Meagan Wolfe Impeachment Effort Shows Power of MAGA Republicans

Recently readers of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel have encountered a full-page ad that demanded that readers tell Assembly Speaker Robin Vos “to let the Assembly vote to impeach Election head Meagan Wolfe or be prepared to be replaced.” The ad, which is shown below, ran for at least three days.

The Wisconsin Constitution states that:

The assembly shall have the power of impeaching all civil officers of this state for corrupt conduct in office, or for crimes and misdemeanors …

The Constitution does not go further in defining the terms it uses, such as what constitutes “corrupt conduct” or “crimes and misdemeanors” or who is a “civil officer.” A recent report from the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau found that the 1853 impeachment of Judge Levi Hubbell is the sole instance in state history of the legislature impeaching a public officer. Thus, there is a substantial lack of precedent about impeachment in Wisconsin.

That said, even if one disagrees with the Wisconsin Elections Commission’s decisions, common sense suggests that this disagreement does not rise to the level of corrupt conduct or crimes and misdemeanors. Whatever one thinks about such issues as drop boxes, grants to cities to improve election management or allowing the voter’s friends and family to deliver an absentee ballot to the poll, these and other disagreements are far from meeting the Constitution’s requirements.

The people behind the ad seem to tacitly agree. Assembly Resolution 18 to impeach Wolfe does not use any of the three words used by the Constitution. Instead, it repeatedly (26) accuses Wolfe of “maladministration.”

A Journal Sentinel article puts spending on the ads at six figures. It is unclear where that money is coming from.

Leading the group are Adam Steen and Harry Wait, two conservative activists in Racine County. This is not the first time they have been in the news.

Steen ran against Vos in the 2022 Republican primary and came surprisingly close, as shown in the chart below, to beating the speaker. He lost by only 260 votes out of almost 10,000 votes cast. In the general election, Vos did much better, as shown by the right-hand group of columns.

Assembly District 63 is in the western, more conservative, part of Racine County. In the 2010 gerrymander, the eastern, more urban and Democratic, voters were removed from the district. This made the district safer for Republicans. As shown below, however, it shifted the decision from the general election to the Republican primary, making the incumbent vulnerable to a challenge from the right.

In the 2022 election, while winning the governorship, Tony Evers lost AD 63 by a vote of 15,902 to 11,153.

Wait, the other person mentioned by the press as behind the ads, is charged with two counts of misappropriating identifying information, both felonies, and two counts of election fraud, both misdemeanors.

Aiming to demonstrate election vulnerabilities, Wait used personal identifying information of Vos and Racine Mayor Cory Mason to obtain absentee ballots. A four-day jury trial is set for March 19, 2024.

The ad lists the Wisconsin Elections Committee as its sponsor. The only person listed on the state’s list of corporations is one HARRY WAITE, presumably the same person is Harry Wait.

This leaves us with the mystery of who is paying for these ads. In a statement, Vos suggested that they must be out of state:

Conservatives, unlike liberals, believe in following the rule of law and the Constitution. … The people running these ads are obviously from out-of-state since anyone living in Wisconsin would know of recent events. They appear to be uninformed and not following what’s actually going on in our state. The money could be better spent attacking the real obstacle to election reforms and that’s Tony Evers.

Closely following the release of the ads, Vos did move the impeachment articles against elections chief Wolfe to the Committee on Government Accountability and Oversight. He denied that the action had any connection to the ad pressure campaign.

People in the MAGA sphere, as Wait and Steen seem to be, accept Donald Trump’s claims that he actually won the 2020 election, that fraud accounts for the official result. It is useful to look at what the data show. Five states, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, switched from Republican majorities in 2016 to Democratic majorities in 2020. Their electoral college votes were sufficient to make Joe Biden president.

Votes for both party’s candidates were higher in the later year, but Biden’s vote increase over Hillary Clinton was greater than Trump’s. Trump’s vote total nationwide grew by 11,239,150 compared to Biden’s 15,429,985. Most of this growth came from states that were either safely Republican or safely Democratic, so there was little incentive for fraud. The Democratic vote increase was more than the Republican increase in 38 states; the Republican increase was greater in the remaining twelve.

The next chart shows the state-by-state results. The horizontal scale shows the percentage that Clinton won in each state. The vertical scale reflects the difference between Biden’s vote growth and Trump’s. In states falling below 50% Trump voter growth was greater than Biden’s; above 50% Biden’s grew more.

The five competitive states are shown by the red circles. Note that they are very much in the voting mainstream. Like most states, their Biden vote increase was greater than Trump’s. The difference with the others is that their closeness to the 50% mark in 2016 meant that this increase gave the victory to Biden.

For many Republican officeholders, Trump’s dominance of the Republican base makes life more difficult. While representing a safe Republican district brings a certain level of security, it also raises the probability of being challenged in the Republican primary for not being sufficiently loyal to Trump.

Speaker Vos’ earlier hiring of former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to investigate charges that the election was stolen from Trump can be viewed as an attempt to solve this dilemma. One could reasonably expect that the investigation would end up with one of two possible conclusions: (1) that there was no evidence of fraud or (2) actually to discover that there was credible evidence of fraud. Unfortunately for Vos, Gableman’s investigation was too incompetent to arrive at either. Instead, Gableman turned on Vos and endorsed Steen, leading to a close call in the 2022 Republican primary.

Avoiding that danger may underly Vos’s quick move to send the Wolfe impeachment motion to committee.

Related Legislation: Assembly Resolution 18