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 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.
His campaign was born out of ostracization, Ramthun told a packed high school auditorium — a last resort after his Republican colleagues in the Wisconsin State Capitol rebuffed his repeated calls to overturn the last presidential election.
"I need to exhaust all options to address the November 2020 election," Ramthun said from a lectern decorated with the green, yellow and white logo of Kewaskum High School, where Ramthun played basketball about four decades ago.
"Right person. Right role. Right time. It's Tim time.”
Ramthun enters the Republican primary for governor as the second campaign focused on ousting Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, whose decision to remove a full-time staff member from Ramthun's legislative office over false election claims engendered statewide support for the Fond du Lac County lawmaker and his staffer, who received a standing ovation Saturday.
Supporters flashed signs that read "Decertify Now!!" on one side and "Toss Vos" on the other.
Lindell kicked off the three-hour rally, telling the hundreds of supporters from across Wisconsin that Ramthun could shift Wisconsin's electoral votes to former President Donald Trump more than a year after the 2020 election. The event also featured a phoned-in endorsement from Michael Flynn, who briefly served as Trump's national security adviser.
"He will be the best governor Wisconsin ever had," said Lindell, the chief executive offic of MyPillow.
Ramthun declined to be interviewed.
The crowd hollered as Lindell detailed how a review of the election was thwarted by Ramthun's fellow Republicans who control the Legislature. Courts, recounts, reviews and an audit have confirmed Biden won the state.
"You needed Fox (News) to pull this off," Lindell 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. The issue that has fueled rage against Vos, who earned boos Saturday from the crowd because they view his efforts to probe the election as insufficient.
More:A Republican base focused on the 2020 election turns on Assembly Speaker Robin Vos
How elections are run 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 has backed the commission.
Political newcomer Jonathan Wichmann, the first Republican to enter the race for governor, attended Ramthun's announcement. He declined to say why he came or whether he would remain in the race.
Kleefisch and Nicholson offered no comment on Ramthun's entry into the race. Evers' campaign accused all the Republicans of trying to divide voters.
“The Republican candidates in this race are so desperate to divide our state, and even their own party, that they’ll embrace radical conspiracies and pander to a disgraced pillow salesman instead of doing what’s best for our state," Evers campaign spokesman Sam Roecker said in a written statement.
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 the outcome.
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 and Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke, the two who have done the most to block Ramthun's efforts to try to recall the state's electoral votes.
Vos last summer hired former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman to conduct a review of the election. He has given him a taxpayer-funded budget of $676,000. Ramthun contended more needs to be done and said Republicans have moved too slowly.
"We hadn't done diddly-squat," he said of his thinking as of last fall. "I really started thinking they were running out the clock on purpose."
Ramthun promised to seek an audit of the 2022 election regardless of who wins.
His campaign website, which briefly was made public days before his announcement, 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 soon after said it would never get out of that committee.
Ramthun's supporters and other critics of the 2020 election plan to gather at the Capitol on Tuesday, in part to urge that committee to take up Ramthun's resolution.
'The recompense is coming'
Tristan Johannes is now playing a key role in Ramthun's campaign, after quitting his legislative job when Vos reassigned him from Ramthun's office to Steineke's.
More than $20,000 was raised on a GiveSendGo donation page for Johannes in the days following Vos' action.
"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."
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.
As with Ramthun's backers, Kleefisch recently told a conservative radio host that she disagreed with Vos on how he treated Johannes.
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.
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 officials 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 helped organize the rally that will be held Tuesday at the Capitol that is aimed at getting Ramthun's resolution to the Assembly floor. Ramthun and Rep. Janel Brandtjen of Menomonee Falls are scheduled 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.