The Trump GOP's Urge to Purge - WSJ Editorial [View all]

A feature of the Trump-era Republican Party has been its collapse into disarray in swing states like Michigan and Arizona. Next up may be Wisconsin, where a faction of Republicans is trying to purge Assembly leader Robin Vos. On Monday the Trump wing of the GOP announced it had submitted enough signatures to force a recall vote of Mr. Vos, a fellow Republican and the longest serving speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly.

Mr. Vos’s alleged offense is that he didn’t fight hard enough to overturn President Biden’s 2020 election victory in the state. Mr. Trump’s supporters wanted the election decertified, and Mr. Vos had to explain to people unwilling to listen that this wasn’t legally possible. Lawmakers “don’t have the ability to unilaterally overturn the election,” the Speaker said.

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And for what? Mr. Biden won Wisconsin by some 21,000 votes. The reason is that more than 60,000 voters who supported down-ballot GOP Congressional candidates didn’t vote for Mr. Trump. This was the pattern in the suburban areas of several swing states. A study of the 2020 election results by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a highly credible conservative legal group, found “no evidence of widespread voter fraud” and no evidence of significant problems with voting machines.

Speaker Vos’s antagonists are allying themselves with the state’s progressives at a moment of GOP vulnerability. Mr. Vos and other legislators must run this year in new districts ordered by state Supreme Court that are far better for Democrats. The urge to purge the GOP of dissenters is one reason the party has lost so many recent elections. Democrats in the Badger State couldn’t be happier at the spectacle.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/wisconsin-assembly-gop-robin-vos-recall-donald-trump-michael-gableman-d186f080?st=cndkc0g5jhotxaa&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

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