MADISON, Wisconsin — First, Wisconsin Republicans ordered an audit of the 2020 election, then passed a series of new voting restrictions. And in June, they authorized the country’s only special counsel investigation into 2020.
Now, more than 15 months after former President Donald J. Trump lost the state by 20,682 votes, an increasingly vocal segment of the Republican Party is backing a new plan: to decertify the results of the 2020 presidential election in the hopes of Mr Trump to reinstall. at the White House.
Wisconsin is closer to the next federal election than the last, but the Republican effort to undo the election results here is gaining momentum more than it is fading — and moving further and further from reality. The latest twist, fueled by Mr. Trump, false legal theories, and a new candidate for governor, is wreaking havoc in the Republican Party and threatening to undermine its bid to win this year’s governor and Senate contests.
The situation in Wisconsin is perhaps the most striking example of the Republican leaders’ struggle to keep their party together, while many of the most animated voters simply do not accept the reality of Mr Trump’s loss.
In Wisconsin, Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker who has spread vague theories about fraud out of control, now struggles to contain them. Even Mr Vos’s careful efforts have turned election deniers sharply against him.
“This is a real problem,” said Timothy Ramthun, the Republican state representative who turned his drive to decertify the election into a nascent campaign for governor. Mr. Ramthun has argued that if the Wisconsin legislature invalidates the results and revokes the state’s 10 electoral votes — an action with no basis in state or federal law — it could spark a move that would remove President Biden from office. to make.
“We don’t wear tinfoil hats,” he said. “We are not marginal.”
While support for the decertification campaign is hard to measure, it wouldn’t take much to make an impact in a state where elections are regularly decided by narrow margins. Mr Ramthun is drawing crowds and his campaign has already revived Republicans’ divisive debate over false fraud claims in 2020. Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee.
“This is just not what the Republican Party needs right now,” said Rob Swearingen, a Republican state representative for the conservative Northwoods. “We shouldn’t argue with each other about what happened a year and a half ago.”
Wisconsin has the most active decertification effort in the country. In Arizona, a Republican state legislator running for secretary of state, along with congressional candidates, has called for the state’s electoral votes to be recalled. In September, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to officials in Georgia requesting that Mr. Biden’s victory there be decertified, but no organized effort emerged.
In Wisconsin, decertification pressures are rocking Republican politics. After more than a decade of Republican leaders keeping pace with their bases, the party is hampered by infighting and Democrats are behind Prime Minister Tony Evers, who is running for a second term in November.
“Republicans are now arguing about whether we want democracy or not,” Evers said in an interview on Friday.
Ramthun, a 64-year-old lawmaker living in a village of 2,000 people an hour northwest of Milwaukee, has ridden his decertification drive to suddenly become a folk hero in the Trump wing of the party. Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, has hosted Mr. Ramthun on his podcast. At party events, he flaunts a 72-page presentation falsely claiming that lawmakers have the power to invalidate Wisconsin’s election results and recall the state’s electoral votes.
Mr. Ramthun has received more rounds of applause than the leading candidates for governor at local Republican rallies, and last weekend he took part in the race himself, announcing his candidacy at the kick-off of a campaign, where he was introduced by Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow who made countless efforts to undermine and overthrow the 2020 elections.
Mr Trump publicly expressed encouraging words.
“Who in Wisconsin is leading the charge to decertify this fraudulent election?” the former president said in a statement.
It wasn’t long before the state’s top Republicans reacted to Mr Ramthun’s election conspiracies. Within days, both of his Republican rivals for governor launched new plans to strengthen partisan control over Wisconsin’s elections.
During a radio appearance on Thursday, former Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, the party’s preferred candidate, refused to admit that Mr Biden had won the 2020 election — something she had already admitted last September. Ms Kleefisch declined to be interviewed.
Yet Mr. Ramthun claims to have the energy of the base on his side. On Tuesday, he drew a crowd of about 250 people for a two-hour rally at the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda.
Terry Brand, the Republican Party chairman in rural Langlade County, chartered a bus for two dozen people for the three-hour ride. In January, Mr. Brand overseeing the first conviction of Mr. Vos by the provincial GOP, calling for the leader’s resignation for blocking decertification efforts. During the meeting, Mr. Brand stood with a sign in his hand that read ‘Toss Vos’.
“People are foaming at this issue,” he said, listening intently to the speakers who gave both conspiracy theories and assurances to the crowd members that they were sane.
“You’re not crazy,” Janel Brandtjen, the chairman of the Assembly’s Election Commission, told the crowd.
A speaker tied Mr. Fox, through college roommate and former House Speaker Paul Ryan, to false claims circulating in the right-wing media that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was spying on Mr. Trump. Another was introduced under a pseudonym and then promptly announced himself as a candidate for lieutenant governor.
The meeting closed with comments from Harry Wait, an organizer of a conservative group in Racine County called HOT Government, an acronym for honest, open and transparent.
“I want to remind everyone,” said Mr. Wait, “that yesterday’s conspiracies could be today’s reality.”
Mr. Ramthun says he has questioned the outcome of every Wisconsin presidential election since 1996. (He makes no exception for Republicans’ only victory in that period: Mr Trump’s in 2016.) He has pledged to consider ending the use of voting machines and conducting an “independent full forensic physical cyber audit.” from the 2020 elections – and also from the 2022 elections, no matter how it turns out.
Mr Ramthun has adopted a biblical slogan – “Let there be light” – a reference to his claim that Mr Vos is hiding the truth from voters. If Wisconsin withdraws its electoral votes, Mr Ramthun said, other states could follow.
(U.S. presidents can only be removed from office by impeachment or by cabinet vote.)
All of this has become too much for Mr. Fox, who before the Trump era was a regular Republican soldier focused on taxes, spending, and labor laws.
Mr. Vos has often appeased his party’s election conspirators, voiced his own doubts about who really won in Wisconsin, called for charges against Wisconsin’s top election administrators, and authorized a probe into the 2020 election, which is still ongoing. are underway.
Now, even as he draws the line on decertification, Mr. Fox has tried to appease his base and advocate for patience. He announced this week that the Assembly plans to vote on a new package of voting laws. (Mr Evers said in the interview Friday that he would veto any new restrictions.)
“It’s just a matter of misdirected anger,” he said, of the criticism he’s been receiving. “They already assumed the Democrats are hopeless, and now they’re targeting those of us trying to get to the truth, hoping we do more.”
Other Republicans in the state are also on a political tightrope — refusing to accept Biden’s victory while avoiding taking a stance on Ramthun’s decertification efforts.
“There may be evidence, other people are working on that,” said Ron Tusler, who sits on the Assembly’s Election Commission. “It’s too early to be sure, but it’s possible we’ll try later.”
State Senator Kathy Bernier is the only one of Wisconsin’s 82 Republican state legislators to have made public that Mr. Trump lost the state fairly, without widespread fraud.
Ms. Bernier, the chair of the state Senate election committee, asked attorneys for the Wisconsin legislature in November to rule on the legality of decertifying an election — it’s not possible, they said. In December, she called for an end to the Assembly’s inquiry into 2020. Three weeks later, she announced she would not stand for re-election this year.
“I have no explanation for why lawmakers want to pursue voter fraud conspiracy theories that have not been proven,” Ms Bernier said in an interview. “They shouldn’t do that. It is dangerous for our democratic republic. They need to step back and only talk about things they know and understand and can do. And beyond that, they have to button it up.
Kitty Bennett contributed to research.