Ron Johnson
And what can we learn from the Republicans who are not running for the state Senate?
This is Inside Wisconsin Politics, I'm WPR Capital Bureau Chief Sean Johnson, here with WPR Capital
Reporter Anya Van Wachtendank, PBS Wisconsin Senior Political Reporter Zach Schultz and
WPR Political Reporter Rich Kramer in Eau Claire.
Hey everyone.
Hello.
Hey.
So let's start with what Senator Johnson said this week about something that President
Trump said.
And I mean, I think we've all gotten pretty used to, especially in swing state Wisconsin,
hearing pretty broad claims about what's happening in elections or changes that people want
to see, especially President Trump.
But this is pretty big even by his standards.
First of all, Rich, what did the president say about nationalizing elections?
So during a podcast interview, President Trump mentioned that Republicans should just
take over election administrations.
He talked about nationalizing it.
He also mentioned 15 different states where this might happen or where he'd like to see
it happen, but he didn't specify which ones.
So that's gotten a lot of people's attention based on some of those comments you referenced
from the president.
We had the 2020 situation with the president denying the outcome essentially, and that
led to January 6, the riot at the US Capitol.
So definitely people are paying attention to what President Trump said.
Yeah.
So you mentioned it.
15 states, we don't know which ones, but we just kind of assume, hey, we're Wisconsin.
One of the most important political states every year, we got to be on that list, right?
So Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson was asked about this at his tele-town hall.
What did he have to say?
Senator Johnson said he wouldn't like to see nationalized elections, but he did offer
some ideas for how to set basic standards across the country.
He talked about the SAVE Act.
Essentially that would require people prove their citizenship before they register to
vote.
To do that, you didn't need documents like a certified birth certificate or a passport,
something that a lot of people might not have access to.
But Senator Johnson went beyond that and also said that he thinks early voting has
gone way too far in this country and that he's generally opposed to mail-in balloting
of absentee ballots.
So it feels like there's a lot to unpack with both what the president said and with
what Senator Johnson said.
I mean, first of all, the idea of nationalizing Wisconsin's elections, how would that work?
I mean, tangibly, what would that mean?
In Wisconsin, it's not really possible without some drastic changes.
First off, they'd have to be the votes to pass it in Congress, which they're not.
And Wisconsin's election system is decentralized, like so many other states.
We have an elections commission that has very little direct oversight over how elections
are run all the way down to like the township level where there may be 30 or 40 voters
and a clerk that works part-time.
That's the beauty of Wisconsin elections and that's why all the conspiracy theories
about fraud can usually be put to rest among people that actually are paying attention
and listening to facts is that you can't rig an election that's run by so many different
people.
The conspiracy is the entire state at this point.
So it really wouldn't work here without some sort of dramatic federal court takeover
that goes too far down the line for what most people can rationally conceive at this point.
You actually did a feature once.
I remember where you talked to a bunch of election clerks who have many duties, as I recall.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, that's the thing with this kind of defederated system is that you have all of
these highly skilled local kind of civil servants, I should say.
And they do all kinds of things that we never think about.
They have to think about the size of the envelopes and they have to be creased in a certain way.
All these little things.
And so that's also like a built experience level.
And so when you make these changes, first of all, there's rules about kind of how far
out you need to make changes to election processes, but then also how do you just get the knowledge
to be able to kind of implement these nitty gritty kind of administrative details.
And so, you know, we can't read the president's mind here, but we do know that we're an election
cycle where there's a lot of talk that this might be a democratic wave year and everybody's
always trying to predict waves.
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn't.
But if you look at the polling generically right now, it's shaping up that way anyway.
Do you think this is sort of a way of putting down a marker and saying that this is the
kind of thing we're going to fight over in court if things don't go our way?
Well, it's definitely setting the table for conspiracies if Republicans lose in the fall
because the easiest way to convince your base that they never lost it was stolen from us,
which we saw in 2020.
There are still people holding on to this idea that Donald Trump had the election stolen
from him.
And there's still conspiracies about ballot dumps from the city of Milwaukee running around
the internet just this week having to be debunked yet again.
And so what's the best way to set your base up for that?
Tell them right now it's going to be stolen ahead of time that we have to nationalize
it if we don't do it.
But this is also another example of Donald Trump shoots from the hip and then everyone
else has to take it seriously and explain either why it is or is not possible.
And we've been doing that since he came down the Golden Escalator 10 years ago.
It's not a new thing that we have to sit there and say, well, would it really be possible
to do this?
And sometimes it's farcical, but we have to take it seriously because so many of the
things previously in politics that we didn't think were possible.
He has pushed through somehow or they've materialized enough for people to take it seriously.
And so that's what we have to do talking about nationalizing elections when everyone
knows that's not how they're running Wisconsin.
Rich?
Yeah, I'd also like to mention we also just recently saw the U.S. Department of Justice
or the FBI essentially raid a county clerk's office in Fulton County, Georgia and seize
2020 ballots.
We don't know what's going on with that or why it happened, but that was one of the
places where President Trump made a lot of noise about widespread fraud.
And in that Ron Johnson town hall, he brought up the 2020 election too.
I mean, I think he brought that up in his own.
I feel like that is going to be the year in the election that we hear about for the
rest of our careers seemingly.
And there were a handful of swing states that were involved in them.
Wisconsin obviously being one of them, Fulton County, Georgia, these kind of the blue centers
of these swing states.
And so I don't think that we will be exempt from whatever goes on over the next election
cycle.
It does feel that way.
So turning to the state legislature, Anya, there was a group of Democratic lawmakers
and activists who introduced a big bill this week would legalize marijuana for medicinal
and recreational purposes.
This is something that if you look at polling, has widespread support among both parties.
It's one of those issues.
And so why did you say in your story about this bill that it is doomed at the Capitol?
Yeah, I mean, a very astute listener pointed out to me that they made this introduction
on Groundhog Day and that this is a thing that happens every single year is that the
Democrats introduced a full legalization bill.
Governor Tony Evers also in his proposed budget every two years has proposed legalizing marijuana.
And it won't happen because Republicans who are in leadership in the legislature.
So not every Republican lawmaker, but Republican leadership says we don't want it.
So there is some amount of leadership support for medicinal marijuana.
There is not unity among those leaders in terms of what it will look like.
There is certainly no support among the most powerful Republicans for recreational marijuana.
And so the Democrats will do this introduction.
It won't go anywhere.
We might see a medicinal bill maybe come forward in the Senate.
Session is also about to end in a couple of months.
So I don't necessarily have high hopes for that.
I think the authors actually don't have high hopes for that either.
This just ends up being a little bit of a marketing or a messaging kind of move from Democrats
in the election year.
Yeah, I was going to say the session could wrap up in the assembly as soon as this month
they may wrap up their business.
They're both going to be done by March at some time.
Is that how you get bills to become law when you want it to happen?
You get bills to become law by saying this is what we would do if we were empowered.
The message really is to the voters for this fall, saying Democrats for the first time
in a long time have a legitimate chance at gaining control of one or both houses, obviously
the governor's race is up for grabs as well.
If they had full power, you would fully expect to see a real discussion at the Capitol about
medicinal marijuana or fully recreational legal weed.
And what would that look like?
Who would run it?
Would it be state-run dispensaries?
Would it be a wide open market?
Whose state model will be followed?
Those are all the conversations that have happened over the past decade.
And Sean, you and I were talking, we covered this.
The last time Democrats were in power when the conversation hadn't quite shifted to fully
legalized, Democrats were still talking medicinal then.
Yeah, I got to say this sort of tentative atmosphere when it comes to moving forward
of the legalization, either medicinal or otherwise, has been around for a long time.
It's very, very there with Republicans.
They do not want to move on recreational, obviously, and seem to not want to really
move on medicinal, or they could have done it by now.
But yeah, it was the 2009 session, I think, we were speaking about two.
It was probably 2010, the end of that session.
It would have been 2010, and Democrats had, believe it or not, the governor's office,
the assembly, and the Senate, they could do what they want, and they just got cold feet
over that one, even though it was very much a passionate cause for some of their members.
Well, and it's become so much more normalized since then.
So a majority of states have a medicinal marijuana program.
I think 22 have a recreational program, including our neighbors in Minnesota, Michigan, and
so Illinois.
And so one of the arguments, again, from both sides of the aisle is that Wisconsin is losing
money when people go across the border to reach those products.
And so that argument has been compelling, I think, to some Republicans, a lot of Democrats,
but again, not the Republicans who actually get legislation across the finish line.
And just an aside here, right now, you know, we've got these other products that are essentially
marijuana, but derived from hemp, that are all over the state.
I mean, some gas stations sell these products, so it's just kind of an interesting paradox.
So you alluded to this, whether or not this actually becomes legalized in Wisconsin or,
you know, medicinal, you name it, it might be the next legislature that decides that.
And the next governor, we could keep saying this year after year, potentially, on this
issue.
We're three governors into that.
We could, yeah.
But we know it's not happening now.
This won't even get a hearing.
I think, yeah, yeah.
And pretty clearly, in fact, a few sessions ago, when there was a hearing on a medicinal
bill, they held it after the legislature had adjourned.
It's one of those issues where they acknowledge we got to talk about it.
Our constituents are talking about this issue.
They just don't seem to want to know what they want to do with it.
But the next legislature, there is some movement in terms of what might happen in the state
Senate, where Republicans currently have an 18 to 15 majority.
We had a couple of retirements recently, Rob Hutton in Brookfield and Steve Noss in
Whitewater, very different lawmakers.
I guess just kind of an open question to all of you, but I'll start with you, Zach.
Like, what do we make of this?
Does this matter that we see these retirements coming up here as we try to read the tea leaves
of 2026?
They matter for different reasons.
Hutton is in one of the most vulnerable Republican Senate districts.
The number one target, arguably, from Democrats, the number one expected pickup, they need
two to flip the chamber.
He's number one.
The fact that he's leaving does make it easier.
It's also a sign that he may be looking at and saying it's an uphill battle.
A lot of politicians across party lines love to retire before they lose.
No one wants to go out as a loser.
They all just slip away a cycle early if they can, when they know what's coming.
So whether he's leaving for that reason or because he's just sick and tired of the capital,
he can't answer.
But Democrats certainly were pushing the message of this show as Republicans think they're
going to be losing this fall.
Certainly that seat.
Nas was not really in danger of losing his seat.
He is a completely striking example, and he's one of the most conservative Republicans
in the Capitol and that he's willing to buck his own party over and over, voting against
multiple budgets, forcing Republicans in the Senate to find Democrats to help pass budgets.
He is a true believer in what he says and stands by his vote.
Even leaving sends a different message of either he thinks they may lose and doesn't
want to be in the minority, as you mentioned before, Sean.
Or it could simply be he's done with that kind of politics.
And what will be most interesting is to see who takes that spot because one of the things
that we saw over and over in the Walker era is when a Republican Senate seat opened up.
It was the most conservative assembly member from that district, that won.
So over time, Robin Voss and the Assembly saw most of his most strident Republicans move
and then become state senators.
Sometimes to his chagrin, those weren't people that he always got along with, and that created
that relationship that has existed now for more than a decade of how assembly Republicans
and how Senate Republicans have gotten along.
So it will be interesting to see who takes his place in that seat.
Very likely conservative, though, as you look at the numbers for those districts, I think
Kamala Harris won the Hutton seat by close to six points.
So that is a very good seat for Democrats.
I want to say Steve Noss in his district, Donald Trump won by 27 or 28.
So even in the bluest of waves, that is probably going to be a conservative district.
Yeah, I mean, I think Democrats have been trying to kind of spin this as like, oh, Republicans
are running scared.
They know we're going to sweep the legislature.
They know we're going to have this takeover.
And I think that there might be an argument to be made that the Hutton seat is going to
be a really competitive fight.
And so a person could decide, you know, maybe I don't want to.
Maybe I just want a major legal settlement.
And I don't want to participate in a Rob Hutton, this did happen.
He did win a large sum of money.
Yeah.
So maybe he wants to kind of, you know, bow out of what might be a dukes out kind of fight.
But I don't think that you can make the same argument for Steve Noss, right?
And so I think that it's actually a little bit more of a nuanced case than just like
the blue wave is coming.
Yeah, he is.
He is 73.
And he has been doing this since 1991, I believe, and has always been kind of that sort of legislature.
Which we're watching a couple more seats in the Senate too.
I mean, it's not just that the Hutton seats going to decide that they need more things
to happen.
Democrats do if they want to flip that chamber.
That's right.
I mean, first of all, they have to defend Jeff Smith, who is a state senator up in my
neck of the woods here near Eau Claire or in Eau Claire representing this area.
So they need to defend that.
But also like you both men, you were all mentioning, they have to win a couple.
They need a net positive gain of two.
If speaking of tea leaves, some campaign finance reports recently offered a little bit
of that.
We saw that Senator Van Wengard only raised $30,000 give or take.
And that's just not the kind of money you raise if you're going to run for reelection.
He is undecided about retirement.
In fact, a person with his office said the fundraising indicates that he hasn't made
a decision yet.
So if that seat opens up, you know, generally open seats are a little more competitive
for say Democrats trying to take over a district that might be a little safer for Republicans.
Yeah, I want to say that when you did a story about that district, Rich, you talked to his
spokesperson and he basically said, you know, Van really doesn't want to think about this
right now.
So that does not sound like somebody who's super eager to run in a highly competitive
race that could determine the balance of the Senate.
That's like another one that Kamala Harris narrowly won.
Yeah, and just more broadly, some of those finance reports from these fundraising committees
in the state assembly and state Senate on the Republican and Democratic side also painted
a little bit of a picture showing some strategy, maybe, again, a little bit of speculation
here.
But a lot of money went into the Republican assembly campaign committee and Democrats were
able to raise more in the state Senate fundraising committees than the Republican counterparts.
So, you know, one could look at that and say, okay, Republicans are going all in on holding
the assembly majority and they don't feel as confident about the Senate majority.
So, Rich, real quick, you did some reporting on congressional fundraising too.
What's gone on in the first and the third congressional districts in Wisconsin, the
third in Western Wisconsin represented by Derek came in, and the first by Brian's style,
those are both by the numbers in theory, competitive, what's happening in practice in terms of
what you're seeing, at least money raising.
So, in practice, it doesn't appear that the first is considered as gettable for Democrats.
So, Brian's style is a good fundraiser.
He ended the last three months of 2025 with $5 million in the bank.
His nearest Democratic competitor had something like $130,000 or maybe even less, just not
really competitive.
In the third district, it has been a bit of an arms race between the Democrat, Rebecca
Cook, and Republican Congressman Derek Van Ordon.
They've both raised around a million dollars every three months that they've reported.
Most recently, Rebecca Cook raised more, around $200,000 more than Van Ordon.
So, it's still going strong in the third district.
All right.
And I know you're working on a story coming up about the Republican primary in the seventh
congressional district real quick before we wrap up here.
Zach, what do you have going on in coming weeks here?
Looking at mining in northern Wisconsin, drilling to explore some of the deposits that
I identified nearly half a century ago to see if they're viable.
All right.
And Anya?
I hate to say it, but I am going in the weeds on marijuana legislation.
There are so many puns.
So many puns.
We'll see how many you cross out of my final draft.
I may add some.
Or that.
It's just a little bit too much fun.
So, you're going to look at the politics that we just talked about and whether it could
happen.
That's right.
I'm looking forward to reading that one.
That will do it for us today.
Thanks for joining us on this week's Inside Wisconsin Politics.
Be sure to follow us on PBSWisconsin.org, wpr.org, YouTube, or wherever you get your
podcasts.
I think the time we end up going to four is when it means there's really not that much
to talk about.