A Wisconsin rightwinger's fall from conservative grace: 'The Maga crowd despises him'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

51% : Trump was furious.
49% : "As the leader, [Vos] takes the brunt of it," said the state senator Duey Stroebel, a Republican who served in the assembly for four years and has, like Vos, worked on restrictive voting laws during his tenure.
45% : The same year, he followed former Republican governor Scott Walker's lead in creating the most restrictive voter identification law in the country and passing legislation to kneecap union power in a state where organized labor was once the core of the Democratic coalition.
44% : The "lame duck" legislation, among other provisions, limited the governor's authority to appoint leaders to certain state agencies and gave the legislature the right to hire outside lawyers to intervene in lawsuits.
39% : A day before the scheduled certification of the presidential election in Congress, as Trump supporters piled into buses headed for Washington, DC for a rally that would devolve into the January 6 Capitol riot, 14 Wisconsin lawmakers - including 13 members of the assembly - signed a letter addressed to Mike Pence, the vice-president, urging him not to certify the election.
37% : The Republicans' refusal to actually attempt to decertify the election angered Trump.
34% : "It's not gonna happen," Vos said brusquely, voicing his irritation at Trump and his allies' unyielding focus on the 2020 election.
31% : And after Trump lost the state in 2020, Vos initiated an investigation into Wisconsin's election, hiring a promoter of the "Stop the Steal" movement to lead it.
29% : "As Trump turned on Vos, cracks within the Wisconsin GOP deepened.
27% : Under pressure from Trump, Vos in 2021 announced an investigation into the election, appointing Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin supreme court justice who had bolstered Trump's disproven claims of election fraud and spoken at a Wisconsin "Stop the Steal" rally shortly after the 2020 election, as special counsel.
22% : In June 2021, as Wisconsin Republicans gathered for their annual convention, Trump issued a statement accusing Vos and other legislative party leaders of "working hard to cover up election corruption".
20% : Trump and his allies spent months filing lawsuits to try to overturn his loss in Wisconsin and other states.
20% : Vos has also come under pressure from election denying groups to oust Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin's nonpartisan election commissioner who became a target of false claims that she broke the law to hurt Trump in 2020.
20% : Wisconsin activists who challenge election outcomes, she said, "will continue this until Donald Trump is no more".
19% : "There's a segment of the Maga crowd who despises him, because they adamantly believe President Trump was cheated," said a veteran Wisconsin GOP operative, who spoke anonymously given his role within pro-Trump circles.
11% : His unwillingness to cross that line has turned him into a pariah on the far right, a target of Lindell, an enemy of Trump and a symbol of the current state of the Republican party where loyalty to Trump is the key litmus test.
8% : "As long as Donald Trump is politically active, they will be politically active," said Bernier, who has been vocal in pushing back against Trump's election lies - and counts Vos as a friend.

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