A Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate is running on a platform to decertify the 2020 statewide presidential results

State Rep. Timothy Ramthun listens to Gov. Tony Evers during the State of the State address at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., on February 15, 2022.
AP Photo/Andy Manis

Wisconsin state Rep. Timothy Ramthun wants to decertify the state's 2020 presidential results.
Ramthun, a conservative lawmaker, earlier this month jumped into the GOP gubernatorial primary.
His pro-Trump appeals have animated activists who have become increasingly critical of state GOP legislative leaders.

A Wisconsin Republican gubernatorial candidate is running on a platform to decertify the state's 2020 presidential election results — an effort that isn't rooted in state or federal law — in a drive to oust now-President Joe Biden from the White House and reinstall former President Donald Trump to the Oval Office.

State Rep. Timothy Ramthun shook up the Republican primary with his proposal after jumping into the gubernatorial contest earlier this month — and stands firmly behind his questioning of the 2020 presidential results.

"This is a real issue," he told The New York Times in a recent interview. "We don't wear tinfoil hats. We're not fringe."

Ramthun's efforts to overturn the state's election results earned him a phone call and public praise from Trump, who last November applauded the lawmaker for "putting forward a very powerful and very popular" resolution to decertify the Wisconsin results. And Ramthun's platform now puts pressure on the GOP gubernatorial frontrunner — former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch — to appeal more strongly to the former president's supporters.

Last week, Kleefisch — who previously attested to Biden's 2020 victory in the state — declined to say if the president won the election fairly.

In November 2020, Biden defeated Trump in Wisconsin — one of the nation's premier swing states — by roughly 20,000 votes out of nearly 3.3 million ballots cast. The results were certified with no verifiable evidence of voter fraud.

However, base Republicans — who continue to be animated by Trump's debunked claims of a stolen election — have continued to tune into appeals from the former president and his allies regarding the 2020 election, despite the efforts of many party leaders to focus on the 2022 midterm elections and the upcoming 2024 presidential contest.

According to a Marquette University Law School poll from October 2021, 64% of Republicans indicated that they weren't confident in the 2020 election results, while only 33% expressed confidence in the outcome. In comparison, 67% of independents and 99% of Democrats expressed confidence in the results.

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos — who has been a top foil to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — has struggled to rein in some of the most outspoken forces within the party and has increasingly attracted scorn from conservative activists.

The speaker has been asked to resign from his post by multiple Republican county chapters over his handling of issues related to the 2020 election, a reversal of fortune for the conservative leader and a troubling sign of discontent for a party that is itching to retake the Governor's Mansion and reelect US Sen. Ron Johnson to a third term.

GOP state Rep. Rob Swearingen told The Times that the party wasn't well-served by engaging in such battles.

"This is just not what the Republican Party needs right now," he told the newspaper. "We shouldn't be fighting among ourselves about what happened, you know, a year and a half ago."

Over the past year, Wisconsin Republicans have passed a set of restrictive voting laws which were in turn vetoed by Evers, while also moving to conduct an audit of the 2020 results, hiring retired police officers to conduct a probe looking into "potential irregularities" from the election, and threatening to jail public officials who have so far refused to sit down for private interviews regarding the GOP-led election probe.

However, Trump in the past been less than impressed by the efforts on the part of the state's GOP legislative leaders to probe the 2020 results.

"Wisconsin Republican leaders Robin Vos, [Senate President] Chris Kapenga, and [Senate Majority Leader] Devin LeMahieu, are working hard to cover up election corruption, in Wisconsin," he said in a statement last June. "They are actively trying to prevent a Forensic Audit of the election results, especially those which took place in Milwaukee, one of the most corrupt election locales in the country. Don't fall for their lies!"

He added: "These REPUBLICAN 'leaders' need to step up and support the people who elected them by providing them a full forensic investigation. If they don't, I have little doubt that they will be primaried and quickly run out of office."

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