Donald Trump's stolen election message was 'already honed' by Wisconsin Republicans: op-ed

The rigged election message that former President Donald Trump made his own was borrowed from the GOP in Wisconsin, according to an op-ed in The Guardian Wednesday.

The state has honed gerrymandering to win supermajorities despite losing the popular vote, it said. With the election of liberal Janet Protasiewicz to the state supreme court, that tide seemed to be changing – but Republicans are now determined to impeach her in an effort to hold on to power, according to The Guardian's Andrew Gawthorpe.

Even though Protasiewicz hasn't heard a single case yet, Republicans are pushing to investigate her on "spurious charges," Gawthorpe writes, adding that Donald Trump's election denial rhetoric was "already honed" by Wisconsin Republicans long before 2020 came about.

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According to Speaker of the State Assembly Robin Vos, the gerrymandering is fair because, “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority.” Gawthorpe contends that since Madison and Milwaukee are the parts of the state with the largest concentration of non-white voters, Vos' comments reveal that the Wisconsin gerrymander is really about race.

"Wisconsin Republicans have been remarkably frank about their intention of ensuring that minorities stay in their place. When Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers powered to victory in 2018 with massive wins in Madison and Milwaukee, the Republican legislature used a lame-duck session to strip him of much of his power," Gawthorpe writes. "Not content with that, Evers’ Republican opponent in 2022, Tim Michels, promised that if he was elected, then Republicans in Wisconsin 'will never lose another election.'"

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Gawthorpe goes on to write that Republicans’ plan to impeach Protasiewicz "is nakedly hypocritical," since they argue that Protasiewicz "cannot give unbiased rulings in gerrymandering cases – despite the fact that numerous other Wisconsin state supreme court justices, including Republicans, have also received party donations and ruled on cases with political implications."

Gawthorpe said, "When Trump argued that he was the real winner of the election because the votes of people living in Democratic-leaning urban areas were somehow fraudulent and should not count, he was repeating arguments that Wisconsin Republicans had already honed."

Read the full op-ed over at The Guardian.