Cape Republicans battle for future of party

Jeannette Hinkle Cape Cod Times

Published Jan 16, 2021 

UPDATE: This article was updated to add a paragraph that was inadvertently cut from the original version due to an editing error. The paragraph details the parliamentary procedure of the Jan. 3 caucus.

The fight for the heart of the Massachusetts GOP is in full swing on Cape Cod.

On Jan. 2, Cape and Islands Republican Committee members gathered in a parking lot at Patriot Square in South Dennis and voted to elect Will Crocker as the district’s new state Republican committeeman. Crocker ran to fill a vacancy left by Francis Manzelli, who died on Nov. 19.

He defeated opponent Adam Lange, the founder of United Cape Patriots who is known to ride around in a military-style truck adorned with Trump flags and mounted with a fake machine gun.

The vote was 97 to 16.

But Crocker's election was not ratified at the statewide caucus the next day because Republican State Committee Chairman Jim Lyons, who is closely aligned with President Donald Trump, deemed the caucus vote illegitimate. Crocker backers say the tactic was a power grab.

Lyons scheduled another caucus vote for11 a.m. Saturday. Local Republican committee members — there are about 230 of them — will gather again in the same parking lot to cast votes for Crocker, a former state representative who lost his seat to Democrat Kip Diggs in November, or Lange, who worked for President Donald Trump's campaign in Massachusetts.

Lyons asserted the state Republican committee members who organized the Jan. 2 caucus violated MassGOP bylaws, which say that he has the ultimate authority to conduct a caucus or designate someone else to do so in his place.

But those who organized the Jan. 2 caucus say it is Lyons who violated their party’s bylaws — which outline a specific time frame during which the chairman must call a caucus to fill a vacant seat. They say Lyons deliberately kept a known opponent, Crocker, from filling the empty Cape and Islands seat ahead of Lyons’s bid for reelection as party chairman.

At the Jan. 3 state meeting, Lyons was reelected by a vote of 39 to 36. 

                                                                                  

“Every vote was precious to him,” said Nancy Stanton-Cross, an attorney who serves as Republican state committeewoman for the First Bristol & Plymouth District. It was Stanton-Cross, at the request of MassGOP Region 5 Chairman Mark Townsend, who administered the Jan. 2 caucus and fought for Crocker’s election to be ratified the next day.

“In my opinion, the chair did everything in his power to not have a vote against him on Jan. 3rd,” Judith Crocker, a state committee member and Will Crocker's wife, said.

Lyons did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in a timeline of events he sent to state committee members, he forcefully rejected the accusation.

Judy Crocker Handout

“I respectfully ask that you consider the delicate process necessary to fill this seat, and question why several members of this party would attempt to try and take advantage of this careful process in order to hurt me with an unfounded and disgusting accusation,” Lyons wrote in the Dec. 18 letter.

Lange said Thursday that Lyons was right to deem the Jan. 2 caucus invalid. He called it a “fake caucus” organized by establishment Republicans outside of Cape Cod to usurp control from the party’s chairman. 

The bylaw stating Lyons has the ultimate authority to call a caucus or designate another person to perform the duty in his place, was also cited in a Dec. 23 letter sent to members of the Massachusetts Republican State Committee by MassGOP attorney David Carr. His letter didn’t mention that Lyons hadn’t followed the mandated timeline for calling a caucus laid out in the bylaws. 

Jim Lyons Worcester Telegram

In the letter, Carr instructed the party secretary to keep the request to ratify Crocker’s election off the Jan. 3 agenda.

When reached by phone on Thursday, Carr declined to comment.

Despite the pandemic, and Carr’s letter of warning, turnout was high at the Jan. 2 caucus, and Stanton-Cross asked Lyons the next day to put the ratification of Crocker's victory before the party’s full voting body. 

“King Jim has the power to call the caucus. Yes, he does,” Stanton-Cross said. “But King Jim, unfortunately, has bylaws that say when he calls that caucus, and he did not do it in accordance with that. Our position is that the ratification piece of our bylaws is the check and balance that we have on someone like Jim taking unilateral authority to determine when and how he's going to do things.”

The debate over the Cape and Islands District caucuses, though rooted in parliamentary procedure, is about more than MassGOP bylaws. 

It’s emblematic of the power struggle to chart the course of a party at a crossroads after Trump’s election defeat, the loss of two key U.S. Senate seats in Georgia and a deadly attack on the nation’s Capitol by a pro-Trump mob that included members of far-right extremist groups, according to the FBI. 

Despite those losses, millions of Americans still back Trump's movement and falsely believe he was cheated out of a second term.

Both Lange and Crocker said they want further review of the 2020 election procedures, including mail-in balloting. Neither said they knew whether any additional audit would convince those so far unswayed by the failure of some 60 lawsuits filed Trump’s legal team claiming voter fraud in the November election.

The judges — including one appointed by Trump — found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Even Trump's own Attorney General William Barr said there is no evidence of voter fraud that would overturn the election result.

While some Republicans are simply trying to avoid alienating those whose remain fervent supporters of Trump or the movement he started, others, including Lange, are embracing them as the party’s path forward. 

If he loses on Saturday, Lange said he’ll continue to organize Cape Codders. His social media recruiting efforts could be hobbled by recent suspensions of his accounts by Twitter and Facebook for violating the company’s rules. 

Crocker said Lange is too focused on national politics to represent Republicans on the Cape and Islands, and that he would focus on bringing the GOP together locally.

“I believe in teaching from the ground up, the local level to get those candidates on Republican town committees and then get them to run for school committee, selectmen, town council, whatever, and then possibly for higher office,” Crocker said. “I'm focused where I should be: on the local level.”

Stanton-Cross said that the Republican Party in the blue state of Massachusetts will continue to lose power if more moderate members of the party who don’t have hardline views on social issues are turned away. She said Republicans who have shown support for Gov. Charlie Baker are regularly derided by more right-wing members of the party as RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only.

“You tell me in Massachusetts what Republican that handles things in the manner that they do is going to possibly have an opportunity to be elected governor in this very Democratic state? Never,” she said, adding that Republicans need to unify on the issues they agree on.

“A true Republican, a real Republican is somebody that’s for small government and fiscal responsibilities and that supports small businesses,” she added. “That’s it.”