Vos Doing Doors, Faces Challenger

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said he is spending 20 or more hours a week “doing doors,” listening to Racine County residents in the 63rd Assembly District that he has represented since 2005. The longest-serving Assembly speaker in Wisconsin history, and the Republican who led the fight for his party’s conservative priorities for the last 10 years, Vos is focusing on retail politics because he faces an Aug. 9 primary challenge from first-time challenger Adam Steen.

Vos got 58% of the vote in his 2020 election over a Democrat. But now he faces a challenge from the right by Steen.

The last time a Republican legislative leader lost a primary was 2004, when then-Rep. Glenn Grothman ousted Senate Majority Leader Mary Panzer. Grothman, now a member of Congress, called Panzer too “moderate” for her suburban Milwaukee Senate district.

Vos was first elected to the Assembly that year, so the lessons of Panzer’s loss were not lost on him. He has worked his district hard, but Racine-area voters also ousted a Senate majority leader – Democrat Joe Strohl – in the general election in 1990.

Although Vos said his constituents most often worry about high prices and inflation, some also worry about election integrity. Those questions could include why a Dane County judge held Vos in contempt of court in March for not releasing records from former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s investigation of the 2020 election and why the same judge a few weeks ago threatened to fine Vos over the same dispute.

But they are not the kind of questions likely to be raised by Steen. The first statement on his campaign website declares why he is running: “[Donald] Trump is the best thing to happen to the United States since the Declaration of Independence in 1776.”

Although Vos hired Gableman to investigate how the 2020 presidential election was conducted in Wisconsin, and Vos’s lawyers have defended Gablemen’s probe in lawsuits, that has not satisfied Trump loyalists like Steen. At a Capitol rally earlier this year, Steen called Vos a “treasonous traitor” for failing to try and overturn the November 2020 election that Steen insists fraudulently elected Democrat Joe Biden president.

In a WisconsinEye interview last week, Vos said he talks to Trump on a “fairly regular basis” and Trump “overwhelmingly has been good for the [Republican] party.”

But Vos was booed at the state Republican Party convention for telling party loyalists: “We have no ability to decertify the [presidential] election and go back and nullify it. We do not. We need to focus on going forward.”

GOP Party Chair Paul Farrow asked convention delegates to “be respectful – let him talk.” Vos then said Wisconsin’s Republican Party is “not the ‘cancel culture’,” which insists “there is only one legitimate point of view.”

By almost a two-to-one margin, GOP convention delegates rejected a resolution calling on Vos to step down as speaker.

Vos expanded on the 2020 presidential vote in the WisconsinEye interview: “Once somebody is sworn into office, you cannot go back,” unless there is “overwhelming” evidence of fraud.

“I do not believe that [voting] machines changed ballots” in Wisconsin, Vos added. But, Vos said, “serious problems” occurred before that presidential vote — “billionaires” gave local governments millions of dollars to conduct elections “in a certain way,” illegal “balloting harvesting” occurred and questionable votes were cast in nursing homes.

Vos said all Republican-sponsored bills to fix those problems were vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who Vos called a “disaster.”

“People have a right to know that the election was secure at the end of the day and that everybody has a chance to cast their ballot legally, fairly and one time,” Vos told  WisconsinEye.

In fund-raising appeals, the Evers campaign says Republicans want to rig future elections. “Whoever my GOP opponent is has shown that they want to destroy everything from our voting rights to a woman’s right to choose,” the Evers campaign said. “Without me as governor, the GOP has already made it clear they would attempt to overturn the will of the people during the next presidential election to score points with Donald Trump.”

Vos told convention delegates Evers has refused to negotiate with Republicans. Besides a pre-speech handshake, Voa said, “I have not spoken to Tony Evers in over a year and a half.”

Asked about goals for the next session, Vos cited education reforms. “We have almost a lost generation of kids who went through a year or two of school when every teacher was told, ‘Just pass the kids. It’s Covid.’ They were not taught the basic things that help them be on to the next phase.”

Vos also said Covid-era benefits created “too much of a safety net…a lot of people are home on the couch.” By contrast, Evers has touted the fact that Wisconsin has the lowest unemployment rate in state history.

Vos also charged that a single mother with two children received $60,000 in “free stuff” over the last two years, and warned that “The freebies have to end.”

Steven Walters started covering the Capitol in 1988. Contact him at stevenscotwalters@gmail.com