MAGA Republicans Hate Robin Vos

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos. File photo by Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who often declines to respond to questions from media in the state, rolled out the red carpet for the liberal, British based publication The Guardian, which claims a world-wide readership of 82 million, including 39 million in the United States. The story is entitled “A Wisconsin rightwinger’s fall from conservative grace: ‘The Maga crowd despises him.” It is not long on new information for those who follow politics in Wisconsin, but is still a fun read.

Probably the juiciest quote is Vos on hiring former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to head up an investigation of the 2020 election, which turned into an expensive fiasco, costing taxpayers $2.5 million while coming up with nothing but a rehash of already disproven claims about the presidential election. “One of my biggest regrets was hiring Gableman,” Vos admitted. “He was way wackier than I thought. He was disappointing. He was inept. He was way worse for the system.”

The admission that Gableman was wackier than Vos thought is revealing, letting us know that he picked someone who would please Republican MAGA diehards, but wasn’t likely to do a good job. And Vos, like any veteran political tactician in Wisconsin, knew full well there were no widespread voter fraud, even as he threw a bone to the MAGA folks by claiming there were some election irregularities.

Vos has been forced to do this, the story notes, because he “is fighting elements of his party that rejected the results of the 2020 election and have come to view him not as a hardline conservative who has done more than almost anyone else to strengthen Republicans’ power in the state, but as a corrupt establishment hack complicit in Trump’s undoing…

“‘There’s a segment of the Maga crowd who despises him, because they adamantly believe President Trump was cheated,’ said a veteran Wisconsin GOP operative, who spoke anonymously given his role within pro-Trump circles. ‘Where he is right now is kind of emblematic of the fight going on within the Republican party – here in Wisconsin and across the nation.’”

This is a guy who was a Young Republican who supported Gov. Tommy Thompson and still talks to him every week, he noted, and roomed with Reince Priebus at UW-Whitewater. As Assembly Speaker he was an important player getting Gov. Scott Walker‘s conservative agenda passed, he “helped push through one of the most restrictive voter identification laws in the nation,” and after Walker was defeated led the way in helping write and pass the infamous lame duck laws that still constrain the power of Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul. Democratic critics have assailed him as “Boss Vos” (something The Guardian missed) and he has done all he can to shield the gerrymandered, 22-year Republican legislative majority from any public record requests. “When it comes to sunshine in government, Robin Vos is the prince of darkness,” said journalist Bill Lueders, the president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, who can always be counted on for punchy quotes on this subject.

Yet Vos, who has delivered so many victories for his party, has become so hated by MAGA Republicans that he nearly lost the 2022 primary election in his district to a Trump-backed GOP challenger Adam Steen, who lost by just 300 votes. Vos “was roundly booed at the state convention in 2022 for telling the delegates that lawmakers ‘have no ability to decertify the [2020] election and go back and nullify it.’ That day, more than a third of the delegates voted to oust him from party leadership.”

All of which explains why Vos seems to go back and forth on so many issues, from the claimed need for election reforms to impeaching Janet Protasiewicz to firing or impeaching Wisconsin Elections Commission leader Meagan Wolfe. He is constantly trying to sound tough on these issues while giving it to the reality that political leaders actually have to follow state law and the Wisconsin Constitution.

Privately Democratic strategists will tell you that Vos is very smart political leader. Democratic congressman Mark Pocan, who previously served as legislator and fellow member of the Joint Finance Committee, formed a friendship with Vos. “I always found him someone that I can have [a] conversation with,” said Pocan. “He’s very effective in knowing how to work his members to get things done.”

“Everybody seems to think that Robin tells everybody in the caucus, ‘You will vote this way, you will do this, you will do that,’ and it’s not that way at all,” noted retired Republican Rep. Kathy Bernier, who served for five years under Vos’s leadership. “He will be always cognizant of the vulnerable members of his caucus.”

Indeed, in a different, less partisan era, Vos might have been heralded statewide as a very effective political tactician. But GOP operatives like Vos helped bring in this vicious era personified by Trump by passing one of the most partisan gerrymanders in the country, which has rewarded extremism and punished those who dare to compromise. In the last election he was hoist with his own petard.