The Perils of ‘Cross-Partisanship’
A new Wisconsin group seeks to protect the vote—but its leaders are unwilling to call out Donald Trump’s continuing lies about 2020.
DONALD TRUMP HAS MADE ONE THING perfectly clear: He intends to win Wisconsin in November, whether or not he gets the most votes.
“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in a May 1 interview. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
Trump, the paper said, “doubled down” on his prior false claims about the 2020 race. “If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” he lied. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”
Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020 by almost 21,000 votes, a result affirmed by two partial recounts, multiple lawsuits, a nonpartisan audit, a review by a conservative law firm, and a costly probe ordered by state Republicans. Yet Trump and his allies continue to make baseless claims that the election was stolen. Now, as the state prepares to host the Republican National Convention in mid-July, there are signs that this apparatus of denial is being primed for use, if needed, after what is expected to be another super-close Wisconsin election.
While GOP operatives who posed as “fake electors” in Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, and Arizona have been charged with felonies, those in Wisconsin, where the scheme was pioneered, seem to have gotten away with barely a slap on the wrist. Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul refuses to say whether an investigation is underway. A liberal law firm called Law Forward settled its lawsuit against the state’s ten fake electors as well as the two attorneys who put them up to it. The electors had to say Biden won and promise to not work as electors in any future election where Trump is on the ballot, and the attorneys, Jim Troupis and Kenneth Chesebro, paid an undisclosed sum. None of the electors or lawyers was required to make any admission of wrongdoing.
Indeed, one of the fake electors, Bob Spindell, continues to serve on the Republican half of the state’s bipartisan elections commission. This he does despite not only his role in the fake elector scheme, but also his widely reported bragging about the success of GOP efforts to drive down the Hispanic and black vote in Milwaukee.
In late April, it came to light that Andrew Iverson, the newly named executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, worked behind the scenes on Election Day 2020 with a man named Carlton Huffman on a plan to suppress the minority vote in Milwaukee. At the time, Iverson was the head and Huffman the state strategic initiative director of Victory Trump, a joint effort by the re-election campaign of former president Trump and the Republican National Committee to help Trump win Wisconsin. (Again: He didn’t.)
Text messages unearthed by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Dan Bice show Iverson asking Huffman about Souls to the Polls, a project that gives Election Day rides to voters in Milwaukee. He encouraged Huffman to “help get some Trump supporters to participate in” Souls to the Polls by accepting rides they didn’t need to keep them from being available for people who did.
“I’m excited about this,” Iverson wrote Huffman. “Wreak havoc.”
Iverson now claims it was all a joke. Huffman—who lost an earlier job in politics after it was revealed that he had advocated white supremacist and pro-Confederate views in the early 2010s, but who maintains he has turned over a new leaf and left those views and associations behind—insists that it was not a joke. He says Iverson called him twice asking how this effort, dubbed “Operation Ratfuck,” was going.
Two days after the November 3 election, which Trump lost, Iverson was captured on audio telling others at a meeting: “Here’s the drill: Comms is going to continue to fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election. We’ll do whatever they need (inaudible) help with. Just be on standby in case there’s any stunts we need to pull.”
Turns out there would be opportunities galore for such stunts (January 6th, anyone?), just as there will be in the election to come, with Iverson now in charge of the state GOP.
Into this maelstrom of conniving and intrigue steps the Wisconsin Alliance for Civic Trust.
THE WISCONSIN ALLIANCE FOR CIVIC TRUST, which goes by WisACT, was launched at an event in Milwaukee on April 30 and a press conference at the state capitol in Madison on May 7. It joins five other, similar state-based projects being supported by the Carter Center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter and his late wife Rosalyn. The other states are Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, and Michigan.
Like these other state groups and their patron organization, WisACT bills itself as above partisanship; each group has two chairs, one Democrat and one Republican. The Wisconsin co-chairs are David Haynes, a Democrat, who recently capped off a forty-six-year journalism career as opinion editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Scott McCallum, a Republican who served for two years as the state’s governor. (I will note here that I have known Haynes for many years. He is a member of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, an all-volunteer group that works to promote open government; I am the council’s president.)
WisACT is not the only group in Wisconsin pushing back against the erosion of trust in public institutions, especially with regard to elections. Another such effort, Keep Our Republic, is being led by a former Republican state senator, Kathy Bernier. The group has sponsored educational presentations around the state on how elections work and why they can be trusted, with the information being delivered by local clerks directly involved in running them.
WisACT bills itself as “a pioneering community initiative to build bridges across the political spectrum to prevent the erosion of public trust and the rise of political violence.” The idea is to find ways to lower the temperature and mitigate the damage being done to civic institutions and the risks posed to public officials, particularly election workers. It bills itself as “cross-partisan,” meaning that it is open to Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike.
“We are recruiting people like you from across Wisconsin, and from across all political identities, to serve as messengers for better politics and civic engagement,” WisACT wrote in a newsletter sent after the Milwaukee kickoff. “We will give you the tools to counter the voices of a very small minority that is sowing mistrust in our elections and the broader political system.”
Among other things, WisACT plans to hold monthly one-hour Zoom meetings “to help you learn tactics and strategies to bridge divides.” The first is set for May 29. Check the WisACT website for details. The group also seeks to build a “rapid response” capability to identify and correct bad information.
THE MAY 7 PRESS CONFERENCE in the senate parlor of the Wisconsin state capitol was attended by about two dozen people, mostly supporters of the cause. Bernier, the former state senator, was present, as she had been at the Milwaukee event. Only a small handful of journalists turned out.
Former Governor McCallum led things off. “Thank you for joining us today in support of democracy,” he said. “It’s impressive to have this many people here.” He introduced co-chair Haynes, saying they “kind of kid each other” over “how trustworthy can we be, a former politician and a former journalist?” (For the record: Journalists are far more trustworthy than politicians.)
“Why are we here?” Haynes asked, getting right to the point. “I don’t think I have to tell any of you that we live in a highly polarized environment. The polarization, though, is a little bit different than it was in the past, and I think it’s more toxic and worse,” to the point that people in the public eye are being threatened. McCallum, in turn, said the solution was “to provide a platform for people to get actively involved, to stick up for democracy, to stick up for our system.”
Dr. Michael Ford, director of the Whitford Center at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, explained the project’s academic component: five listening sessions with community leaders across Wisconsin that will be used to inform two all-day trainings for “an “informed cohort of trusted community members who can bring some of these tools for strengthening democracy back into their communities.”
McCallum said the goal is “to build an organization statewide, so as issues arise in each community, a large part of the public comes out and stands for democracy, stands behind the institutions.”
Then it was time for questions. The Washington Post’s Patrick Marley, a top-notch Wisconsin reporter who worked for many years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, noted that Trump, in his interview with that paper, had suggested he might claim the 2024 election is rigged, as he did last time.
“If you’re trying to make your organization a bipartisan or cross-partisan organization,” Marley wondered, “how are you going to respond to rhetoric like that if it escalates and are you worried that if you respond in a forceful way that you will then be perceived as a partisan organization and turn off Republican voters you might otherwise be able to engage?”
McCallum gave a boilerplate answer that WisACT is trying to draw people into the process.
Marley tried again: “Are you going to speak out against rhetoric like [Trump used] if it continues or escalates?”
McCallum dodged again: “We’re hoping a majority of people are willing to stand up and say, ‘We’re making sure that this is going to be a fair and honest election. And we’re participating in it, and we’re going to be monitoring it.’”
I had a question: “So how about right here, right now? Trump said last week to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he won the Wisconsin election, that that was a sure thing. He refused to say he would accept the outcome of the upcoming election. Do you condemn that?”
McCallum: “We’re looking to the future.” He said the courts had upheld the 2020 election result, and people needed to respect that. But, he added, genuflecting on some unseen altar, “as we know, there were things that were not entirely by the book in the last election.” I asked for an example and McCallum brought up the use of absentee ballot dropboxes, which a conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court decided to ban after the fact—a decision a new liberal-led court is likely to overrule.
I asked McCallum if the bad things that happened in the last election had corrupted the results. He replied: “The Supreme Court decided they didn’t.”
“What did you decide?” I asked.
Haynes jumped in to say that WisACT “is going to speak out about dis- and misinformation. If a candidate is lying about something that happened, or if a candidate is saying things that can’t be proven with evidence, we’re going to say something about that.” He said both co-chairs believed that Biden won the election. (Again: He did.) “But it’s also true, as Scott mentioned, that we’re looking to the future.”
Marley said this messaging left him perplexed. The group was saying it would call out misinformation but when given the chance says “we’re looking toward the future.” The issue that was raised was not about the past; it was about the present. Trump “was in the state last week lying about 2020. Governor McCallum, you won’t say you condemn that?”
McCallum reiterated his point about getting people involved in the process, adding, “I’m hoping that we have enough people in the state of Wisconsin, including in each community, that speak out when the system isn’t working, when you’ve got people attacking the system.”
Marley: “We had someone attacking the system last week.”
McCallum: “And you got people speaking out against it.”
Me: “Not here.”
IT WENT ON LIKE THAT. Bernier, the former state senator, also made a comment about irregularities in the last election. Haynes went on to note that people on both sides of the political divide are “sowing distrust in our institutions,” which is why “part of what WisACT needs to do is to stand up for truth in politics.” But, he asked, “Does that mean that we’re going to call on politicians not to use hyperbole or do what politicians always do? No.”
But the problem with Trump and his followers is not that they use hyperbole but that they lie, and that they intend to lie again. To counter criticism over Trump’s election denialism by noting there were problems with how the last election was administered even though those issues had no effect on the outcome is to cloud the issue and give Trump a pass he has not earned.
Moreover, saying you’ll stand up for the truth in politics only matters if you do it. And WisACT, in one of its first opportunities, failed to do so. Neither McCallum or Haynes specifically condemned Trump’s untruthful remarks.
In an email afterward, I asked Haynes whether this was an oversight. He got together with McCallum and they replied with a statement that never mentioned Trump but called for people of both parties to “put aside divisive rhetoric” and “collectively agree to work for higher standards.” They stressed that people need to defend the electoral process by getting involved. So no, it was not an oversight; Trump was getting a pass.
WisACT and other such groups serve a valuable purpose and deserve public support. And they’re certainly right that restoring trust in institutions will require cross-partisan solutions. But it is emphatically not a cross-partisan problem. Democrats may have raised concerns about past elections but they present no counterpart to Trump’s Big Lie. Joe Biden didn’t instigate an attack on the U.S. Capitol. Not even RFK Jr. is suggesting he’ll reject the election results if he doesn’t win.
I hate loyalty tests, right up to and including “Do you renounce Satan?” (Do you really need to ask?) But the fact is that no one poses more of a threat to American democracy than Donald Trump. If we are going to protect our public institutions against that threat, we all need to call him out on his lies, loudly and clearly.
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