Move forward
Now that an audit of Clark County’s 2020 presidential election results have been completed — and no major signs of fraud or irregularity were found — local Republicans need to move on. This doesn’t just mean accepting that Democrat Joe Biden won last year’s election; it means moving on to next year’s midterm elections, when every member of the House of Representatives and a U.S. Senate seat will be up for grabs.
By accepting that Donald Trump lost the state of Wisconsin, despite clearly dominating in this area, Republicans can move ahead with a strategy to win back seats in Congress. If they continue to clutch at straws and hope they can prove non-existent mass voter fraud, they will make themselves out to be sore losers. Instead, they should be looking ahead to see what can appeal to voters in 2022 and beyond.
Of course, it may be tempting to latch on to a couple of errors that were caught during the Clark County audit. The main problem, which affected both candidates, was people double-voting for their preferred candidate. Instead of fixing the ballot by erasing their write-in, some people inadvertently allowed their ballot to be rejected by the vote-counting machine.
This is an unfortunate turn of events for these voters, but it does not amount to the grand technological conspiracy that some may have been hoping to find with this audit. Still, it’s good to hear that county clerk Chris Jensen will be talking to local clerks about this particular problem so voters in the future won’t have their ballots discarded due to an honest mistake. If the audit did nothing else, it did root out an easily fixable mistake.
However, it did not show a significant undercounting of Trump votes, as some Republican Party members may have expected. Instead, it reconfi rmed that the former president had a strong following among local voters, and still does. The problem is, his statewide appeal fell short of repeating his surprise 2016 victory here in America’s Dairyland.
If the county party wants to show the rest of the party the way forward, perhaps it should be helping develop a platform and a slate of candidates to promote that set of principles. These will surely include legacies from the Trump presidency, such as a strong stance on immigration enforcement and an “America first” trade policy.
However, if the party wants to broaden its appeal, it needs to work on some issues that perhaps the Trump campaign ignored. The former president repeatedly promised, but never delivered on his promise for a replacement to Obamacare. Those who rely on the Affordable Care Act for insurance still have a lot of legitimate complaints about the cost of health insurance on the marketplace. Introducing proposals that would help bring down those costs would go a long way toward rebuilding the party’s nationwide electability.
The Clark County Republican Party would do well to look at its own voters to find an idea worth backing. In November of 2014, just two years before helping send Trump to the White House, a majority of county voters got behind an idea that generally doesn’t fair well among the party’s upper echelons. Nearly 60 percent of the county’s voters said “yes” to an advisory referendum calling on the state “to accept federal funding for the expansion of the Medicaid/Badgercare program in Wisconsin to cover persons up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level.”
It may be hard to believe this was true, given the antipathy Republican leaders generally have toward accepting federal money for Medicaid expansion. But, if Trump taught us anything, defying one’s own party isn’t always a bad thing, especially if it means aligning oneself closer to the voters themselves. Local Republicans could do a lot toward expanding their influence by taking a defiant, yet commonsense, stance on an issue that everyone cares about.
The Tribune-Phonograph editorial board consists of publisher Kris O’Leary and editor Kevin O’Brien
