The Republican challenging Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers next week has openly fessed up to his plan to target elections administration in the purple state in a way that ensures Republicans permanently control it.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels made the remarks on Monday during a campaign stop and they caught fire on Twitter today.
“Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor,” Michels said.
In a longer recording of the remarks obtained by The Washington Post, Michels reportedly did not get into the specifics of what exactly he meant from a policy perspective. But he’s flirted with Trump’s Big Lie beliefs in the past, and Wisconsin is the poster child for aggressive gerrymandering and other ratfuckery. It’s not hard to imagine the range of things he might be nodding at policy-wise.
The Republican candidate and executive of a construction company — who won his primary after a Trump endorsement — has previously indicated an interest in decertifying the 2020 election results in Wisconsin if he were to win the election, a legal impossibility. He also has vowed to make changes to the state’s bipartisan election commission, but has not floated anything specific.
He has previously dodged questions about whether he would certify the 2024 results, but has vowed to sign into law a handful of voter suppression bills that passed the Wisconsin state legislature but that Evers vetoed in 2021. The bills were part of a package of new election laws that state Republicans tried to push after Trump’s 2020 loss — all part of the GOP’s broader embrace of the Big Lie and election denialism.
Per Wisconsin Public Radio, some of the bills that Evers vetoed last year centered on restrictions meant to suppress voter turnout, like expanding voter ID laws and limiting ballot box drop off locations, among many other things. WPR has a good breakdown here.
Gov. Evers tweeted tearing into Michels’ latest remarks, calling his challenger a “danger to our democracy.”
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