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      In Wisconsin, Governor’s Race Stand Between G.O.P. and Near-Total Power

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      KAUKAUNA, Wis. — Nowhere in the country have Republican lawmakers been more aggressive in their attempts to seize a partisan edge than in Wisconsin. Having gerrymandered the Legislature past the point that it can be flipped, they are now pushing intensely to take greater control over the state’s voting infrastructure ahead of the 2024 presidential contest.Two pivotal elections in the coming months are likely to decide if that happens.The soaring stakes of the first, the November race for governor, became clear last week when Tim Michels, a construction magnate endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, won the Republican primary.His victory raised the prospect that Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who has vetoed a range of Republican voting bills, could soon be replaced by a Trump ally who has embraced calls to dismantle the state’s bipartisan election commission, invoked conspiratorial films about the 2020 election and even expressed openness to the false idea that Mr. Trump’s loss can still be decertified.The second election, an April contest to determine control of the narrowly divided Wisconsin Supreme Court, could be even more important.This year alone, the court’s 4-to-3 conservative majority has upheld the most aggressive partisan gerrymander of state legislative districts in the country, prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voters returning absentee ballots, and blocked Mr. Evers from making appointments to state agencies.The Wisconsin Supreme Court has prohibited the use of most drop boxes for voters returning absentee ballots, forcing them to vote by mail or in person.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesAnd three of the four conservative justices on the court voted to hear Mr. Trump’s objections to the 2020 election, which could have led to overturning Wisconsin’s results. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 20,000-vote victory in the state stood only because Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, sided with the court’s three liberals.Electing a liberal justice to replace the retiring conservative, Justice Patience D. Roggensack, would give Wisconsin Democrats an opportunity to enact a host of measures that currently have no shot at passing in the Republican-led Legislature. Bringing new lawsuits through the courts, they could potentially undo the gerrymandered legislative districts; reverse the drop box decision; and overturn the state’s 1849 law criminalizing abortion, which went back into effect in June when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.Wisconsin’s next two elections are inexorably linked. Mr. Michels has said that he will seek to change the state’s voting laws on his first day as governor. If he is indeed elected and moves quickly, new voting procedures could be in place before a new justice is elected to a 10-year term in April — and the court combined with Mr. Michels would have wide leeway to set voting rules for the 2024 presidential election, when Wisconsin is widely expected to again be a central presidential battleground.“If they’re going to cherry-pick things that they know will depress a Democratic vote, it will absolutely impact every Democrat, including Joe Biden,” Mr. Evers said in an interview on Thursday. Referring to Mr. Michels, he added, “His election certainly would focus on depressing the vote of Democrats, no question about it.”Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, has vetoed a range of Republican voting bills, including measures to give the Legislature greater control over elections.Youngrae Kim for The New York TimesDuring the primary campaign, Mr. Michels promised to replace the Wisconsin Elections Commission with an agency that would effectively be under the control of Republicans. And while he never explicitly endorsed decertifying Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election, Mr. Michels did not rule it out, either, saying enough to appease Mr. Trump — who has repeatedly demanded such a move.At campaign stops and during primary debates, Mr. Michels invoked films about the 2020 election that propagate conspiracy theories falsely suggesting that Mr. Trump was the real winner. He claimed without evidence that there had been fraud in the state and pledged to prosecute the perpetrators.“I’ve seen the movies ‘2000 Mules’ and ‘Rigged.’ And I’ll tell you, I know that there was a lot of voter fraud,” Mr. Michels said at a recent rally in Kaukauna, a small industrial city in the state’s politically swingy Fox Valley. “When I am sworn in as governor, I will look at all the evidence that is out there in January and I will do the right thing. Everything is on the table. And if people broke the law, broke election laws, I will prosecute them.” More

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      Why Wisconsin Is the Most Fascinating State in American Politics

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      What happens there in November will offer a preview of the political brawls to come.Wisconsin has long been a crucible of American politics. It remains so now.It’s where two once-powerful senators, Joseph McCarthy and Robert La Follette, defined two of the major themes we still see playing out today — what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style,” in McCarthy’s case, and progressivism in La Follette’s.It’s a place that has also proved time and again that elections have consequences. McCarthy won his Senate seat in the 1946 midterms amid a backlash against President Harry Truman, who was struggling to control the soaring price of meat as the country adjusted to a peacetime economy. He ousted Robert La Follette Jr., who had essentially inherited his father’s Senate seat.Four years later, McCarthy used his new platform to begin his infamous anti-communist crusade — persecuting supposed communists inside the federal government, Hollywood and the liberal intelligentsia across the country. His rise came to an end after a lawyer for one of his targets, Joseph Welch, rounded on him with one of the most famous lines ever delivered during a congressional hearing: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”The state’s modern political geography, which is rooted in this history, as well as deep-seated patterns of ethnic migration and economic development, is as fascinating as it is complex.A voter casting her ballot this week in Madison, Wisconsin’s capital and a liberal island among the state’s rural conservative areas.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesLa Follette’s old base in Madison, the capital and a teeming college town, dominates the middle south of the state like a kind of Midwestern Berkeley. But unlike in periwinkle-blue coastal California, Madison and Milwaukee — the state’s largest city, which is about 90 minutes to the east along the shores of Lake Michigan — are surrounded by a vast ocean of scarlet.Much of the state remains rural and conservative — McCarthy and Trump country.And as in much of the United States, even smaller Wisconsin cities like Green Bay (the home of the Packers), Eau Claire (a fiercely contested political battleground), Janesville (the home of Paul Ryan, the former House speaker), Kenosha (the hometown of Reince Priebus, the sometime ally and former aide to Donald Trump) and Oshkosh (the home and political base of Senator Ron Johnson) have gone blue in recent decades.The so-called W.O.W. counties around Milwaukee — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — are the historical strongholds of suburban G.O.P. power, and political pundits and forecasters watch election trends there closely to tease out any potential national implications. Other portions of the northwestern area of the state are essentially suburbs of Minneapolis, and tend to toggle between the parties from election to election.The Republican Party’s origins can be traced to Ripon, Wis., where disaffected members of the Whig Party met in 1854 as they planned a new party with an anti-slavery platform. The party’s early leaders were also disgusted by what they called the “tyranny” of Andrew Jackson, a populist Democrat who built a political machine that ran roughshod over the traditional ways politics was done in America.On Tuesday, the state held its primaries, and the results were classic Wisconsin: Republicans chose Tim Michels, a Trump-aligned “Stop-the-Steal” guy, as their nominee to face Gov. Tony Evers, the Democratic incumbent, over Rebecca Kleefisch, the establishment favorite. Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker who has tilted to the right on election issues but who refused to help Trump overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, barely held on to his seat.To understand what’s happening, I badgered Reid Epstein, my colleague on the politics team. Reid has forgotten more Wisconsin political lore than most of us have ever absorbed, and here, he gives us some perspective on why the state has become such a bitterly contested ground zero for American democracy.Our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity:You started your journalism career in Milwaukee, if I’m not mistaken. Give us a sense of what’s changed about Wisconsin politics in the years you’ve been covering the state.In Waukesha, actually. Back in 2002, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel still had bureaus covering the Milwaukee suburbs, and that’s where I had my first job, covering a handful of municipalities and school districts in Waukesha County.A lot of the same characters I wrote about as a cub reporter are still around. The then-village president of Menomonee Falls is now leading the effort to decertify Wisconsin’s 2020 election results, which of course can’t be done. The seeds of the polarization and zero-sum politics you see now in Wisconsin were just beginning to sprout 20 years ago.Republican voters chose to keep Robin Vos, yet nominated Tim Michels. Help us understand the mixed signals we’re getting here.Well, it helped that Michels had more than $10 million of his own cash to invest in his race, and Adam Steen, the Trump-backed challenger to Vos, didn’t have enough money for even one paid staff member.Vos, whose first legislative race I was there for in 2004, nearly lost to a guy with no money and no name recognition in a district where the Vos family has lived for generations. He won, but it was very close. More

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      In Wisconsin, Robin Vos Fires the 2020 Election Investigator He Hired

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      Wisconsin Republicans’ 14-month investigation into the 2020 election results, which cost taxpayers $1.1 million and turned up no evidence of significant fraud, ended on Friday when the top G.O.P. lawmaker who first announced the inquiry fired the man he had entrusted to lead it.Under pressure from former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, had moved in June 2021 to hire Michael J. Gableman, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, to scrutinize the state’s 2020 results.But after weeks of open tension between Mr. Vos and Mr. Gableman — partly over the speaker’s refusal to entertain decertifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state, and partly over Mr. Gableman’s endorsement of a primary challenger to Mr. Vos — the speaker said he was shutting down the investigation. The firing was first reported by The Associated Press.Mr. Gableman has become a key driver of conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin and a ringleader of far-right Republicans’ effort to overturn the state’s presidential results, which cannot legally be done.Mr. Vos told WISN-TV in Milwaukee that he had fired Mr. Gableman by letter and that the two had not spoken in recent weeks.“I really don’t think there’s any need to have a discussion,” Mr. Vos said. “He did a good job last year, kind of got off the rails this year.”Wisconsin Democrats, who have castigated Mr. Gableman and his investigation from its beginning, celebrated his firing and blasted Mr. Vos for hiring Mr. Gableman in the first place.“Finally,” said Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Until now, Mr. Vos had remained publicly supportive of the state-funded investigation, even as Mr. Gableman amplified increasingly outlandish theories about the 2020 election. In March, the former justice presented state legislators with a report that said they should consider decertifying the election — a proposal that has no basis in state or federal law but that has nonetheless been adopted by Mr. Trump and his most ardent supporters in Wisconsin.As Mr. Vos resisted the decertification push, Mr. Gableman continued to promote false election claims. Last week, he endorsed Mr. Vos’s Trump-backed primary opponent, a far-right political neophyte named Adam Steen who came within a few hundred votes of toppling Mr. Vos.At an election-night party after his narrow victory on Tuesday, Mr. Vos said that Mr. Gableman was “an embarrassment to the state.”In the following days, Mr. Vos defended his decision to start the Gableman investigation but signaled that he would soon end it.“There were problems with the 2020 election that we need to fix — all of those things are real,” he said Wednesday on a conservative talk radio show in Milwaukee. “But somehow, Justice Gableman, as the investigation began to come to an end, decided it was more important to play to Donald Trump and to play to the very extreme of our party who thought we could unconstitutionally overturn the election than it was to be responsive to his client, which was the Legislature.”Mr. Vos said in that interview that he had given Mr. Gableman “some very clear direction: ‘You can’t be involved in politics, you can’t go to rallies. We want you to be an independent voice.’ And he broke that.”Yet when Mr. Vos announced the hire in June 2021, he did so at the Wisconsin Republican Party’s annual convention. And he did not publicly discipline Mr. Gableman when the former justice attended a political event with Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has funded many attempts to overturn the election, or when he appeared at campaign events with local Republican Party chapters.Mr. Vos and his spokeswoman did not respond to messages on Friday. Mr. Gableman’s spokesman, Zak Niemierowicz, said he had resigned from the investigation last month. Mr. Gableman did not respond to messages.Francesca Hong, a state assemblywoman from Madison, was one of four Democratic legislators who demanded a state audit of Mr. Gableman’s work on Wednesday. On Friday, she said Mr. Vos was equally responsible.“Michael Gableman, fully enabled & encouraged by Robin Vos, has been nothing but a conspiracy theorist and fraudster,” she wrote on Twitter, “sowing division in our state by undermining the integrity of our elections at a price tag of more than 1 million Wisconsin taxpayer dollars.”Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said in a statement, “Like Dr. Frankenstein, Robin Vos created a political monstrosity that wound up turning on its creator.” More

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      Progressive Ilhan Omar wins closer-than-expected House primary in Minnesota

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      Progressive Ilhan Omar wins closer-than-expected House primary in MinnesotaDemocrats select progressive Becca Balint for Vermont House seat while Trump-backed candidate nominated for Wisconsin governor Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a member of the select progressive group in the House of Representative dubbed the Squad, eked out a closer-than-expected Democratic primary victory on Tuesday night against a centrist challenger who questioned the incumbent’s support for the “defund the police” movement.Pro-Israel groups denounced after pouring funds into primary raceRead moreThe evening went far smoother for another progressive, Becca Balint, who won the Democratic House primary in Vermont – positioning her to become the first woman representing the state in Congress.But Tim Michels, backed by Donald Trump, was projected to win the Republican nomination for governor of Wisconsin, a day after the FBI searched the former US president’s home in Florida reportedly seeking classified documents.Michels defeated rival and former lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, who had been endorsed by Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence.Kleefisch served with right-wing former governor Scott Walker and she conceded to Michels on Tuesday night.Michels has falsely asserted that Trump, rather than Democratic US president, Joe Biden, won the vital swing state in the 2020 presidential election, echoing the former president’s claims.Michels has also vowed to enforce a 19th-century abortion ban that went into effect in Wisconsin after the US supreme court in June eliminated the nationwide right to the procedure with its overturning of the landmark Roe v Wade ruling.He will face the incumbent Wisconsin governor and Democrat, Tony Evers, in November’s election.With a Republican-majority legislature, Michels could push through new abortion restrictions if elected. Evers and his administration have filed litigation challenging the 1849 law while promising not to prosecute doctors who violate it.Other Trump-backed candidates also prevailed.In Connecticut, Leora Levy surprised observers by winning the Republican primary race for the US Senate after being supported by Trump, upending moderate Themis Klarides who had a lot of party support in the state, the Hartford Courant reported.Levy faces the high-profile incumbent Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal.In her Minneapolis district, Omar, who is one of the left’s leading voices in Congress, has defended calls to redirect public safety funding more into community-based programs.She squared off with former city council member Don Samuels, whose north Minneapolis base suffers from more violent crime than other parts of the city.Samuels argued that Omar is divisive and helped defeat a ballot question last year that sought to replace the city police department with a new public safety unit.He and others also successfully sued the city to force it to meet minimum police staffing levels called for in Minneapolis’s charter.But Omar narrowly prevailed on the night, seeking her third term in the House. She crushed a similar primary challenge two years ago from a well-funded but lesser-known opponent.“She’s had a lot of adversity already and pushback. I don’t think her work is done,” said Kathy Ward, a 62-year-old property caretaker for an apartment building in Minneapolis who voted for Omar. “We’ve got to give her a chance.”Two other members of the Squad – Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Cori Bush of Missouri – won their Democratic primaries last week.Meanwhile, Republicans see a pickup opportunity in Wisconsin’s third congressional district, the seat being vacated by the retiring Democratic incumbent Ron Kind.The district covers a swath of counties along Wisconsin’s western border with Minnesota and includes La Crosse and Eau Claire.Republican Derrick Van Orden was unopposed in his primary on Tuesday and has Trump’s endorsement.Van Orden narrowly lost to Kind in the 2020 general election. He attended Trump’s rally near the White House on 6 January 2021, where the then president urged his supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, but has said he never set foot on the grounds of the Capitol during the insurrection that followed.State senator Brad Pfaff topped three other Democrats to secure the party’s nomination and will face Van Orden in the fall. Pfaff, a one-time state agriculture secretary, had previously worked for Kind and received his endorsement.Vermont is the last state in the country yet to add a female member to its congressional delegation. Balint, who immediately becomes the favorite in November’s general election, would also be the first openly gay member of Congress from Vermont.She was endorsed by some of the nation’s leading leftwing figures, including the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.“Vermont has chosen a bold, progressive vision for the future, and I will be proud to represent us in Congress,” Balint said in a statement.Balint is vying to fill the state’s lone House seat, which is being vacated by Peter Welch who is running for Senate and easily secured the Democratic nomination on Tuesday.Welch is trying to succeed retiring senator Patrick Leahy, the US Senate’s longest-serving member.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022Ilhan OmarUS politicsDemocratsRepublicansMinnesotaVermontnewsReuse this content More

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      Meet Mandela Barnes, the 35-Year-Old Candidate Working to Oust Ron Johnson

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      MILWAUKEE — Millennials came of age at a time of crisis. They are the first generation in American history positioned to be worse off than their parents, their economic trajectory forever altered by the economic meltdown of the late 2000s, as the ladders to the middle class were pulled up or broken by the crushing burden of student debt, the decline of unions and skyrocketing health care and housing costs, and as rapid technological changes proved more calamitous than democratizing.Mandela Barnes — who won the Democratic Senate primary in Wisconsin on Tuesday night — understands the challenges this era has thrust upon millennials better than most in his position. Serving under Tony Evers as the lieutenant governor of the state, Mr. Barnes is just 35 years old, and if elected could be only the second senator born in the 1980s.In many respects, he embodies both the flaws and the promise of his generation. Running to be the first Black man to represent a Rust Belt state in the Senate since Roland Burris, he is talented, charismatic and passionate, a fresh face entering the national scene in a party still dominated by an aging political establishment. But like many other millennial politicians now considering higher office, his path was a more progressive one. Mr. Barnes came up as a young State Assembly representative on Milwaukee’s liberal North Side. This fall, he will face challenging questions about his record, like his position on bail reform and the Evers administration’s response to the unrest in Kenosha.But he has the tools he needs to overcome them — he can win this race in part because he has endeared himself to mainstream Democrats as a member of the Evers administration, and because he may be able to tap into a new pool of Wisconsin voters.The fault lines in American politics are sometimes generational as well as ideological, and that is certainly part of the story unfolding in the midterm elections in Wisconsin, where Senator Ron Johnson, the incumbent Republican — a vulnerable one — faces a Democrat roughly half his age.Mr. Barnes is more than a decade younger than any of the other swing state Democrats running for Senate this year. If elected, he and Jon Ossoff of Georgia would be the only millennials in the upper chamber.This generation is not especially well represented in Washington. Just 31 people born between 1981 and 1996 are currently serving in the House. And the Senate is the oldest it has ever been. One-third of its members are over the age of 70, and there are roughly as many members of the Senate in their 80s (seven) as there are under the age of 50 (eight).As Jamelle Bouie wrote recently, the older guard lacks “any sense of urgency and crisis — any sense that our system is on the brink.” Democrats have been delivering legislative wins as of late, such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the Senate’s sweeping health and climate bill, but it’s been an arduous process to get there, stalled by filibusters and parliamentarians and everyday D.C. gridlock.Mr. Barnes, for his part, seems to grasp what the old guard does not. He has put eliminating the filibuster front and center in his campaign and has, throughout his career, talked about the need for Democrats to be more bold, both in their messaging and on “bread and butter issues” like health care, environmental issues and racial injustice.As a young Black millennial from a tough part of a large Midwestern city, he can give voice to issues many in the Senate cannot relate to, and he can do it through lived experience. He’s the son of a United Auto Workers father and a public-school teacher mother, who was born in a troubled, high-poverty area of Milwaukee.Of course, Mr. Barnes has his flaws as a candidate. He has encountered several mini controversies. He was once photographed holding an “Abolish ICE” T-shirt and has worked alongside Representative Ilhan Omar from neighboring Minnesota and called her “brilliant” — the type of thing that could irk centrist swing voters.But some of Mr. Barnes’s controversies are actually reasons that he may understand where younger voters are coming from. He was delinquent on a property tax payment and had an incomplete college degree (both since rectified). He also drew negative headlines for being on BadgerCare (Wisconsin’s Medicaid program) while he was running for lieutenant governor in 2018. But encountering financial challenges and making some early career mistakes sounds like a typical millennial experience. Perhaps if more of our elected officials faced similar challenges, they’d have a better idea of how to help others find solutions to them.Of course, one does not need to be a millennial to understand their problems, and age alone does not guarantee support from younger voters. Many in the demographic gravitated to Bernie Sanders over other, younger candidates in the last two presidential primaries. But Mr. Sanders’s popularity was rooted in the fact that the country he described mirrored the one that millennials had experienced — one in which economic precarity and wealth inequality had transformed the American dream into pure fantasy.To be fair, plenty of other Democratic candidates are harnessing this kind of rhetoric. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania is one example. But because of his relative youth, Mr. Barnes is uniquely well positioned to give voice to the anxieties and problems of his generation: We millennials were introduced to the horrors of school shootings through the massacre at Columbine in our adolescence; now our children go through active shooter drills in pre-K. Our country is not doing enough to address climate change, economic inequality, systemic racism, rapidly eroding reproductive rights, diminishing voting rights or the skyrocketing costs of health care, child care and housing. The list goes on.Wisconsin is more politically complex than it can sometimes appear. The idea that the state can’t stomach a politician as progressive as Mr. Barnes is pure fiction. Liberal candidates have won 10 of the last 11 statewide elections. Like Mr. Barnes, Senator Tammy Baldwin was also accused of being too far left for Wisconsin when she first ran for statewide office a decade ago, and in 2018, she was re-elected by an almost 11-point margin. And while slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the Police” have become unpopular, the Black Lives Matter movement — which Mr. Barnes is a vocal supporter of — is still quite popular in Wisconsin, with a higher favorability rating than almost any state or national politician, according to the most recent Marquette University Law School poll.What’s more, Mr. Barnes has chosen his moment wisely: The state Republican Party is in disarray, riven with bickering over their nominee for governor, mired in an endless battle over the results of the 2020 election and saddled with Mr. Johnson, whose chaotic and conspiratorial comments are already alienating swing voters, tanking his favorability rating to just 21 percent among moderates.If Mr. Barnes can deliver a new kind of message that both speaks to the anxieties of younger generations and harnesses their hope, he has a fighting chance. Wisconsin is one of the nation’s most closely contested swing states, where elections are often decided by tenths of a point.If Mr. Barnes can turn out just a few thousand voters with promises to enact big, bold changes in Washington, he may be able to pull off an upset, beating Mr. Johnson in November. Colleges will be seeing their most normal returns to campus since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and students could be more directly engaged in these midterms than they were in other pandemic elections, especially with heightened activism around abortion. And in Milwaukee, turnout has never reached the levels it did during Mr. Obama’s second presidential election. If Mr. Barnes can reach a sliver of young Black voters and turn them out to the polls, it could be enough to tilt the race in his favor.Wisconsin can often be a bellwether of political change. The Tea Party wave of 2010 made the state a Republican testing ground for hard-right conservative policies that would soon go national. The 2018 election of Tony Evers was in many ways predictive of President Biden’s win two years later. A victory for a young Black millennial politician in this of all states could be a sign that a generational shift in American politics is well on its way.Dan Shafer (@DanRShafer) is a reporter based in Milwaukee. He writes a newsletter about Wisconsin politics, The Recombobulation Area.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      In Wisconsin Primary, G.O.P. Voters Call for Decertifying 2020 Election

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      SHEBOYGAN, Wis. — When she started her campaign for governor of Wisconsin, former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, a Republican, acknowledged that President Biden had been legitimately elected.She soon backtracked. Eventually, she said the 2020 election had been “rigged” against former President Donald J. Trump. She sued the state’s election commission.But she will still not entertain the false notion that the election can somehow be overturned, a fantasy that has taken hold among many of the state’s Republicans, egged on by one of her opponents, Tim Ramthun.And for that, she is taking grief from voters in the closing days before Tuesday’s primary.At a campaign stop here last week, one voter, Donette Erdmann, pressed Ms. Kleefisch on her endorsement from former Vice President Mike Pence, whom many of Mr. Trump’s most devoted supporters blame for not blocking the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6, 2021. “I was wondering if you’re going to resort to a RINO agenda or an awesome agenda,” Ms. Erdmann said, using a right-wing pejorative for disloyal Republicans.Ms. Kleefisch’s startled answer — “don’t make your mind up based on what somebody else is doing,” she warned, defending her “awesome agenda” — was not enough.“I’m going to go with Tim Ramthun,” Ms. Erdmann said afterward.Ms. Kleefisch’s predicament illustrates how Mr. Trump’s supporters have turned fury over his 2020 election loss and the misguided belief that its results can be nullified into central campaign issues in the Republican primary for governor in Wisconsin, a battleground state won by razor-thin margins in the last two presidential elections. G.O.P. candidates have been left choosing whether to tell voters they are wrong or to engage in the fiction that something can be done to reverse Mr. Trump’s defeat.Dozens of Republican voters and activists interviewed across the state in the last week said they wanted to see lawmakers decertify the state’s election results and claw back its 10 electoral votes, something that cannot legally be done. Nearly all of them pointed to a July decision from the conservative-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court, which ruled that drop boxes used to collect ballots during the pandemic were illegal under state law, as evidence that hundreds of thousands of 2020 votes should be thrown out.“Everybody that I’ve talked to voted for Trump,” said Cyndy Deeg, a food industry worker from Larsen, Wis. “He should be reinstated and resume the position, because he never surrendered it.”Cyndy Deeg at a campaign event for Tim Michels in Kaukauna, Wis. Mr. Michels says that if elected, he will consider legislation to decertify the 2020 election results. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThere is no mechanism in Wisconsin law or federal law for a state to retract electoral votes or undo presidential election results two years after the contest, a fact Ms. Kleefisch finds herself explaining to voters, reporters and audiences of televised debates.Her top Wisconsin ally, former Gov. Scott Walker, said Republicans wanted to move on from discussing Mr. Trump’s defeat two years ago.“Across the nation, a great many people who love what the president did are starting to grow tired of hearing about 2020 and want to get focused on winning 2022 and 2024,” Mr. Walker said in an interview.But even as Ms. Kleefisch campaigns on an agenda of restricting voting access and eliminating the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, two Republican rivals promise to do that and more.Tim Michels, a wealthy construction magnate who has been criticized for sending his children to school in New York and Connecticut, where he owns a $17 million home, has been endorsed by Mr. Trump and says that if elected, he will consider legislation to decertify the 2020 results. Mr. Ramthun is the state’s leading proponent of decertification, but polling shows him trailing Ms. Kleefisch and Mr. Michels, who are in a tight race.The winner of the primary will face Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who has vetoed more than a dozen voting bills passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in the last two years. Because of the G.O.P.’s large majorities in the gerrymandered Legislature, a Republican governor would be given a wide berth to change how the state casts and counts votes in the 2024 presidential election.Mr. Michels, who has blanketed Wisconsin’s airwaves with advertisements reminding voters that he is Mr. Trump’s choice, has learned that running as the candidate backed by the former president comes with certain obligations.Mr. Michels has walked back recent statements that angered Trump supporters in Wisconsin.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTwice in recent weeks, he has walked back statements that departed from Trump-wing doctrine.First, Mr. Michels said at a debate that decertifying Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election results — which Mr. Trump himself has repeatedly urged the top Republican in the State Assembly to do — would not be a priority in his administration. He soon corrected himself, saying that he was “very, very fired up about this election integrity issue” and pledging to consider signing a decertification bill if legislators passed one.Then, during a town hall-style debate on Monday night, Mr. Michels was asked if he would support a presidential bid by Mr. Trump in 2024.“I’m focused on this election right now,” he said. “I have made no commitments to any candidates in 2024.”Trump supporters saw the remarks as a betrayal of the former president, and the next day, Mr. Michels corrected himself.“The day President Trump announces that he’s going to run for president in 2024, if he does, I will support him and I will endorse him,” he told supporters Tuesday in Kaukauna.Mr. Michels declined to explain the flip-flop. “I talked about it last night,” he said after the Kaukauna stop, as his aides and supporters physically pushed reporters away from the candidate.Complicating matters for both Ms. Kleefisch and Mr. Michels is Mr. Ramthun, a state assemblyman whose campaign for governor is scoring low in the polls but held in high regard by the state’s most devoted conspiracy theorists. It was Mr. Ramthun, in February, who pioneered the decertification push after Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker, prevented his proposal for a “cyber-forensic audit” of the 2020 election from coming to a vote.Tim Ramthun, a state assemblyman running for governor, is the state’s leading proponent of decertifying the 2020 results.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMr. Ramthun’s campaign is infused with Christian nationalism, presenting him as a messianic figure who will lead the state to correct what he presents as the injudicious 2020 election results.“I’m what you’ve been looking for for decades,” he said at Monday’s debate.Mr. Vos has aggressively tried to restrict voting access in Wisconsin. Along with passing the bills Mr. Evers vetoed, last year he called for felony charges against five members of the state election commission for guidance they issued for voting during the pandemic that he said violated state election law. He also ordered a $1 million investigation into the 2020 election, led by a former State Supreme Court justice, that endorsed debunked conspiracy theories.But as with Ms. Kleefisch, Mr. Vos’s refusal to allow a decertification vote has exposed him to an attack — in his case, from a primary challenger, Adam Steen, who has no paid staff and barely enough money to print and mail his campaign literature.Mr. Steen, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump on Tuesday and was given a prime speaking slot at a Trump rally on Friday night in Waukesha, has built his campaign around decertifying the election and has also said he would seek to make contraception illegal.During a lunch of cheeseburgers and cheese curds, Mr. Steen said he would not have challenged Mr. Vos had Mr. Trump been re-elected.Adam Steen, right, has been backed by Donald J. Trump in his challenge to Robin Vos, the powerful Republican speaker of the State Assembly, who has resisted decertification calls.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“Without the knowledge that I have right now, I don’t think I would be running, because it wouldn’t have been exposed,” said Mr. Steen, who drives a Lincoln Town Car with a commemorative license plate from the 2017 presidential inauguration that says “TRUMP.” “I don’t think there was that catalyst to see those problems without him losing.”Mr. Vos declined to be interviewed. After Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Steen, Mr. Vos issued a statement reiterating that decertification is impossible.The party’s grass-roots base is not convinced.In April, a poll from Marquette University Law School found that 39 percent of the state’s Republicans backed decertification. Since then, momentum for decertification has built, especially after the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s drop box decision. The chairwoman of the Assembly’s elections committee, along with dozens of the state’s county Republican Parties, have called for the election to be decertified.Dennis Gasper, the finance director of the Sheboygan County Republican Party, which last month passed a resolution calling for legislators to withdraw the state’s 10 Electoral College votes, said he believed elected officials and Ms. Kleefisch were resisting voters’ decertification calls to spare themselves grief in the news media.“You know, the press is very powerful, and if they would say what they thought, they would be held up as being a little bit crazy,” Mr. Gasper said.Ms. Kleefisch has faced pressure from Republican voters on election issues even though she is campaigning on an agenda of restricting voting access and eliminating the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesMs. Kleefisch is left trying to navigate a party that, not long ago, considered her local royalty.A former Milwaukee television reporter, she was Gov. Scott Walker’s deputy when he led Wisconsin Republicans to revoke most public employees’ collective bargaining rights, a political earthquake in state politics that led to weeks of protests and eventually sapped Democrats’ power here for a generation.During two interviews last week, she dismissed the ideas that she had crossed Mr. Trump or that his endorsement of Mr. Michels would be decisive. She said she still supported the former president and praised his policies, though she would not commit to backing him in 2024.But she acknowledged that the issue most forcefully driving Wisconsin Republicans in the current post-Trump era is not grounded in reality.“I’m not saying that the passion is imaginary, I’m not saying that the mistrust is imaginary,” she said after her Sheboygan stop. “I’m saying the idea that you can disavow the Constitution and statutes and do things that are not articulated anywhere in law is a lost cause, and there’s no path that is articulated to do that.”Mr. Michels and Mr. Ramthun, she said, are playing with fire by telling voters they’ll deliver something impossible.“It’s irresponsible to pander,” she said. “You’ve got to tell the truth.” More