Election conspiracy theorist Timothy Ramthun enters race for governor, putting Donald Trump’s false claims on the 2022 ballot
KEWASKUM – State Rep. Timothy Ramthun entered the race for governor Saturday, ensuring 2022 will be all about 2020.
The Campbellsport Republican brought election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell to a high school auditorium in Kewaskum to make his pitch to voters, an argument that relies on the impossible and illegal endeavor of revoking Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes for President Joe Biden.
“He will be the best governor Wisconsin ever had,” Lindell said from a lectern festooned with the green, yellow and white logo of Kewaskum High School, where Ramthun played basketball about four decades ago.
Lindell was the keynote speaker at a rally scheduled to last three hours that brought supporters from all over Wisconsin to fill a school auditorium, and then some.
The crowd clapped and hollered as Lindell detailed how former President Donald Trump’s election loss that has been confirmed by judges, audits, reviews and studies should have been overturned but was thwarted by establishment Republicans and conservatives.
“You needed Fox (News) to pull this off,” he said. “They go silent — our voices that we trusted to bring this all out were gone.”
The Wisconsin Republican base remains focused on the 2020 election and how such contests will be carried out in the future — an issue that has fueled rage against Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who earned boos Saturday from the crowd, over his efforts to probe the last presidential election.
More:A Republican base focused on the 2020 election turns on Assembly Speaker Robin Vos
The issue of elections has been central to the campaign for governor and only stands to grow with Ramthun’s entrance to the race. The other major Republicans in the race — former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and management consultant Kevin Nicholson — have said they would dissolve the state’s bipartisan Elections Commission. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers basked the commission.
Ramthun shakes up the GOP primary by wading into the race with former President Donald Trump’s praise and an endorsement from Lindell — support that will energize a conservative base that is focused on election issues and loyal to Trump.
“He’s going to win — 100%. It’s not even going to be close,” Lindell said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “We’re going to get rid of the (voting) machines. In Wisconsin, and nationwide, we’re going county by county. And when you do that, now you’re going to have elections that people get one person one vote.”
Wisconsin remains important to Trump, who began calling the 2020 contest into question before ballots here were even cast and continues to make false claims about an election outcome that has been confirmed by judges, audits and reviews.
Saturday’s rally began with multiple standing ovations and a chant of “Let’s go, Brandon,” the pejorative phrase used by conservatives to mock Biden. It was followed by jokes about Vos of Rochester and Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke of Kaukauna, the two leaders who have done the most to block Ramthun’s efforts to try to recall the state’s electoral votes.
Ramthun’s plans to run have been rumored for weeks. He recently made public a still-under-construction website but took it down late Wednesday after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on it.
He promised on the site to seek an audit of the 2022 election regardless of who wins.
“It’s time we restore confidence in our elections process,” he wrote.
His site included a link to his 72-page PowerPoint presentation on how he plans to rescind the state’s electoral votes, with supporting memos from pro-Trump attorneys. Among them is one drafted by John Eastman, who argued Trump could stay on for a second term and joined the president in addressing a crowd gathered at the Ellipse just before the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Mainstream attorneys from the left, right and middle have said pulling back electoral votes is impossible.
Ramthun tried last month to bring his resolution to the Assembly floor, but his colleagues quickly sent it to a committee controlled by legislative leaders. Steineke of Kaukauna soon after said it would never get out of that committee.
Also last month, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester stripped Ramthun of his lone staffer because Vos said Ramthun had made false claims about him on the 2020 election.
‘The recompense is coming’
In the following days, more than $20,000 was raised on a GiveSendGo donation page for Tristan Johannes, the Ramthun aide who lost his job and was on hand Saturday.
“Without getting into specifics, the recompense is coming,” Ramthun said in a Jan. 24 podcast interview about Vos’ decision to remove Johannes.
“I hear stuff like, ‘you know, the speaker plays chess while everyone else is playing checkers.’ Well, if you have strong intuition and strong discernment in the move-counter move, and anticipate elements of being a good chess player, you would not have done what you did last Wednesday by taking my staff away because you poked the hornet’s nest in this entire state and beyond.”
Ramthun has won support from some Republicans in that dispute, with Kleefisch recently telling a conservative radio host that she disagreed with Vos.
In January, a group of people who appeared to support Ramthun confronted Republican lawmakers in their offices with calls for Vos to be fired. Many said a taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 election launched by Vos was too secretive.
The group surreptitiously filmed two lawmakers as one called for cheating in elections and another slammed a Capitol office door in the face of a man distributing a petition to oust Vos.
Vos’ decision also spurred a handful of county Republican parties in recent weeks to pass resolutions calling for Vos to resign as speaker. At the same time, Ramthun has grown in popularity among Trump loyalists — appearing on a number of far-right podcasts including one hosted by Steve Bannon, a former White House chief strategist under Trump.
“All these Republican legislators, just like in Wisconsin, that didn’t do anything about this election crime. Now, it’s right in front of their face. You’ve got Tim who raised his hand and said we’ve got to do something here,” said Lindell, the chief executive officer of MyPillow.
Lindell last summer hosted a forum in South Dakota to promote his baseless claim that the Chinese hacked the election. Ramthun was one of three Wisconsin Republicans to attend the event.
More:A who’s who guide to the Republican review of Wisconsin’s 2020 presidential election
On Saturday, guests at Kewaskum High School were greeted by Jefferson Davis, the former Menomonee Falls village president who has led an effort to get lawmakers to further scrutinize the 2020 election. He called himself a host but said he had no official affiliation with Ramthun’s campaign.
Davis has organized a rally for Tuesday at the Capitol to try to urge a committee of legislative leaders to schedule a floor vote on Ramthun’s resolution on the state’s electoral votes. Ramthun and Rep. Janel Brandtjen of Menomonee Falls are slated to speak.
“Our goal is to just force a vote,” Davis said in an interview. “We want them on the record.”
Ramthun hosts frequent video updates he calls “The Ramthun Report,” many of which focus on his effort to overturn the 2020 election. In one appearance last month, Ramthun alleged elections in Wisconsin had been mishandled going back a decade.
He invoked the wide-ranging QAnon conspiracy theory last summer by titling one video “The Calm Before the Storm.” The phrase is commonly used by adherents of QAnon who have pushed baseless claims that the government is controlled by a ring of Satanist pedophiles.
Months later, he made light of the reference in another video.
“Last time there was a quietness I think I used the term ‘calm before the storm’ or something like that and here I go, you know, QAnon crap,” he said in that October video.
Bill Glauber of the Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.
Contact Molly Beck at molly.beck@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MollyBeck.
