The Capitol Times
Opinion | Wisconsin Republican governor’s race: dumb
and dumber
·
Feb 22, 2022
It is common to assert that all politicians are
cynical liars who arrange their pronouncements solely to fool gullible voters
into supporting them. But that’s an unfair characterization. Surely, some
politicians are transparently dishonest — Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton come to
mind. But there are others whose transgressions are rooted in ignorance, or
outright stupidity.
When faced with the choice of whether to identify a
candidate as a liar or a fool, the generous course is to give the contender the
benefit of the doubt and assume that they mean what they say. In other words,
if a politician says something that is quantifiably dumb, the polite response
is to assume that they must be, well, dumb.
So let us conclude that the Republican candidates for
governor of Wisconsin who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020
presidential election — nationally and in Wisconsin — are ignoramuses. Rather
than suggest that they are lying in order to score partisan points, let’s
assume that they simply do not understand that:
• Biden was elected president with a margin of more
than 7 million votes over Trump. Running against an incumbent who shamelessly
exploited all the advantages of his position, Biden secured a higher percentage
of the vote than any challenger to a sitting president since Franklin
Delano Roosevelt upended Herbert Hoover in 1932. Notably, Biden’s winning
percentage in 2020 was a full five points higher than the percentage Trump’s
obtained in 2016.
• Biden secured a higher level of Electoral College
support — 57% — than George W. Bush got in 2004 or 2000, than Jimmy Carter got
in 1976, than Richard Nixon got in 1968, or than John Kennedy got in 1960.
Indeed, Biden finished with a better Electoral College percentage than a dozen
presidents who were elected over the past 231 years, including John Adams and
Thomas Jefferson.
• Biden flipped five states that had voted for Trump
in 2016, including Wisconsin, and won the Electoral College with a comfortable
306 to 232 advantage. As a footnote, when Trump prevailed in 2016 by a similar
margin, the former president claimed he was “winning the Electoral College in a
landslide.” Trump’s political counselor, pollster, and chief White House
apologist Kellyanne Conway amplified that remark by announcing: “306.
Landslide. Blowout. Historic.”
Let us also assume that Wisconsin’s denialists do not
understand that Biden won the state in 2020 with 49.5% of the vote, as opposed
to the 47.2% that Trump won with in 2016. And that Biden’s winning margin of
just under 21,000 votes was roughly the same as Trump’s 2016 margin. And that
Biden won Wisconsin by more votes in 2020 than John Kerry did in 2004 or Al
Gore did in 2000.
Lastly, let’s assume that they are unaware that
official counts and recounts, courts, audits, reviews and multiple court
rulings have affirmed the Wisconsin results. And that they were not listening
when conservative Republican U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson acknowledged Biden won
Wisconsin and “that we should respect our system of individual state
certification of election results, and that in Wisconsin, there is nothing
obviously wrong with the statewide results.” Or when Republican Assembly
Speaker Robin Vos declared, “Do I believe, in the end, that Joe Biden won the
election? Yeah, I think he did. There’s no doubt he’s the president. That’s
where we are."
Against the overwhelming weight of evidence supporting
the fact of Biden’s victory, it is entirely fair to suggest that politicians
who deny that reality, such as state Rep. Timothy Ramthun, meet the dictionary
definition of an ignoramus: “an utterly ignorant person.” A newly-announced
contender for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, Ramthun wants the
Legislature to withdraw the state’s electoral votes from Biden’s column as part
of a broader effort to undo the 2020 election result.
That, as experts in election law from across the
partisan and ideological spectrum explain, is sheer lunacy. There is no
evidence of the widespread fraud Ramthun rants about. What he is saying is
simply wrong, and yet he appears to be absolutely sincere and certain in his
assertions.
The most generous conclusion is that he’s a fool.
But how to explain Rebecca Kleefisch? Unlike Ramthun,
Kleefisch is a former television news reporter and anchor who served two terms
as the state’s lieutenant governor and is now bidding for the top job with an
endorsement from former Gov. Scott Walker. Last September, during an appearance
on WISN-TV’s “UpFront,” Kleefisch was asked if she thought Biden had won
Wisconsin.
She replied, “I do.”
In an interview last week on WTMJ-AM radio, Kleefisch
was again asked who won the 2020 election. She refused to repeat her direct
answer. Instead, she referenced convoluted investigations being conducted by a
pair of Republican partisans who have embraced fully discredited conspiracy
theories about the 2020 election: former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael
Gableman and state Assembly Elections Committee chair Janel Brandtjen.
“I think right now, we have two ongoing
investigations to make that determination,” replied Kleefisch. “One under
Michael Gableman, one under Janel Brandtjen — I am watching in real time live
with you what those audits are yielding.”
There will be those who claim that Kleefisch, as a
former journalist and statewide elected official, is cynically trying to appeal
to Republican base voters who might be drawn to Ramthun. But that’s essentially
saying that she’s a liar, which isn’t very nice at all.
So let’s assume that she somehow forgot what she knew
in September and is now as ignorant as her newly announced rival — giving
Republican primary voters a choice between two candidates who are best
identified as dumb and dumber.
John Nichols is associate editor of The
Capital Times. jnichols@captimes.com and
@NicholsUprising.