The Milwaukee journal Sentinel says Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany is having a hard time squaring his MAGA policies in a state that is steadily growing more blue with each unpopularpolicy President Donald Trump unloads.
“Republican candidate for governor Tom Tiffany sent mixed messages in recent days about whether he supports mail-in voting,” said the Sentinel. “In a March 12 interview with a conservative news outlet based in northwest Wisconsin, Tiffany said he doesn't believe ‘we should be doing mail-in voting’ when asked for his thoughts on the practice.”
"Many states have encouraged it and we've seen the results where you get these questions around elections. So I think it would be better if we did not have it," Tiffany told DrydenWire founder Ben Dryden in the interview.
Tiffany is the only major candidate running in the Wisconsin Republican primary for governor. The Sentinel points out that he has the endorsement of President Donald Trump, who has demanded the end of mail-in voting.
But the Sentinel added that Tiffany himself has voted absentee in a dozen elections over the past 10 years. And his state’s voters highly approve of mail-in voting while increasingly disapproving of the president who wants to end it.
When asked to clarify Tiffany’s statement that “it would be better if we did not have” mail-in voting, Tiffany spokeswoman Caroline Briscoe said the candidate “supports” the current mail in-system in Wisconsin.
"He does not believe universal mail-in voting should exist. He supports Wisconsin’s requested absentee voting system with safeguards to prevent abuse," she said.
But the Sentinel explains that the term "mail-in voting" is often used to describe the style of Wisconsin's system of absentee voting, which mails absentee ballots to voters who request them.
However, Briscoe preferred to split hairs over the differences between absentee voting systems and vote-by-mail systems — which appear to differ only in whether voters request their ballots beforehand.
But state voters are sensitive about keeping mail-in voting intact. The Sentinel reports that Madison, Wis. election officials are already being sued by voters whose absentee ballots were not counted during the 2024 election.