When Wisconsin State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) arrived at Saturday’s Republican caucus, he drove past a half-dozen protesters with “Toss Vos” signs, playing Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” on a karaoke speaker. When he walked inside, a four-page resolution condemning him was being passed around the room. And when he stood up to address fellow Republicans, Vos was standing a few feet away from his primary challenger.
“Within one month of a Republican governor being sworn into office in January of 2023, we are going to have election integrity, where we don’t have unsecured drop boxes at all in the state of Wisconsin,” Vos promised. “We need to make sure that our candidates running in 2022 focus on who our real adversaries are. And that’s not us. It’s the other guys!”
After that, the anti-Vos resolution was crushed — but it wasn’t the first, and it didn’t end the primary challenge. Fifteen months after the 2020 election, conservative anger at Donald Trump’s loss, and the idea Republicans could still wipe it off the books, has dominated local GOP politics. It’s not enough to question whether the election was fair, or whether Biden should be in the White House.
“I would like for the Wisconsin Legislature to take a roll-call vote and determine whether the assemblymen and women stand with the people,” said Adam Steen, a conservative challenger to Vos. “The decertification is not to pull back the presidency. It’s almost a litmus test.”
In just the last four weeks, a state legislator who believes the election can be decertified has jumped into the race for governor; former lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch (R), who has led in polls of that primary, would not say if she would have certified the 2020 election; and a Vos-appointed special counsel told the legislature that it “ought to take a very hard look” at decertifying President Biden’s 10 electoral votes in the state.
“Theyare leapfrogging over each other to get the far, far right,” Wisconsin’s Gov. Tony Evers (D) said in an interview. “They may want to forget about that, when whoever wins the primary runs against me. But we won’t let them forget about that.”
In other states, especially after the filibuster-assisted death of federal voting rights legislation, Democrats have been wary about focusing on election issues at the expense of inflation, gas prices or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But in the states where the presidential election was closest, where the Trump campaign and conservative groups went to court to stop Biden’s victory, the topic is inescapable. Evers has made “democracy” one of the pillars of his reelection campaign, running as a bulwark against Republican election reform plans that would ban drop boxes, restrict absentee voting and abolish the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission — created by Republicans seven years ago.
The demands have grown louder and more numerous since last June, when Vos appeared at the state GOP’s convention and announced that he would answer concerns about the election by appointing Michael J. Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice, as a special counsel with the power to investigate it.
“This is not a partisan effort,” Gableman told the Republican audience. Nine months later, Gableman is still investigating the election, on a contract that was just extended through the end of April. His report on the election, issued last month and presented to legislators at a March 1 hearing, suggested that the election had been compromised, by everything from the election commission lifting a rule that required monitors to witness votes cast by nursing home residents, to election management grants from the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
The Gableman investigation, demanded by conservative activists, had kept pressure on election officials and generated explosive headlines — and were interpreted, in some conservative media, as breakthroughs on the way to a full-scale election audit leading to decertification. That, say Democrats, has made it easier for them to motivate their base and open donor wallets, in a midterm cycle when that’s traditionally hard to pull off. In 2021, said Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, the state party raised more than $10 million, obliterating the fundraising record in an off-year.Advertisement
“The Republican strategy of having highly public fights about the most extreme ideas that would be the most dangerous to democracy has been a menace to Constitution, but a gift to the Democratic Party,” Wikler said in an interview. “The really dangerous foes are the ones who keep their plans secret until they execute them. But the GOP is publicly debating whether they have the legal authority to decertify the 2020 election. Every time they come up with a plan to jail mayors or dismantle the elections commission, it says this is a five-alarm fire.”
At Republican events this week, there was brimming enthusiasm for wins in 2022, and plenty of discussion about 2020. In Racine, before Vos spoke, state Sen. Van H. Wanggaard (R) told the audience that “my personal feeling is that our previous president should have won the election,” though he didn’t “believe that there was widespread fraud that occurred” in Wisconsin.
“They didn’t bring in buckets full of ballots and shove them through in the middle of the night,” said Wanggaard, pointing to a debunked story from Georgia — that a box of ballots in one counting room was actually a suitcase of fraudulent ballots added to the count. “They may have done other things, I believe, that caused the Democrats — who have been sitting there for the last decade looking at what areas of our election law can they exploit — to take advantage.”Advertisement
On Friday, at a meeting of the conservative Rock River Patriots in Fort Atkinson, activists and candidates, including Steen, asked why their leaders in Madison had not acted in 2020 to prevent the election changes that Gableman was now calling illegal. Their special guest, rallying after losing his voice, was state Rep. Timothy S. Ramthun (R), who had entered the race for governor after Vos had undermined his report — which preceded Gableman’s — urging for the election to be decertified.
“The actions legislators are taking right now are Band-Aid approaches at best. It’s layering bureaucracy on top of existing bureaucracy,” said Ramthun. The audience of more than a hundred activists, meeting at a church, booed at mentions of the Republican “establishment,” and cheered when Ramthun said that he’d raised the $100,000 necessary to compete for the party’s endorsement at this summer’s convention.
“As a nation, we have to stop saying it’s unconstitutional to reclaim the electors, because constitutional experts are saying it is,” Ramthun, 65, said in an interview. “I think that the excuse makers are running out of excuses.”
Ramthun’s decision to run for governor, which he announced at a rally with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, didn’t dramatically alter the GOP’s view of that race. Kleefisch — who won two statewide races as the running mate of former governor Scott Walker (R) — was by far the best-known GOP gubernatorial candidate in this month’s Marquette Law poll of the race. Just 15 percent of Republican voters could identify Ramthun, and just 5 percent started out with a favorable view of the two-term legislator. And while Trump had praised the Gableman report, his statements urging Republicans to decertify the election didn’t mention Ramthun.
“I feel confident that Robin will exercise his moral duty to follow up on Justice Gableman’s findings,” Trump said in a statement last week. “I would imagine that there can only be a Decertification of Electors.” Other Republicans would not go as far as that. But Ramthun had, and spoke plainly about how voting to pull back Biden’s electors, even if it did not restore the presidency to Trump, would put Wisconsin on record that the president did not win the state.
“He goes from 306 electors to 296, right?” Ramthun said in an interview, shortly before Gableman issued the report. “If it becomes a constitutional crisis, that’s what they deserve. They’re the ones who cheated, not me.”Advertisement
After the report came out, Ramthun said that he had been vindicated. It had been impossible to imagine a special counsel being appointed to study the election, until conservatives pushed Vos to do it. It seemed unthinkable that mayors who presided over high turnout that Republicans called suspicious would be held accountable, until Gableman threatened them with jail time. The people who considered decertification to be impossible now had to confront a special investigator, whose term had just been extended, telling them that it wasn’t.
“I’m not the only one getting the scrutiny and criticism anymore,” said Ramthun, who was greeted with news stories calling him a “conspiracy theorist” when he launched the campaign. “Now there’s two ‘conspiracy theorists’ in the same foxhole. It’s nice to not be alone.”
I have been wondering what in the world Trump is thinking with his daily email updates of 2020 election “fraud” allegedly being found in the swing states. Apparently, it’s feeding the cult what they want to hear.
You know it’s going to result in chaos in November. That, of course, is the plan.
