Tom Tiffany is unfit for office
The presumptive GOP nominee in the race for governor is an election denier, and seeking to overturn the results of a free and fair election is extreme in a way that goes beyond policy disagreements.
The Recombobulation Area is a 19-time 21-TIME! Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
During a recent interview on 620 WTMJ, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany was asked about his views on the 2020 presidential election.
Given that Tiffany backed a State of Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the election results in four swing states (including Wisconsin), and then came back after the riot to side with rioters by voting against certifying the election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania as a member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 (and said he would have rejected Biden’s victory in Wisconsin, too), it’s a more than valid inquiry.
And given recent news on President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” insurrectionist slush fund (Tiffany said he is open to Jan. 6 rioters “possibly” being owed restitution), the FBI’s inquiries into Milwaukee election workers (which Tiffany has said he backs) and former Trump attorney Jim Troupis (who led the Trump campaigns’ efforts to overturn the election in Wisconsin) seeking millions from that slush fund, it’s a timely one, too.
In his response, Tiffany launched into a series of long-debunked conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election count in the city of Green Bay, where the City Attorney eventually found “no issues affecting the integrity of the election” following a thorough review.
After listening to that segment, I reached out to Amaad Rivera-Wagner, a current Assembly representative who previously served as the chief of staff to Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich. In that role, he and his family faced harassment, vandalism and very real threats to the point where they needed police protection, he told me in 2024, when I was in Green Bay working on a story. So, I was curious if he’d heard what Tiffany had to say in that interview with Steve Scaffidi and Kristin Brey on “Point Taken.”
“Yes,” said Rivera-Wagner. “And I am pissed. It’s bullshit and it led to real people’s lives being threatened, harassed. Millions of taxpayer dollars wasted.”
Rivera-Wagner and others in Green Bay faced all sorts of wild election-related conspiracy theories, including a “Stop the Steal” rally outside Green Bay City Hall on Jan. 6, 2021, and former state Supreme Court justice Michael Gableman calling for the mayor’s arrest as part of his sprawling, multi-million dollar review of the election (which produced no evidence of widespread fraud). The city spent years rehashing the results of the election, and reviving this struck a nerve.
In a press release issued June 3 (available in full here), Rivera-Wagner said:
“Let me be clear: this has been investigated, litigated, reviewed, and debunked. No fraud was found. No issue affecting the integrity of Green Bay’s election was found. Yet these conspiracy theories continue to be repeated by people who know, or should know, better. That is not leadership. That is dangerous…
“These lies were not harmless. They cost taxpayers $2.3 million. They drew bipartisan condemnation. They fueled threats against public servants, election workers, police officers, and families. If an elected official can’t tell the difference between facts and conspiracy theories, they have no business asking to lead our state.”
Tiffany remarking on Green Bay with reheated election denier conspiracies was just a small moment at the outset of a larger conversation, but a revealing one nonetheless. Spouting nonsense like he did shows him to be a true believer of this madness.
The fact of the matter is that Tom Tiffany is completely off the deep end when it comes to 2020 election conspiracies. He’s already drawn national attention for being an election denier candidate running in a swing state — a piece in the Washington Post grouped in with the likes of conspiratorial pillow baron Mike Lindell, who is running for governor in Minnesota — and this is justifiably going to be a heavily scrutinized part of Tiffany’s record as the campaign rolls on.
Because Tiffany’s record on this matter fails to meet basic benchmark standards of American democracy. If you cannot respect the will of the people in a free and fair election, and instead seek to toss out results that go against your wishes, that is tantamount to wanting to upend our entire system of government.
From the archives:
Some on the right like to argue that this issue is in the past, that people have moved on from what transpired in the late months of 2020 and on through Jan. 6. Donald Trump was later re-elected, after all. But the next governor will have oversight of the next presidential election in 2028, and with Trump and his party continuing to fan the flames of conspiracy and inject Jan. 6 politics back into the national dialogue, what Tiffany says on this truly does matter quite a bit.
Beyond this, though, the underpinnings of the right’s never-ending conspiratorial response to the 2020 presidential election results speaks to something larger, and perhaps more essential, about our politics, our democracy, and the very core of the American experiment.
Last week, conversations surrounding the Democratic primary in the race for governor turned to matters of police and prisons, following national media stories on previous comments made by Francesca Hong, the Madison state representative running for governor. These comments — ones on defunding and abolishing police and on envisioning a world “without prisons” — are controversial, and frankly, not ones I particularly agree with.
But I do believe it is important to have discussions like these and consider various viewpoints, and it is our very system of government that allows for such policy debates to be held in the first place. A policy to disagree with is one thing — and Tiffany has plenty of those — but threatening the very foundations of our democratic system is quite another.
This is why I will always believe that any action taken to overturn the 2020 presidential election should be considered immediately disqualifying for anyone running for public office at any level.
Put simply: Tom Tiffany is unfit for office.
He is unfit for the office he currently holds as a member of Congress representing Wisconsin’s 7th District, and he is unfit to serve in the office he is seeking as governor.
It is utterly mystifying why Wisconsin Republicans have not only accepted Tiffany as their presumptive nominee, but cleared the field for him. You would think Wisconsin Republicans would want to be done with this kind of behavior from their statewide candidates after the Michael Gableman “investigation” and the endless toxic examples of this kind of politics, but no. You’d think that after losing their right-wing majority on the state Supreme Court — where all three justices who sided with the Trump campaign in 2020 will be out of office by next year — might prompt them to seek statewide candidates with no ties to election denier absurdity, but no.
Even beyond his disqualifying election denier history, Tiffany does not project as an especially strong candidate. He is no moderate by any stretch of the imagination. He has a slew of problematic votes in a particularly unpopular Congress (and no sitting member of Congress has ever won a race for governor in Wisconsin); he’s has put zero airspace between he and Trump as the president’s favorability continues to crater and the economy continues to wobble; and his less-than-stellar record in the state legislature ties him to the worst of the Walker years (he voted for the Foxconn deal, just to name one).
It’s not as if Tiffany has other marks that lean particularly in his favor, and by making him the nominee, Republicans have chosen to elevate perhaps the most extreme election denier of any high-ranking elected official in Wisconsin to be their choice for governor.
With his record on the matter — and these are not just stray comments, these are votes — Tiffany clearly does not respect the will of the people, he does not respect Wisconsin’s voters, and he’s demonstrated that he’s willing to dismantle democracy itself to get his way.
These are nightmarish qualities for anyone running for governor. The continued proliferation of this kind of politics is entirely unacceptable. It should have been over by Jan. 7, 2021. That it continues to persist in 2026 is a stain on our entire system.
As citizens of a free country, we can disagree on policy. We can disagree on priorities or strategy or so many other aspects of our politics. But what we cannot accept is a candidate who has proven himself to be willing to end our entire system of government. There is no policy proposal from any candidate that is more extreme or more un-American than Tiffany’s record of wanting to end the American experiment itself.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he and the publication joined Civic Media, where he is currently a Contributing Editor. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 24 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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