Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) fended off his Trump-endorsed primary challenger by the slimmest of margins – and now said challenger’s taking another shot at Vos’ seat.
Adam Steen, a 2020 election denier who lost his race against Vos by a mere 260 votes, announced during a press conference in Burlington on Thursday that he would be running as a write-in candidate in November’s general election.
“I want the people to be able to choose their election representatives,” he said, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I want them to know the truth about the people that are going to represent them.
Steen signaled that he thinks he would’ve been more likely to win if more people had known about ex-President Donald Trump’s endorsement, which came only a week before the Wisconsin primaries on Aug. 9.
“I was endorsed by [former] President Donald Trump on Aug. 2, 2022,” Steen said, per Spectrum News 1 Wisconsin. “Approximately 2,500 people in this district did not know that endorsement had happened when they had voted on Aug. 9.”
Trump’s endorsement of Steen was largely an attack against Vos, who had enraged the ex-president by not magically de-certifying Wisconsin’s 2020 election results – a legal impossibility (the fact that Vos did launch a nakedly partisan election “audit” at Trump’s behest clearly wasn’t enough for the former president).
Vos responded to Steen’s announcement on Thursday by commenting that his rival “apparently can’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
“He seems intent on re-litigating the primary election he lost, just like he wants to do with the 2020 election,” the Wisconsin GOP leader said.
Vos’ jab at Steen’s obsession with the 2020 election reflected the Assembly speaker’s new effort to distance himself from his past attempts to indulge Trump by commissioning the fake election audit, complete with a hardcore MAGA-ite Michael Gableman as the lead “investigator.”
Shortly after surviving his primary, Vos bashed the audit and Gableman, whom the speaker mocked as “an embarrassment to the state” (yet it was Vos himself who had appointed said embarrassment in the first place).
Several days later, Vos gave Gableman the boot.
