The speaker of Wisconsin’s house of representatives clearly has a well-heeled opponent in Arkansas.
Spoiler alert: It’s real estate titan John Bailey of Little Rock.
Robin Vos has been speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly, which is what the Badger State calls its house of representatives, since 2013. He represents a district in southeast Wisconsin, south of Milwaukee.
While Vos is a Republican, he isn’t Republican enough for some folks. Twice this year he has been the target of recall attempts because he rejected calls to decertify President Joe Biden’s 2020 win in the state by a mere 21,000 votes. According to the Associated Press, he further alienated himself from some in his party by declining to endorse an effort to impeach the state’s top election official.
Both recalls failed because they didn’t get enough valid signatures from Vos’ district as it is currently configured. That doesn’t seem to be because they didn’t have enough money: The two efforts combined reported donations of almost $1.28 million — about $185 for every one of the 6,850 voter signatures that either petition drive needed in order to get the recall on the November ballot.
What may have been lacking was local buy-in. When the two organizations behind the recall attempts finally filed their financial statements — a month late — at the end of August, it turned out that less than $2,500 came from Wisconsin donors while more than $1.2 million came from Bailey.
Identified in the paperwork as a philanthropist from Little Rock, we know Bailey as a major shareholder and former CEO of publicly traded BSR Real Estate Investment Trust. BSR owns multifamily residential properties, mostly in Texas but also in Oklahoma City and Little Rock. BSR’s headquarters at 1400 W. Markham St. was listed as the donor’s address.
“This makes it clear this wasn’t a grassroots, volunteer, local effort,” Vos was quoted by The Journal Times in Racine. “It was an out-of-state paid endeavor engineered to pay those who took part in it.”
Vos was nominated for re-election in the Republican primary last month, getting almost 70% of the vote after his only challenger unofficially withdrew.
It is not clear what would prompt Bailey to invest so much into ousting the Wisconsin speaker — $425,000 to the first recall effort (after an additional $60,000 was returned to him when that effort fizzled) and $785,000 to the second.
Whispers reached out to BSR with no success, and no reporters in Wisconsin seem to have answered the why either.
Bailey isn’t the only Arkansan involved in the efforts to recall Vos. Conrad Reynolds, the retired U.S. Army colonel who has twice sought the Republican nomination for Arkansas’ 2nd Congressional District, worked with both Wisconsin recall committees.
Reynolds and Bailey were both listed as officers of Restore Election Integrity Arkansas, which abandoned its planned petition initiative to get a paper ballot amendment on this year’s General Election ballot.
Reynolds told Whispers he knew that Bailey was interested in Wisconsin because “it was important to the mission to get their elections right,” but he said he could not speak to Bailey’s motive for donating so much to the Vos recall attempts. Reynold said he had not personally solicited donations to that effort from Bailey or anyone else.
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