Some Wis. voters want the impossible: decertify 2020

GOP candidates struggle against Trump loyalists

SHEBOYGAN, Wis. — When she started her campaign for governor of Wisconsin, former lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican, acknowledged that President Biden had been legitimately elected.

She soon backtracked. Eventually, she said the 2020 election had been “rigged” against former president Donald Trump. She sued the state’s election commission.

But she will still not entertain the false notion that the election can somehow be overturned, a fantasy that has taken hold among many of the state’s Republicans, egged on by one of her opponents, Tim Ramthun.

And for that, she is taking grief from voters in the closing days before Tuesday’s primary.

At a campaign stop here last week, one voter, Donette Erdmann, pressed Kleefisch on her endorsement from former vice president Mike Pence, whom many of Trump’s most devoted supporters blame for not blocking the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. “I was wondering if you’re going to resort to a RINO agenda or an awesome agenda,” Erdmann said, using a right-wing pejorative for disloyal Republicans.

Kleefisch’s startled answer — “don’t make your mind up based on what somebody else is doing,” she warned, defending her “awesome agenda” — was not enough.

“I’m going to go with Tim Ramthun,” Erdmann said afterward.

Kleefisch’s predicament illustrates how Trump’s supporters have turned fury over his 2020 election loss and the misguided belief that its results can be nullified into central campaign issues in the Republican primary for governor in Wisconsin, a battleground state won by razorthin margins in the last two presidential elections.

GOP candidates have been left choosing whether to tell voters they are wrong or to engage in the fiction that something can be done to reverse Trump’s defeat.

Dozens of Republican voters and activists interviewed across the state in the past week said they wanted to see lawmakers decertify the state’s election results and claw back its 10 electoral votes, something that cannot legally be done.

Nearly all of them pointed to a July decision from the conservative-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court, which ruled that drop boxes used to collect ballots during the pandemic were illegal under state law, as evidence that hundreds of thousands of 2020 votes should be thrown out.

There is no mechanism in Wisconsin law or federal law for a state to retract electoral votes or undo presidential election results two years after the contest, a fact Kleefisch finds herself explaining to voters, reporters, and audiences of televised debates.

Her top Wisconsin ally, former governor Scott Walker, said Republicans wanted to move on from discussing Trump’s defeat two years ago.

“Across the nation, a great many people who love what the president did are starting to grow tired of hearing about 2020 and want to get focused on winning 2022 and 2024,” Walker said.

But even as Kleefisch campaigns on an agenda of restricting voting access and eliminating the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, two Republican rivals promise to do that and more.

Tim Michels, a wealthy construction magnate who has been criticized for sending his children to school in New York and Connecticut, where he owns a $17 million home, has been endorsed by Trump and says that if elected, he will consider legislation to decertify the 2020 results. Ramthun is the state’s leading proponent of decertification, but polling shows him trailing Kleefisch and Michels, who are in a tight race.

The winner of the primary will face Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat who has vetoed more than a dozen voting bills passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in the past two years. Because of the GOP’s large majorities in the gerrymandered Legislature, a Republican governor would be given a wide berth to change how the state casts and counts votes in the 2024 presidential election.

Complicating matters for Kleefisch and Michels is Ramthun, a state assemblyman whose campaign for governor is scoring low in the polls but held in high regard by the state’s most devoted conspiracy theorists.

In April, a poll from Marquette University Law School found that 39 percent of the state’s Republicans backed decertification.