December 21, 2022 – I feel it is important to have an accurate narrative about the Michels for Governor campaign. This is necessary so that future campaigns can focus their efforts accordingly and not wrongly shape those efforts because of inaccurate information.
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I joined the Tim Michels campaign in early July as grassroots director and in the final months of the campaign ran the advance/logistics. I was with Tim at most stops around the state and helped with the background work of setting up our stops and crowd-building for each event.
I must start by thanking the churches, taverns, bowling alleys, farms, businesses, and state GOP offices that welcomed us and allowed us to campaign at their establishments. Your support and help won’t be forgotten.
With the November election is over a month behind us, the focus should be on moving forward with important elections like Supreme Court and local School Boards.
Unfortunately, there are those who are working hard to keep the Conservatives divided. They are doing this by having some completely false rumblings about Tim Michels having a ‘light’ schedule during the campaign.
Clearly, nothing could be further from the truth. It seems that false criticism is coming mainly from people who were upset that Tim Michels won the Republican Primary back in August.
Here are some first-hand facts. After Michels won the Republican primary, we knew we had to get him around the state aggressively. Like many campaigns, that meant 18-hour workdays that consisted of events, travel, calls, logistics, and planning. There were no “banker hours” on our campaign whatsoever. There was even an article in News Undone talking about how far the campaign had come.
I was with Tim Michels just about everywhere. He worked hard and in fact the biggest compliment we got on the trail from Conservative media, talk show hosts and grassroots organizers was, ‘you’re everywhere.’
People who paid attention to our social media were able to see that we were moving across the state at a rapid pace. We went everywhere we could possibly go and attended over 450 events during the general election cycle, and I use that number conservatively. That doesn’t include the number of stops by our top surrogate, our Lieutenant Governor candidate, Roger Roth.
Cherry-picking a few schedule dates by referencing an INCOMPLETE schedule doesn’t tell the real story of our campaign. Many of our stops were unplanned, unprompted, and unscheduled. We kept another schedule of events that were optional stops where I would have advance teams attend in the hopes that time would permit a stop.
I was with Michels for every inner-city Milwaukee stop, places Republicans have mostly ignored in recent years. We made a few dozen stops in these areas to speak with voters who are being ignored by the Democrats and are being harmed by a failed education system, soft-on-crime policies, and economic failures by Milwaukee’s “leadership.” I can go on and on, but the fact is we worked hard and made more stops than just about anyone.
I learned a lot from this past campaign. What I learned most is unfortunate. Ballot harvesting and weak election laws have turned our elections to a game of who can ballot chase the best. Our campaigns are less reflective of the issues, enthusiasm, crowd size, and working the hardest.
Gov. Evers did not come close to making the number of stops we made. The U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania is reflective of this as well. Jon Fetterman winning was not shocking when you understand the Democrat party’s ability to get mail-in ballots turned in and the ability to have low-propensity voters cast a ballot. This is something that Conservatives will have to recognize and fix. I plan to talk about my solutions to that in future News Undone articles.
Tim Michels was the ideal candidate. He is a man of high character, a businessman, a veteran, an outsider, and someone who could spend millions of dollars to build his name ID and message. Where we came up short was with GOTV. Like most things in life, there are always things you can do better. For this race, the only lesson to come out is that we need a better GOTV ground game and infrastructure. No single campaign should have to do a solo effort for GOTV. Certainly, the Democrat Party machine does the heavy lifting for all their candidates.
The Monday Morning quarterbacking on our race has been pathetic. It shows that many on the right are not mentally prepared to win and their minds are stuck in a ‘teenage’ personality contest. The only game in town for the right is how are we going to beat the Democrats at GOTV. That’s the only game in town, all other things are petty and should be ignored by serious people.
Chris Lawrence
Milwaukee, WI
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