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The Chairman Who Had No Plan: Jim Runestad’s Two Years of Vanity, Whining, and Failure! One of the major topics I have bitten my lip on for the sake of the party is the Michigan Republican Party chairman himself…and the absolute failure he has been. Let’s start with how Senator Jim Runestad became chairman in the first place. It was not because a single one of his colleagues in the Senate endorsed him. Not one. He won because he chose Bernadette Smith as co-chair, calculating that the move would deliver most of the Kristina Karamo delegate vote. Our party remains so consumed by internal control and factional loyalty that we treat the chairmanship like a social club popularity prize rather than the job of building a machine that can win elections. Runestad understood the game and played it. He ran on the claim that he was the biggest fundraiser in the Senate and therefore uniquely qualified. He was not. He was not even close. He had no proven capability to raise the money the party actually needed. What he had was ambition and a desire for a title. Becoming chairman was a personal vanity project of Jim… an ego exercise dressed up as service. He later complained that he had been misled about the size of the debt; that is water under the bridge. Once he took the job, the responsibility to prepare the party for 2026 became his alone. He arrived with no plan. ZERO! His operating theory was that the donors would simply open their checkbooks because he had the title of chairman. That is not how donors work. I have spoken with previous state party chairman. None of them became chairman and watched the checks arrive automatically. Donors fund a vision. They want to know, how their money will be used to win. They invest in competence and a clear path to victory, not in a title and a complaint. Runestad claimed he would not take a salary because he already had his Senate job. He took the salary anyway. While collecting both paychecks, he spent his first year in half beyond telling anyone who would listen how much debt the party carried and how many hours a day he was working. The picture he painted was of a heroic, under-staffed chairman drowning in obligations. The reality was different. Runestad told people he inherited a state party with roughly $10,000 in the bank. That figure was not accurate. A review of the FEC filings and state campaign finance reports shows a more complicated picture. He either misunderstood the accounts or chose to describe them in the way that best supported a narrative of personal sacrifice and crisis management. The debt itself has been badly mischaracterized. It was a revolving credit line that previous chairmen used to fund operations in the off-year. Election-year fundraising then paid it down, leaving a residual balance that effectively required the next chair to raise money. Earlier chairs operated under similar or worse conditions and still reduced the balance. Runestad spent a full year treating the debt as an existential crisis and an excuse. He was more focused on paying it off than on servicing it while building the infrastructure needed to win elections. He repeatedly told donors and county parties that the organization was broke. This message was delivered at virtually every event he attended. It created a self-reinforcing narrative that cast prior leadership in the worst possible light and discouraged new giving. No serious donor wants to write a check so that their money can service old debt instead of building turnout and winning races. The constant emphasis on insolvency made that outcome more likely, not less. Operational shortcomings compounded the problem. For roughly three months in the summer of 2025, he contacted me every two weeks about designing a personal logo and letterhead. He sent examples from other states and pressed for custom designs at a time when the priority should have been fundraising, coalition-building, and basic party infrastructure. I repeatedly advised him to use the existing MIGOP logo. Jim Runestad was also a chairman who required multiple in-person ( 3 hour drive ) visits simply to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting on his computer, because he is technologically illiterate. This is unacceptable and puts us as a party operating at a structural disadvantage. He also ran the organization in a way that excluded the rest of the elected leadership. Vice chairs were routinely frozen out of strategy discussions and basic information. New hires were frequently on the payroll for weeks or months before the rest of the leadership team learned their names. In multiple cases the only notification was an unexpected text-message group chat that suddenly included an unknown number, or an email from the new employee themselves. After the Mackinac Conference he briefly claimed success; within weeks the same cycle of debt complaints resumed. The cumulative effect was an organization that spent more energy on internal narrative and personal branding than on the unglamorous work of raising money, building coalitions, and winning elections. Previous chairs lived with comparable financial constraints. The difference was that they treated those constraints as a condition to be managed, not as the central story of their tenure. I was in regular contact with him after the convention. From the day we won until November of last year, nearly every conversation circled back to the debt. He never walked me through a donor pitch or asked for input on a joint fundraising plan. Decisions remained centralized. When I requested mileage reimbursement for events I attended to speak for the party and recruit support… standard practice under previous administrations, when vice chairs operated with a modest annual allowance… he refused. He said he had not ordered me to go, so the cost was mine. At the same time, he submitted and received reimbursements for his own travel and tickets. In his accounting, the party had money for his expenses but not for those of other officers doing party work on the ground. On November 19, 2025, the conversation finally broke. I asked the obvious questions with the 2026 cycle staring us in the face: What is your fundraising pitch? How many hours a day are you actually on the phone with donors? What is the get-out-the-vote plan, Jim? I wanted it reviewed with the other vice chairs so we could begin implementation. His answer was: “We don’t have a plan. I don’t have a plan, Chris, because we need money so we can hire the person to write the plan.” -Jim Runestad Chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, November 19th 2025 He had been chairman for eight months. He had run for the job. And he was now telling me that the strategic plan for the election year did not exist because he first needed to raise money to pay a consultant to write the plan, that should have been written and began implementing months prior. I told him “ENOUGH! Fucken Resign”.. I was pissed less than 2 months prior to the January 2026 and the chairman of the biggest swing state in the country has ZERO get out the vote plan, Has NO pitch for donors, he has NO vision to win, other than talk about the debt! He did not like me telling him we would be better off with Cella or Meshawn and with Meshawn as crazy as that sounds we would have at least been in a better position with the white house with potential access to resources to help, The White House would not have been frustrated with the state party. A petulant child cannot be chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. The RNC, the Whitehouse everyone dislikes Jim, because he’s incompetent and all he did was whine, he rarely understood the details of what was occurring. When I told Jim that day to “F’ing Resign”…because he was going to keep whining and playing the pity-party, woe-is-me routine instead of acting like a leader, accepting that the debt was now his problem, or stepping aside—he exploded. He said no one else in the world would dare speak to him that way. That call effectively ended any working relationship. Jim has incredibly thin skin. He is more focused on his own personal reputation and brand than on the mission and reputation of the party. Every decision is about how it affects him. He is the most selfish, self-absorbed narcissist I have ever worked with in leadership. In the months since, he has continued to present himself as the hardest-working chairman the party has ever had, he claimed he is burdened by unique obstacles no other state faces (simply not true). The record does not support the self-portrait. He had no plan when he took the job and no plan eight months later, he had no plan even 10 months later in the general election. He substituted complaining and whining for strategy, factional calculation for coalition-building, and personal control for competent management. And party leadership colleagues as optional. Jim also repeatedly texted House and Senate caucus members begging them to donate to the party while those members were focused on winning their own races. Many of them had no idea he was drawing a salary from the party. Senator Jim Runestad should never again be chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. The party exists to win elections, not to provide a title for someone who cannot produce a plan, cannot manage people or money, and cannot stop complaining long enough to do the job. More to come..