AP: Michigan GOP Primary is “Battle of Whose Personal Baggage is the Least Disqualifying”

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Michigan Pollster: “There are Skeletons in the Closet of Most of the Republican Candidates”

The Associated Press published a scathing report yesterday highlighting how a laundry list of failures and radical positions — including allegations of sexual assault, racial slurs, an FBI raid, and even low-budget zombie movies — have defined the Michigan GOP’s crowded and messy primary for governor.

The AP wrote: “In one of the most politically consequential states in the U.S., the Republican primary for governor is shaping up as a battle of whose personal baggage is the least disqualifying.” 

Key excerpts from the Associated Press report include:

  • “Bernie Porn, a Lansing-based pollster with more than three decades [of] experience surveying the state [said,] ‘There are skeletons in the closet of most of the Republican candidates.’”
  • “The GOP campaign has been fraught from the start. Two top candidates were kicked off the ballot for submitting false petition signatures, narrowing the field to five contenders.”
  • “Four employees sued in 1992 alleging that Rinke repeatedly made vulgar and belittling sexual remarks to both men and women, creating a hostile work environment that was intended to make them quit.”
  • “On one occasion Rinke is alleged to have said that women ‘should not be allowed to work in public’ because ‘they are ignorant and stupid’ while referring to a female employee with a vulgar term, a lawsuit states.”
  • “‘He’ll never be governor because Gretchen Whitmer will just beat his brains out,’ said Fred Wszolek, a longtime adviser to the family of former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who is running a super PAC backing Tudor Dixon, another GOP contender.”
  • “Ryan Kelley, a Grand Rapids-area real estate broker, has made election fraud and the lie that Trump won in 2020 a focus of his campaign. He was also recorded on video in Washington during the Jan. 6 insurrection directing a mob of Trump supporters toward a set of stairs leading to the U.S. Capitol.”
  • “Dixon moonlighted as an actor in low-budget horror productions that have been criticized as being at odds with her current emphasis on family values. She had a small role in the 2011 zombie movie Buddy BeBop Vs. the Living Dead in which she is eaten alive by zombies. The film, which was filmed in the Kalamazoo area and is still available on Amazon Prime, features one scene in which a zombie consumes the midsection of a pregnant woman. In another, a zombie bites off a man’s genitals as he screams.”

Click here to read the full article.

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