Vos pays the price

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It looks like Assembly Speaker Robin Vos may finally be paying the price for some of his antics. Unfortunately, innocent people might be collateral damage.

Vos and his co-conspirator Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald shut down attempts to reschedule the in-person April 7 election. That was a national embarrassment for Wisconsin as it put thousands of voters and poll workers at risk of contracting the coronavirus. Vos and Fitzgerald didn’t care about public health. They thought that pressing on with the election would suppress the vote, which they calculated would help ultra-conservative Justice Daniel Kelly.

But two things happened. First, Vos earned the kind of national media attention no politician wants. He was roundly mocked for working the polls decked out as if he were about to perform open heart surgery while assuring everyone that it was “incredibly safe to go outside.”

And then, even worse for Vos, his nightmare came true. He rejected Gov. Tony Evers’ proposal to send every registered voter an absentee ballot. It turns out that he was probably right to try to suppress mail-in voting because it may have delivered the death blow to Kelly. The New York Times looked at results from about three dozen Wisconsin communities that split out in-person from absentee vote totals. The evidence shows that the liberal-backed Jill Karofsky did overwhelmingly better in mail-in voting than Kelly. Karofsky “ performed 10 percentage points better than her conservative opponent in votes cast by mail than she did in votes cast at Election Day polling places,” according to the Times report. She ultimately won by 11 points.

This is remarkable because it runs counter to political science research, some of it conducted by the UW’s own Barry Burden, which has suggested that neither party gains an advantage in mail-in balloting. But Vos clearly agreed with President Trump, who has said that if we went to all mail-in ballots, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Is it possible that Vos and the noted intellectual powerhouse Donald Trump know more than professors who study this stuff for a living? Maybe. Politicians are in the business of winning the next election, not deeply studying elections gone by. It could be that Trump and Vos felt something in their gut that wasn’t apparent to academic researchers.

Or it could be that for once the Democrats just out-organized the other guys. Credit new Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler for moving quickly to throw resources behind mail-in voting campaigns starting in March. By contrast, the Times reports that Republicans admitted they were caught flat-footed.

Of course, that won’t happen in November. Look for the GOP to match the Dems in an all-out absentee ballot campaign.

But there is one other factor that could make this harder for Republicans. “I would say that, stereotyping, Republicans like to go vote on Election Day,” Vos told the Times.

That would make sense. Conservatives are, generally speaking, more traditional in their choices. If it takes them longer to adapt to the new era of remote voting, then you can chalk that up as another advantage the Democrats will have come the fall.

But I take no pleasure in the fact that this indicates that more Republican voters could be exposed to the virus on Election Day in November, assuming Vos and Fitzgerald continue to stubbornly insist on in-person voting. Early reports out of Milwaukee indicate that perhaps seven voters contracted the virus while voting on April 7. And, of course, since the virus takes a good two weeks or so to show symptoms, there could be more coming.

That’s the collateral damage of Vos’ cold political calculation. But it’s some degree of justice that the direct political damage from his ruthless gambit has come back to haunt him.