Detroit News politics team looks ahead to Michigan GOP convention
Detroit News politics editor Chad Livengood and Lansing Bureau reporters Craig Mauger and Beth LeBlanc discuss this weekend’s Michigan GOP convention.
Novi — Michigan Republican Party delegates endorsed Eaton County Prosecutor Doug Lloyd on Saturday to be the GOP’s nominee for attorney general, according to preliminary results.
Citing his experience in elected office, 63% of the GOP delegates picked Lloyd over lawyer and political newcomer Kevin Kijewski of Birmingham, who got 37% during a convention inside Novi’s Vibe Credit Union Showplace.
Michigan GOP officials announced the initial tallies at about 3 p.m. Saturday.
Republican Chris Arndt, an Eaton County commissioner and an alternate delegate, promoted Lloyd during the convention as someone who wouldn’t act as a partisan if he became the attorney general.
“He wouldn’t take a weird cause or a party line as a guide star,” Arndt said as delegates voted Saturday.
Since 2013, Lloyd has been the prosecutor in Eaton County, a hotly contested political area in bedroom communities west of Lansing.
His supporters contended that he gave the party its best chance of winning the attorney general’s office in November. The current attorney general, Democrat Dana Nessel, can’t run for reelection this fall because of term limits.
About 2,100 delegates participated in the convention.
Kijewski, who primarily has worked on family-related and divorce cases, gained the political spotlight among Republicans by defending one of the GOP electors who signed a certificate falsely claiming Trump won the state’s 2020 election against forgery charges.
In 2023, Nessel’s office charged the electors with forgery. But a judge threw out the charges last year.
Kenneth Thompson, one of the Trump electors, was among the Republicans backing Kijewski for attorney general on Saturday.
“It’s there to protect Michigan, not use as a weaponization,” Thompson said of the Attorney General’s office.
The details of a 2020 domestic violence charge against Kijewski, which was eventually dismissed by prosecutors in Wayne County, loomed over Kijewski’s campaign
Kijewski previously said the incident was an old matter that occurred during a difficult time for his ex-wife.
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Read More: Doug Lloyd picked as Michigan Republican attorney general candidate
