Election Deniers Dominate Wisconsin’s GOP Congressional Primary

When Wisconsin voters go to the polls tomorrow, Republican candidates who tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results or spread claims of widespread voter fraud will be on the ballot in six of eight GOP primary contests for the House, along with the race to take on two-term Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin.

At the top of the ballot is Trump’s pick Eric Hovde, a businessman who is favored to handily win the Republican nomination to face off with Baldwin in November. “Election integrity” has been one of his talking points on the campaign trail, where he told supporters in Ashland last month that he was pushing for around-the-clock monitoring of absentee ballot drop boxes — especially in Madison, one of the most Democratic enclaves in the state. 

“It’s probably not a risk up here in this part,” Hovde said in reference to northern Wisconsin, “But, you know, I think in Madison, let me assure you, we’ve got to make sure that there’s somebody standing by that drop box literally 24 hours a day, you know, for, you know, 45 days to make sure that you don’t have people just jumping, jamming fake ballots.”

In this election cycle, Hovde has also repeated debunked claims about voting irregularities in nursing homes during the 2020 election. Appearing on Fox News’ right-wing Guy Benson Show in April, he claimed that “almost nobody” living in a nursing home is “at a point to vote” since their life expectancy is roughly “five, six months” — and yet at some Wisconsin nursing homes, “100 percent” of residents had voted in the 2020 election. These claims echo those previously made by Trump and Wisconsin Republicans, who alleged that a Wisconsin Election Commission rule change resulted in coerced votes from nursing home residents. 

Election deniers currently hold four of Wisconsin’s U.S. House seats, but will also vie for the chance to pick up two more. 

Representative Mike Gallagher (WI–8) is one of only two Republicans in the state’s House delegation who voted to certify the 2020 election results, calling the Capitol riot “banana republic crap,” but he stepped down in April. Two of the three GOP candidates jockeying for his seat refuse to say that President Biden legitimately won the election.

Tony Wied, who bills himself as an “America First businessman,” secured Trump’s endorsement and would not answer a question during a July 19 debate about whether the 2020 election was stolen. 

The other denier candidate, State Senator Andrew Jacque, answered “hell yes.” 

In November 2020, Jacque signed a letter from state legislators urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to abuse his authority and postpone congressional certification of Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. The letter alleged that there was “evidence of a coordinated and structured multi-state effort to undermine state law protecting election integrity,” and called into question the “validity of hundreds of thousands of ballots.”

During the pandemic, Jacque was a vocal opponent of the Covid vaccine but became gravely ill and almost lost his life to the disease in 2021. At the time, both his wife and his brother spoke out in favor of vaccinations, and his brother urged him to “at least be honest and let your flock know the ‘choice’ they are making is between effective scientifically-backed preventative medicine, or choking on a vent while their friends and colleagues hide their condition and some insufferable (expletives) uses their name to beg for prayers and MAGA points.”

The third candidate in the GOP primary for District 8 is Roger Roth, who said that while there were problems with the election, it was not stolen.

District 8 is solidly Republican, so whoever wins the primary will almost certainly win the general election in November.

Two Republicans are competing for the chance to take on Democratic incumbent Representative Mark Pocan (WI–2), including election denier Charity Barry. A January 2022 post on her campaign Facebook page states that “from the start,” she and her campaign have “supported the forensic audit of the 2020 election.” And, after losing the GOP primary for the District 2 seat in 2022 by a narrow margin, she requested a recount, claiming that “mail-in and walk-in ballots tabulated and counted in the District were defective and/or illegally cast and… the tabulated results are inaccurate.” 

Since District 2 is solidly Democratic, neither challenger is likely to succeed in November.

The four remaining election denier incumbents running for reelection to the House do not face primary opponents.

Representative Bryan Steil (WI–1) currently serves as chairman of the House Administration Committee. In this capacity, he has helped shape two new pieces of “election integrity” legislation, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act and the American Confidence in Elections (ACE) Act, the latter of which he characterized as “the most conservative election integrity legislation to be considered in the House in a generation.” The House just passed the SAVE Act last month, though President Biden has promised to veto it. 

In 2021, Steil attached his name to an op-ed by Wisconsin’s House Republicans published two days before the January 6 insurrection. The piece claimed that “non-residents and deceased individuals” had voted, “double-voting” was a widespread problem, “ballot harvesting” and “midnight ballot dumps” gave Biden an unfair advantage, and “nearly a quarter of a million voters [had been allowed] to vote without showing an ID.” 

Representative Tom Tiffany (WI–7), another incumbent election denier hoping to clinch the Republican nomination this week, co-signed this op-ed as well. 

Tiffany has been described as an “enthusiastic” Trump supporter, and earned endorsements from the former president in 2020 and 2022. He was one of 126 congressional Republicans to sign an amicus brief in support of the Texas v. Pennsylvania lawsuit, which urged the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the results of the presidential election in Wisconsin and three other swing states. Tiffany joined 146 other congressional Republicans in voting against certifying Biden’s 2020 electoral win on January 6, 2021. Shortly before the vote, he issued a statement alleging (without evidence) that “unscrupulous” officials in Dane and Milwaukee County enabled “hundreds of thousands of illegal votes to be cast and counted,” accusing county clerks of “illegally” altering absentee voting forms on a “massive scale.”  

Representative Scott Fitzgerald (WI–5) also objected to certifying the 2020 election results, mere days after being sworn in to his first term in Congress. According to the Wisconsin Examiner, Fitzgerald reserved a room in the Wisconsin capitol for the 10 Wisconsin fake electors to meet and sign the fraudulent certificate. At the time, he was the majority leader of the Wisconsin State Senate.

Rounding out the election deniers among Wisconsin incumbents is Representative Derrick Van Orden (WI–3), who is currently finishing up his first term in Congress. In 2021, he traveled to Washington to attend the March to Save America rally on January 6 and joined the march to the Capitol. He claims that he did not enter the Capitol grounds or participate in the violence that erupted there, insisting that he was in Washington “for meetings and to stand for the integrity of our electoral system.”

However the GOP primary results shake out, politicians who embrace Trump’s big lie of a stolen election and rampant voter fraud will continue to represent at least half of Wisconsin’s congressional delegation.