020 as a poll watcher in Detroit, someone who got famous when she claimed that she saw election fraud with her own eyes. She went on to Steve Bannon's podcast and all kinds of right-wing media, and then ran for Secretary of State.

She's an arresting talker, Black, a Millennial, a devout Christian, named Kristina Karamo. So she tries to become Michigan Secretary of State and was soundly rejected by voters, defeated by 14 percentage points-- again, because Michigan voters are not going for the kind of election-fraud stuff that she was peddling. And she did not concede the race, still hasn't, which is something that the Republican delegates at the state convention loved about her.

Ira Glass

And-- maybe you saw this coming-- Karamo wins. She becomes the head of the Michigan Republican Party, the outsiderist, the grassroots-ist-- not for nothing, the Christianist. And in picking Karamo, Michigan Republicans were saying, basically, what we want as a party is somebody to lead, who, A, believes the election was stolen, and B, has no connection to any establishment political machinery of the past, which is all corrupt.

That kind of purity test is something that you see a lot among Republicans right now. In the House of Representatives in Washington, so many political fights are basically between Republicans who don't want to compromise at all, and everybody else. You see this in other Republican state parties in swing states-- Arizona, Colorado, Georgia. But no state party has taken the flying leap off the cliff that the Michigan Republicans have.

More than any other state party, they have the least politically connected, furthest-from-the-establishment, most ideological party leader and her followers running things. Among other things, I have to say it is an enormously idealistic act, done by true believers who feel deeply that the only way out of the mess that we're in as a country is a total break with what has come before. And when Karamo won, they were amped.

Ira Glass

There were tears.

Ira Glass

Today, on our program, when a political party takes a leap like this one, throws itself out in an act of faith like this one, in a major swing state, what does that gamble look like? What happens next? Today, we're going to look at how this year unfolded for these true believers.

Producer Zoe Chace went many, many times to Michigan throughout this year and has a special up-close and personal look at how all this played out. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, The Lonely Island. OK, before we jump any deeper into this, maybe I should take a sec and explain just what a state party actually does. It's basically an organization set up to handle all kinds of boring, practical work that you need to do if you want to win elections. They recruit candidates. They organize meetings. There are these massive get-out-the-vote operations for state elections and for national candidates, too.

And above all else, they raise money to pay for campaigns, buy ads, and do everything else. And the person who raises that money, usually, is the party chair. So to have somebody with no political connections in that job like Kristina Karamo-- that is very unusual. Zoe tells the story from here.

Zoe Chace

Now, Kristina Karamo was elected in February, and the party did not pull together behind their new chair. There was a ton of infighting still over the first few months. And the first major test of her leadership, her ability to get things done, came this fall-- the Mackinac Island conference.

It's a big, symbolic, fabled event in Michigan politics. Politicians, lobbyists, presidential candidates all make their way up to Northern Michigan and get on a ferry to this island where no cars are allowed-- horse-drawn carriages instead. So the whole place does smell like horse shit, which makes it a perfect setting for a group of politicos.

They hobnob. They gossip. They make deals. They raise money. And the test for Kristina was, with all the old-school Republicans she and her followers have ejected from the party, could she raise enough money to even hold the conference? Would it even happen?

Raising money is probably the most important thing the state party chair does, and Kristina has no fundraising background. Over the last 10 years, the list of reported jobs she's done are the scraping-by kind-- salesclerk, trivia host, substitute teacher, adjunct community college instructor. She made a Christian podcast.

Her plan to fund the party was to get donations from small Republican businesses who have supposedly been sitting on the sidelines because they didn't think the party was conservative enough. But that never seemed to get off the ground. And for months before Mackinac, there were rumors like, how would she ever come up with the cash for this big showboaty affair?

To get a read on those rumors, I checked in now and then with Jon Smith. He's the perfect person to go to, because he totally epitomizes what the Michigan GOP has become. He's an unabashed conspiracy theorist.

He started in state politics around 2020. He chartered two buses to get to January 6-- didn't go inside the Capitol, he says. And he and others stop-the-steal-ers took over their local county parties. Jon's on the state committee now. And he was like, I doubt Kristina raised enough money to pull off Mackinac.

Zoe Chace

Literally, in the Fyre Festival documentary, people show up in the Bahamas, and instead of Blink 182 and the Instagram models they were promised, there is no music, no food, no water, and soggy FEMA tents. What we all find at Mackinac isn't quite that desperate.

[PIANO PLAYING]

When I got up to the Grand Hotel, there was definitely a Republican conference taking place, with Trump hats and red-white-and-blue sparkly pins, as promised. And a grand piano playing a song about how anything is possible if only you believe.

But apparently, this year was really different from past years. At night, I was wandering with a couple attendees, including one of the younger vice chairs, Hassan Nehme, in a suit and a low founding-fathers-y ponytail. We were headed upstairs in an elevator, looking for the Mackinac parties, which I'd heard were legendary.

Zoe Chace

Yeah. Last time, there were around 2,000 attendees. This year, the best guess I saw was 800 at the very most. Last time, Ted Cruz was a keynote speaker. A big name national Republican. This time? QAnon proponent Jim Caviezel, who made the sleeper summer hit movie about child sex trafficking, Sound of Freedom. He also played Jesus in the Passion of the Christ.

Out on the colossal porch at one point, I talked to another state committee member who was upset about how things seemed to be going.

Zoe Chace

Mark Forton is one of those who wanted a complete break with how it used to be. And how it used to be was that the head of the party was a super-rich Michigan guy, real estate mogul Ron Weiser. In the last few years, the party yearly budget has been something like $20 million, a chunk of which came directly from Weiser, and mostly one other rich family in Michigan-- the Devoses.

Zoe Chace

And then, Mark spins out the first of the many times I will hear the theory that Kristina is a globalist plant, and that the reason things are going so badly is that the establishment planned it this way, from the beginning of her rise to power.

Zoe Chace

That's not the only conspiracy theory I hear about Kristina. In the hallway, I run into someone whose conspiracy theory is on a parallel track, but going the other way-- Braden Giacobazzi, kind of a frantic little dude. He's a major Kristina supporter, a chair on one of her committees.

Braden says it's not Kristina who's the globalist plant. Instead, there are secret operatives within the party who are trying to take her out. They're doing it by starting all these rumors. He and his friend, Ken Beyer, another Karamo loyalist, told me about a few.

Zoe Chace

The actual business at Mackinac, the meeting of party leaders, was a showdown between Kristina supporters and Kristina skeptics about party finances. This was a closed meeting, but I got a tape. Kristina's team claimed they'd raised $650,000. The skeptics demanded they open up the books and prove it. Toward the end of the meeting, Kristina went to the podium to defend herself.

Zoe Chace

At the end of the day, Kristina's team does not agree to, quote unquote, "open the books," show them the party finances. And everyone trudges down to the boats, frustrated with each other, dodging the piles of fresh horse shit.

Zoe Chace

Act Two, Another Purity Test. Just a few days after the conference ended, there was something else, that really has nothing to do with money, that came up about Kristina's GOP-- about who's welcome inside this party. It was an email anonymously penned by a guy who called himself Paul Revere.

And the gist was, an Islamic takeover of America is happening. Homicidal Islamic terrorists are becoming entrenched and infecting our whole country. It concluded, "To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, Islam in a man is as dangerous as rabies in a dog."

This email was sent out to district chairs and vice chairs of the state party. Three of the vice chairs are Muslim, and two of them replied all, because they felt attacked by the anonymous email. One of them was Hassan Nehme, the guy I was in the elevator with at Mackinac. Here's what he wrote.

"Good evening, Kristina. This email was sent out to the Republican leadership, every elected member, and all the district chairs. Conveniently, you were not added, So I decided to forward it over. I noticed that others have forwarded it to you, so I was eagerly awaiting a response from you."

Hassan wants her to condemn it publicly. He continues, "I took the liberty of reaching out to my contacts at Fox, ABC, and a couple of the Detroit news outlets today, with the hopes that you would join the Muslim vice-chairs to respond to this. We need to ensure our constituents understand that the party will not stand for this and that our party stands for the Constitution, which defends the freedom of religion.

So you either join us on air and we all play nice and show what our party stands for, or we go on there and talk about how you have sidelined us and that you have yet to condemn any of this rhetoric." Hassan says he never heard back from Kristina.

I went to talk with Hassan and his cousin Ali about their place in the party, if there even is a place in this party for them under Karamo. These are idealistic Republicans who agree with her and what she stands for. They were like exactly what you might think the Republican Party would want-- young Muslim guys in the Democratic stronghold of Dearborn, genuinely excited about the potential of bringing Arab Americans into the Republican Party.

I met them at a business they own, a print shop in a cellar, no cell phone service, no windows, fluorescent lights, concrete walls, and their dog Pickles. Where we sat in the back was a big sign up for Hassan's election. He ran for the US House a year ago, for Rashida Tlaib's seat. Or he tried.

Zoe Chace

The more people seem to doubt them, the more these guys wanted to prove that they belonged. Like, we're family-values conservatives, too. We're concerned about what our kids are learning in schools, too. We think there's big election fraud, too. We belong here so much, we actually should be in the leadership of the party.

Hassan ran for coalitions vice chair, Ali ran for administrative vice chair. No one ran against them. Still, on the day of the leadership race, when Karamo was elected chair, one of the people in their own district tried to sabotage them.

Zoe Chace

That's Ali, Hassan's cousin, admin vice chair. He's more relaxed than Hassan, tipped back in his seat. He says things started to get weird right before the vote.

Zoe Chace

Just to be clear, someone stood up during convention to make a motion that someone could declare their candidacy right then, to stop these Muslims from becoming leaders of the party. Still, it didn't pass, and these guys ended up as vice chairs. They were excited. Like, hey, what's my budget line? What's the credentials to start emailing people as official state party representatives?

Let's drive around, set up meetings, do whatever it is this new experimental group of people wants to do, to reach out to people. But there were no leadership team meetings. They say no one called them to tell them, here's what we want you to do and how to do it, and that they were the ones, Hassan and Ali, who set up the first leadership meeting for vice chairs all across the state. Kristina didn't show up to it.

Then, there was the whole Mackinac situation. The guys wanted to help plan it, and the bylaws say that the admin vice chair-- that's Ali-- is supposed to play a big role in planning it. But they say no one would communicate with them about it. Finally, they ended up at a meeting in Lansing with Kristina and some of her team, where they came away with the message, we don't want people like you leading things with this party.

In Hassan and Ali's telling, this is how the meeting went. Hassan was like, why aren't you advertising what a diverse leadership we are? You're Black. You have three Arab-Muslim vice chairs. You have an Indian-American district chair. You should be talking about that.

Zoe Chace

Ali had stepped out and walks back into the room at this point.

Zoe Chace

"She," Kristina.

Zoe Chace

Hassan starts to get annoyed, staring down the table at Ali.

Zoe Chace

Basically, they felt like at the meeting in Lansing, that they were being subjected to a different purity test-- not one about who was grassroots enough, but about whether anybody but Christians had a place in Kristina Karamo's party. I talked to Kristina about this, and she categorically denied this version of events. She says, of course, there's a place for Muslims in her leadership, and she says she did try to include Hassan and Ali, but they were unresponsive.

Hassan shared screenshots with me that showed him reaching out to her about Mackinac specifically and getting brushed off. In any case, by the time they got to Mackinac, which they had played no part in putting together, Hassan and Ali were feeling salty.

Zoe Chace

We're still talking when Hassan's phone rings. It's Jon Smith, the guy I always talk to about what's happening in the party-- the Fyre Festival guy. He's got news.

Zoe Chace

Relatable to these new Michigan Republicans, who have a habit of overthrowing. First, they overthrew their own establishment. Now, they're having buyer's remorse over the bet they made on Kristina, wondering if they should try to remove her, too.

Zoe Chace

But as far as Jon Smith personally goes, he buried the lead on this call. Hassan checks his email while we're on the phone.

Zoe Chace

That is an interesting question to me. These leadership roles are volunteer, not paid. Like, did the party only work before because there were rich people who could afford to do them?

How long can the not-rich people afford to be in political leadership here? Of all the people to leave now, I'm surprised it's Jon. You know, he was one of the first people in Michigan to make a show of pushing out the establishment-- part of this wave of new leaders who ousted their county chairs to create this grassroots state party, run by the newbies, disconnected from the old guard. He walked so Kristina could run.

As for Hassan and Ali, they hadn't found the party an especially welcoming place, either before or after Kristina's takeover. But they're going to keep trying. Seeing how hard they're having to fight to be included, it makes me think about how relatively unimportant winning seems to be in post-January 6 purity politics.

Like, if the party wanted to win, you could imagine a world where they'd be reaching out to guys like this instead of sidelining them. But instead, it seems that this new version of the party is winnowing it down to a relatively small, untainted-by-compromise group of principled people. Not a winning strategy for a political party-- in Michigan in particular.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace. Coming up, how to topple a Republican leader? Well, like somebody said a half-century ago, follow the money. It's about to get real. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. As this year ends, noticing the kind of fights happening among Republicans in the US House of Representatives and around the country, we have this political story that we thought captures something about the state of Republican politics this year from Michigan. We're calling the episode, "It Wouldn't Be Make Believe if You'd Believe in Me." Zoe Chace picks up where she left off.

Zoe Chace

The last week of September, the plot to oust Kristina heated up, when someone in the Michigan GOP sent out a barrage of screenshots to a few reporters. They were of bank statements of the Michigan GOP. It was a little confusing, this collection of random screenshots, but it did seem like the party was almost completely out of money.

Jon Smith got the texts. He didn't see any evidence of this thing Kristina's people had said at Mackinac about the money they'd raised. He was depressed.

Zoe Chace

Warren comes off antagonistic right from the beginning, and a little manic. What he's just done-- leaking documents to the press about Kristina-- it's a big deal, though.

Zoe Chace

"It's like you didn't read the news or something," he says. That morning, the morning we spoke, September 29, Detroit News reporter Craig Mauger, an eminently fair and lightning-fast journalist, published a write-up of all the documents Warren had sent him.

The article begins, "The Michigan Republican Party had about $35,000 in its bank account in August, according to internal records that flashed new warning signs about the dire state of the GOP's finances." This is followed shortly by a quote from a former state GOP official-- "These numbers demonstrate that the party isn't just broke, but broken."

Warren is also extensively quoted in the article, which is a big betrayal of Kristina, talking to a journalist who, in her view, is just in league with the establishment trying to take her out. Warren says he dabbled in Republican politics before this movement took off, worked on a statewide campaign over 10 years ago, but not much since then, until Trump.

He loves Trump, calls him Big Daddy, and had that school board come-to-Jesus so many Republicans did around the COVID protocols-- masking in schools kind of thing. He went to January 6 after he thought he saw the election get stolen. Says he didn't go inside the Capitol, but he had such an intense experience there, that not long after, he had a mental breakdown, as he puts it.

That's when he got involved in his local party. He's one of the newbies who got elected to district chair, part of the wave that took over the party this year. He'd been part of Kristina's inner circle, but now, he'd resigned from his position as district chair and was talking smack in the press. So what happened?

Well, a few weeks before the Mackinac conference, Warren got on the phone with Kristina's chief of staff, Joel Studebaker, and the rest of her team. And they were telling him they needed help to pull off the conference. So he looked at their financial situation, and he responded with what I now understand to be his typical intensity.

Zoe Chace

A program with speakers on it they didn't have the cash to pay for, it seemed. Warren called campaign finance experts, who looked at what he had and told him to get as far away as possible from this organization.

I've looked at Warren's documents, and what I saw looked like a broke party, spending money way faster than it was taking anything in. I also went over the party's FEC filings, though they haven't filed since July. In all that I looked at, I did see some very unusual accounting, but nothing illegal, like Warren alleges.

Zoe Chace

Warren goes on to float his own version of the sabotage theory I heard from other people, that Kristina herself is controlled by some kind of national operation, launched at the Michigan Republican Party in order to destroy it.

Zoe Chace

He's pretty sure it's an op and that it's not just in Michigan. That would explain why GOPs in Georgia, Arizona, and Idaho are struggling. Someone's sabotaging them. But even if it's not an op, as someone who helped put Kristina in office in the first place, Warren now feels responsible for where she's brought the party.

And Warren's a doer. He's also make-amends-er. I find that out myself when he calls me and apologizes for yelling at me at one point. Maybe that comes from his years in AA.

So Warren has a plan to make things right. Oust Kristina Karamo. He has a whole 18-point plan to do it. That Detroit News article was a first step. Now he's whipping votes against her, just like he whipped votes for her at the beginning of the year, trying to make sure he has the numbers.

Zoe Chace

The next time I hear Warren's voice, it's from a Zoom meeting someone sent me of state committee members from around Michigan. Warren called the meeting. He has a spreadsheet of the 100-or-so people in the state committee color-coded-- who's with him, who's against him. He's literally counting votes, trying to get to that majority to oust Kristina.

Zoe Chace

That's not Andy. That's Jon Smith. Despite having quit as district chair, he can't stay away. Warren and Jon go back and forth on whether or not they have a 2/3 majority. Or do they only need 50%?

Zoe Chace

Then who shows up in the Zoom? The guy Warren lined up to replace Karamo. And guess who it is? Scott Greenlee. Yes, Scott Greenlee, the guy who ran for chair from the beginning of the story, who wasn't America-first enough to get elected in the first place. Remember?

Zoe Chace

Now, he makes his pitch to this renegade faction that he should be the choice of the renegade faction. And he cuts quickly to the chase.

Zoe Chace

Some donors won't come back, Greenlee says. It's going to be a hard sales job to go to people who've been demonized. Of course, I'll include grassroots, but we all got to play nice together. Warren interrupts him.

Zoe Chace

John Yob is a powerful political consultant in Michigan. He's been around, a political director for the John McCain campaign, symbol of the hated establishment.

Zoe Chace

Greenlee-- from another era, it sounds like-- talking to consultants, raising money, being inclusive, bringing people in, instead of cutting people out. The call ends shortly after that. They don't quite have the numbers to oust Kristina. I can't tell how Greenlee went over. Jon's not sure either. He and Warren chat afterwards.

Zoe Chace

Warren's moving a million miles an hour. He's like, Scott or not, I know I'm going to get the votes to remove her. Jon's still stuck on whether the grassroots will stomach him.

Zoe Chace

Act Four, Karamo Fights Back.

Zoe Chace

This is Darlene, Kristina supporter. I'm at a pasta dinner, called by Kristina's chief of staff, in a swanky ballroom in the suburbs of Detroit. The invitation read, "Join MIGOP Chief of Staff Joel Studebaker as he offers a rebuttal to claims of impropriety." In other words, spaghetti, meatballs, a PowerPoint for dessert. Darlene's here for it.

Zoe Chace

Downstairs, in the room literally just below this one, in another giant ballroom, is Warren, sitting alone with his laptop, a projector behind him. He booked the room at 3:00 PM today, after he heard he was going to be barred from attending Kristina's rebuttal event. He's wearing a red baseball cap that says "Trump was right," and he's totally by himself.

Zoe Chace

It's taking Warren longer than he expected to execute his 18-point plan. Because, as he says, he's a vote counter, and he hasn't been getting enough people on the board. And last week, he got invited to a meeting of the Macomb County GOP to present his documents and make his case.

He put up a rapidfire slideshow for the delegates to convince them that Kristina was a fraud. And honestly, he sounded slightly unhinged. Here's some Facebook video of that event.

Zoe Chace

But he's raised enough heat that Karamo's people decided they want to respond publicly to his claims. Hence the pasta dinner and counterpresentation. For Warren's part, he's here to respond to the response to his claims and try to keep his cool.

Zoe Chace

Someone comes in and asks, are you in the middle of an interview?

In the ballroom upstairs, it's maybe 75 people. Kristina's chief of staff, Joel Studebaker, is presenting a rebuttal to Warren's crazed Facebook video. He opens with a Bible verse, but then gets surprisingly detailed, shows snapshots of bank statements. After complaining that the previous administration left them with little money and some debt, which is true, there's this admission.

Zoe Chace

When Kristina finally speaks, she talks about finances, about Mackinac, and she's frank. She admits they would have liked to make a lot more money off the conference. They're still in debt for $110,000 speaker's fee-- for Jim Caviezel, for example.

She reminds everyone that the reason they elected her is they wanted to run the party differently, not raise $20 million and run right through it like previous chairs.

Zoe Chace

She spoke for 20 minutes, no pauses or hesitations, mostly informing the crowd of mostly supporters that she was the victim of a deep-state conspiracy to take her out.

Zoe Chace

She called out the people she sees as covert deep-state operatives within the current party. When she describes them, they sound a lot like Warren.

Zoe Chace

Moving on next to Ali and Hassan, not by name.

Zoe Chace

But she insists, her administration hasn't ever lied or committed any crimes. The fighting itself, she says, is a tactic to keep her from succeeding. The fighting, however, immediately continues.

Back downstairs in Warren's room, a guy from Kristina's team swaggers in to confront Warren. His name's Ken Beyer. He said he'd received a text from Warren saying, I'm coming after you. Warren says, it just said, I'm coming. And there's this big Wild-West-y faceoff between them.

Zoe Chace

Now, a little crowd gathers, watching them go at it across the basement ballroom.

Zoe Chace

This is the problem with the coup Warren's trying to pull off. It's the problem that was baked into Karamo's version of the party from the start. This group of people all agree on some basic issues-- election fraud, less immigration, no gun control, abortion is murder, don't tell me when to wear a mask, don't tell my children what to read, and the rent is too damn high.

But what's brought them all together running this party is their lack of trust in any kind of political leadership. They are a very suspicious, conspiracy-minded group. And that's how they look at everything, including each other. Of course they can't agree on who the real enemy is of the cause they all actually believe in.

Zoe Chace

Right before this story went to air this week, Kristina Karamo finally agreed to an interview. I reached her while she was taking a morning walk. I asked her about her year in power. I told her it seemed like, for all her good intentions, the party's ended up in disarray, broke, and ineffective, without the money it needs to win elections next year.

Zoe Chace

This is what it's like to talk to her about this. She wouldn't say what she'd do to get the party out of this mess. She wouldn't even acknowledge that they're in a mess.

Zoe Chace

As of last month, they're bringing in more than they're spending. Not because of any fundraising. They got a payout from a national committee. But they're still deep in debt, and I could not get any specifics from Kristina on how the party would bring in the millions they've always used to run elections for 2024.

She pointed out, again and again, that was the wrong question. They've cut costs. They do have a plan to run a ground game. And once that happens, I can judge how that goes.

Over the last few months, I've watched her circle of supporters get smaller. District chairs have resigned. Members of the budget committee resigned, upset about the finances and that the leadership wouldn't listen to them. For all intents and purposes, the party split in two.

Zoe Chace

I was talking to Jon Smith, who was there when this all began. I said, it seems like the year of Kristina Karamo has been a year of failure. The party stopped doing most of the basic normal stuff any political party has to do.

And they're limping as they go into this major presidential election year. And Jon was like, no. Don't write your story like it was a waste. It wasn't a waste. Things are going to continue to be different now.

We did something. We changed the party. We put a non-billionaire in charge here. This is just a first step. Maybe a misstep, but we're not going to just disappear.

Ira Glass

Zoe Chace.

["IT LOOKS LIKE THE PARTY IS OVER," BY JOHN ANDERSON]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was edited today by Laura Starecheski, produced by Chris Benderev, with help from James Bennett the Second. The people who put together today's show include Phia Bennin, Michael Comite, Bethel Habte, Cassie Hawley, Valerie Kipnis, Seth Lind, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Ike Sriskandarajah, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Nancy Updike, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Isaac Arnsdorf, Kelefa Sanneh, Craig Mauger, Jonathan Oosting, Simon Schuster, Laura Gibbons, Carrie Levine, Jason Roe, Jamie Roe, Zoe Clarke, Colin Jackson, Tyler Scott, Dustin Dwyer, Todd Gillman, Lance Lashaway, Kelly Sackett, Rola Makki, Jonathan Chapman, and Lori Skibo.

Our website-- thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's confounder, Mr. Torey Malatia.

You know, I invited him to Hanukkah this year. I don't know. I think it's the last time. He lit the candles. He's great at the dreidel game. But he just kept saying the same thing over and over.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

["IT LOOKS LIKE THE PARTY IS OVER," BY JOHN ANDERSON]