Ground Zero for the 'Big Lie'
Wisconsin Is Ground Zero for the MAGA Effort to Steal the Next Election
Republicans, convinced Trump won, are pushing to decertify his 2020 loss — and lay the groundwork to overturn the next election if it doesn’t go their way
Rolling Stone | Feb 6, 2022
At 5:01 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2, Tim Ramthun was sitting in his living room with the TV on when his cellphone rang. He turned to his wife of four decades, Carolann. “Oh, the president’s calling,” he told her. She scoffed. “Hello, Mr. President,” Ramthun said to the caller. “This is Representative Ramthun. May I help you?” Carolann still didn’t believe him, until she heard the voice on the other end and almost fell out of her chair. She started recording a video of her husband, a junior member of the Wisconsin state Assembly, receiving praise from the 45th president of the United States.
Ramthun wasn’t surprised by Donald Trump’s call. A few weeks earlier, Trump had left a message on his work phone at the state Capitol at 6:30 in the morning. Trump had wanted to thank Ramthun for his continued efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, something Trump proceeded to do later that day in a written statement praising Ramthun for “putting forward a very powerful and very popular, because it’s true, resolution to decertify the 2020 Presidential Election in Wisconsin based on the recently found absolute proof of large scale voter fraud that took place.”
Now, with his wife recording the conversation, Ramthun listened as Trump asked what he could do to be helpful. He offered to endorse Ramthun, and Ramthun knew how powerful that endorsement could be running for reelection to the Assembly or seeking a higher office. Trump wasn’t the only conservative luminary to dangle an endorsement: Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a leader of the growing election-fraud movement in America, had twice said he’d back Ramthun. Ramthun told Trump he appreciated the pledge of support, but he wanted the former president to know that the fraud he believed he’d uncovered, and the conspiracy that tied it together, required all of his attention at the moment. First, he would pass his resolution to decertify the last presidential election, and then he would help other states follow his lead.
“If one state does this, I think others will follow,” he remembers telling Trump.
“You’re my kind of guy,” Trump replied.
More than a year later, the Republican Party remains obsessed with Trump’s defeat in 2020 and finding ways to sow doubt on that result, if not reverse it. In Arizona, conservative lawmakers and activists spent millions of dollars on a discredited “forensic audit” of every ballot cast in the state’s largest county. In Pennsylvania and Georgia, GOP legislators and candidates for office have called for their own Arizona-style reviews. There are at least 21 candidates for secretary of state across the nation who have challenged the 2020 election result. Trump leads this movement to mainstream the so-called Big Lie, calling the election “rigged” and arguing that Vice President Mike Pence had “the right to change the outcome,” and the GOP has, with few exceptions, marched in lockstep with him.
Nowhere is this crusade to subvert the 2020 election result more on display than in Wisconsin. Even though Republicans there do not control all the levers of power — the governor, Tony Evers, is a Democrat — they have launched a multifront effort to cast doubt on the 2020 election, intimidate local officials, and, in Ramthun’s case, throw out the state’s presidential-election result.
Lawyers aligned with the Republican Party have filed suit after suit seeking to roll back reforms that made it easier to vote in the pandemic. A secretive investigation run by a conservative former judge with a controversial past has issued dozens of expansive subpoenas, demanded closed-door testimony of mayors and clerks, and sought jail time for those who didn’t cooperate. GOP candidates and elected officials have gone so far as to demand the elimination of the state’s bipartisan election commission — a body that Republicans created seven years ago — and potentially give the GOP-led Legislature the power to control elections. “Wisconsin is the ground zero for the fights over elections right now,” says Paul Nolette, a political-science professor at Marquette University.
This effort did not start in earnest until after the 2020 election, when Trump’s defeat became official, and it has yet to turn up any evidence of widespread fraud or a conspiracy to rig the outcome. For the most part, Republicans waited until months after the vote to challenge the decisions made by election officials, mayors, and local clerks to ensure access to the ballot box in 2020, such as the use of drop boxes, accepting private grant money to safely and effectively administer the election, and mailing absentee ballots directly to voters living in nursing homes. “One of the weapons in the election-subversion arsenal is having post-hoc arguments about what the rules should’ve been, when in fact, election contests have to be built around the rules as they existed at the time,” says Bob Bauer, an election-law expert and co-chair of the Center for Election Innovation and Research’s Election Official Legal Defense Network. “The attempt to change the rules after the fact is the election-subversion campaign.”
With an eye toward the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election, Wisconsin Republicans now want to overhaul their democracy for the supposed sins of 2020. But the debate over how to do that has pitted Republicans against one another, with party leaders navigating an irate party base and MAGA-style lawmakers who believe the state can’t focus on the next election until it has “fixed” the last one. This winter, I spent a week in the state and spoke with dozens of people about the challenges to the 2020 election and the attacks on election workers, voting policies, and more.
In Wisconsin, as in other states, the energy in the conservative movement burns hottest among those voters who believe the Republican-controlled Legislature should empower people like Ramthun and throw out Biden’s 2020 victory. Moderate Republicans have responded by ostracizing Ramthun or blasting their party’s descent into a post-fact cult of conspiracy theorists. “A lot of them are stuck between having to follow what is now the party line in Trump’s party and trying to tamp down the most extreme calls for overturning a democratic result,” professor Nolette says.
It’s also created a bizarre, up-is-down environment in which a fringe lawmaker like Ramthun finds himself lauded by Trump, the party’s leader, and at the same time shunned by fellow Republicans in Wisconsin for his crusade to throw out the last presidential vote.
For the first 150 years or so of its existence, Wisconsin earned a reputation as a laboratory of sorts, a testing ground for policies cooked up by liberals and conservatives. Think unemployment insurance and Social Security, school choice and voter-ID laws. Love them, hate them: Thank (or blame) Wisconsin. Deep political divides have always cleaved the state’s politics — this was, after all, the home of progressive icon Fighting Bob La Follette and notorious red-baiter Joe McCarthy, the land of Republican hero Tommy Thompson and LGBTQ pioneer Tammy Baldwin. And for the past two decades, Wisconsinites have grown used to statewide elections decided by razor-thin margins and a perennial battleground-state status. But if not for Florida’s hanging chads in 2000, the entire world might have converged on Wisconsin instead, where Al Gore won by 5,700 votes. Through it all, Wisconsinites saw themselves as a model for clean, open government, a kinder counterpoint to the brutal machine politics of Richard Daley’s Chicago, 90 miles to the south.
For the past decade, however, Wisconsin politics have polarized in much the same way the nation has. Scott Walker’s gubernatorial election in 2010 and his subsequent “divide-and-conquer” assault on labor unions, a surgical gerrymander that has locked in GOP majorities with no end in sight, Wisconsin Republicans, including former Speaker Paul Ryan and former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, steering the party through the Trump presidency — all of it has cemented Wisconsin’s place as a bastion for the Republican Party. If you want to understand where the GOP might be headed, watch Wisconsin.
“Just as conservatives used the state of Kansas a decade ago as the testing ground for the most reactionary fiscal policies they could come up with, Wisconsin is the place that conservatives have chosen to be their testing ground for the most reactionary policies related to democracy and government,” says Jeff Mandell, a progressive lawyer who works on election litigation and who founded Law Forward, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting democracy in Wisconsin. “And it is not an accident.”