Tagged: GOP

Kerry Bentivolio is resentful of the Republican establishment, and it's not hard to see why.  Bentivolio is running for Congress in the newly redrawn 11th District, which includes a lot of prosperous suburban areas in Wayne and Oakland Counties.

Mitt Romney will make his first visit to Michigan this week since the state’s February presidential primary. The apparent Republican presidential nominee will deliver a speech in Lansing.

Mitt Romney won a narrow victory over Rick Santorum in the Michigan Republican primary.

Romney will speak at Lansing Community College tomorrow afternoon. His speech is expected to focus on the economy, and he will say President Obama’s policies have failed to sufficiently lift middle class families.

The visit is a hint that Republicans may consider Michigan a battleground state.

Republican frontrunner, former Congressman Pete Hoekstra, reports on his facebook page he raised $700,000 in the first quarter of this year for his campaign against incumbent U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow.  The Stabenow campaign claims in an email she raised twice as much, “more than $1.5 million”.

Inside Michigan Politics Editor Bill Ballenger says whoever wins the primary is going to need a lot more money.

It’s a busy day of campaigning in Michigan for three leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney spent today hopping from one rally to another in hopes of getting enough support to win Tuesday’s presidential primary in his native state.

Hundreds of people jammed into a machine parts manufacturer’s plant near Albion to hear Romney.

"This sure has been fun these last ten days or so," Romney joked, "We started off…15 points behind in the polls.  Now, we’re leading in the polls.   Thanks you guys."

Congressman Ron Paul is making stops in Detroit, Dearborn and Lansing Monday, a day before Michigan’s presidential primary. Paul attracted more than 1,000 people at two separate campaign stops in Mt. Pleasant and a Grand Rapids suburb over the weekend.

People wearing ‘Ron Paul revolution’ baseball caps and sweatshirts filled a banquet hall in Hudsonville to capacity Sunday. There Paul said the United States needs to end its involvement in foreign conflicts and privatize entitlement programs like Social Security. He also stressed the need for more civil freedom.

“We’ll never agree on how we want to use our freedoms. In a room like this there might be 50 different religious values and some with no religious values at all. But freedom answers the question because we don’t impose ourselves on other people. You do what you want,” Paul said.

Predicting presidential primary turnout is a tricky business. You would think if anyone would have a good idea of what to expect it would be the Secretary of State’s office, which oversees elections in Michigan.

“We don’t have a turnout estimate at this point," says Fred Woodhams, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s office, "because it is a presidential primary and they do vary greatly from cycle to cycle.”

Woodhams says August primaries generally bring in about 18 to 20 percent of eligible voters. But then again that’s August. Adding to the uncertainty is a host of local issues which may, or may not, boost turnout.

Voters in parts of Oakland and Genesee Counties are electing people to vacant state house seats. There are also numerous school bond and other local issues on the ballot in communities around the state.

Losing the Michigan primary would strip the last of the varnish off the image that Mitt Romney is the inevitable GOP nominee for president. It would also commit him to the long march he says he is prepared to wage.

A Rick Santorum victory next week would be bad for Romney — a public-relations nightmare for a native son of Michigan. But political observers say it would mean little to the campaign that still has more money than any other and remains better organized to compete to the end.

Santorum has shot up in the polls in Michigan and even leads Romney in some.