Op-Ed
Tom Tiffany is the frontrunner to be the Republican nominee for governor in Wisconsin
Sep 25, 2025, 12:39 PM CST
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After months of speculation and quasi-campaigning, Republican congressman Tom Tiffany made it official this week: He’s running for governor.
The 2026 gubernatorial election in Wisconsin will be the first open contest since 2010, and this is sure to invite a great many candidates, both Democratic and Republican. And as we’ve been seeing with candidate after candidate launching their campaigns, it already is.
On the Republican side, Tiffany’s is the most significant announcement yet. He enters this race as the frontrunner to land his party’s nomination for governor, and should be treated like the likely candidate atop the ticket for the GOP next fall. He might be a Trump endorsement and a strong fundraising quarter away from clearing the field.
While Tiffany is a thrice-elected congressman who has been building his name recognition in conservative media appearances as of late, part of his path to being the top candidate in the primary is due to the lackluster set of contenders in the Republican primary thus far. The GOP’s best potential statewide candidate, Congressman Bryan Steil, opted not to run for governor, and is instead running for re-election in his 1st Congressional District seat. Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann was the first entry to the race, but his campaign has not picked up steam since his May launch, and he never had a particularly strong record to run on. Business executive Bill Berrien’s campaign has not really resonated at all among the right-wing base, and that was before the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on his now-deleted personal Medium account where he was following a transgender porn star and other sexually explicit accounts, which, uh…all issues with that aside, might not help him win a Republican primary. Tiffany walks into this race far ahead of Schoemann, and who knows how long Berrien will even stay in the race at this point.
An August poll of a potential three-candidate primary field, published by the conservative publication The Daily Caller, showed Tiffany far ahead of the field, too — at 40%, with Schoemann at 13% and Berrien at 10%.
That poll also hinted at what is the key issue in a Republican primary: a Trump endorsement. Despite everything we’ve seen in his profoundly cataclysmic return to the presidency, Trump remains a remarkably popular politician within his party, and he has a better record of electoral success in the state than any Republican not named Ron Johnson. Especially in a multi-candidate field, Trump’s backing is going to propel any candidate to the top of a Republican primary.
We saw that in Wisconsin not long ago, in the 2024 Republican primary for the special election in the 8th Congressional District, when a Trump endorsement of a political unknown (Tony Wied) led to a decisive victory over current (Andre Jacque) and former (Roger Roth) state senators, each of whom had endorsements from prominent figures in Wisconsin politics. Wied finished more than 10 points ahead of the other primary candidates.
If Trump endorses Tiffany, who already has stronger name recognition, credentials and support than Schoemann and Berrien, that could clear the primary field.
There is another key issue to watch with Tiffany and his prospects in the primary, however, and that is fundraising. He has never been an especially strong fundraiser. That hasn’t emerged as an issue for him running a deep red district that voted more than 60% for Trump in 2024, but could prove problematic for him in his gubernatorial campaign. When Tiffany’s name was floated as a potential candidate to challenge Tammy Baldwin in a run for U.S. Senate, his poor fundraising numbers essentially sunk his case to run. If he doesn’t come out of the gate with strong fundraising numbers following his campaign launch, that could open the door for another challenger — say, a self-funder like Eric Hovde — to get into the mix.
And while Tiffany might not be a strong individual fundraiser, once we get further into this race (and certainly after the primary), we know the Uihleins and Hendrickses of the world will be backing up the Brink’s truck to back his candidacy, and Wisconsin will always draw national attention from outside interest groups. The 2022 race for governor drew a record sum of more than $164 million in spending from outside groups, after all.
But if Tiffany does land the Trump endorsement and raises enough money, he’ll be well on his way to winning the primary. At this point, I am expecting Tiffany to eventually be the Republican candidate for governor in Wisconsin.
It seems like the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is taking his candidacy more seriously, too, as they’ve already released an attack ad, likely to air during the Green Bay Packers game this weekend.
While Tiffany is well-positioned to win the Republican primary, the general election is a different story. He does not project as an especially strong candidate in a statewide race. His staunch Trump allegiance may energize the GOP base, but he could struggle mightily to find crossover appeal, particularly among suburban voters that have been drifting toward Democrats in recent elections.
He’s already facing tough questions on his position on abortion rights, as he has previously supported a ban at six weeks, co-sponsoring federal legislation to that end. His votes on unpopular legislation like the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which slashes spending on health care and food assistance while increasing the debt, will certainly be scrutinized. His Scott Walker-era voting record on education, from his time in the state legislature, could come under the microscope. He’ll have to answer for his support of tariffs, which have polled as a rather unpopular issue in Wisconsin — only 31% of Wisconsin voters said they help the economy, in the most recent Marquette University Law School Poll (and it’s notable that this is the issue that WisDems are highlighting right away). But many of these challenges are ones that could befall any Republican candidate and are necessarily not specific to Tiffany.
And to the extent that this issue still matters to people — I know it matters to me — Tiffany went further than any other Wisconsin congressman in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He was one of two Wisconsin congressmen (along with Scott Fitzgerald) who voted against certifying the results after the riot at the Capitol, was the lone Wisconsin member of Congress to join the Texas lawsuit aiming to overturn the presidential election in the weeks preceding Jan. 6, and said he would also have voted to overturn Wisconsin’s electoral votes in that election. Economic issues will always have more salience than matters like these in campaign politics, but for some, these anti-democracy actions will be disqualifying.
Tiffany becoming the nominee would also signal a significant geographic shift in the center of power for Republican politics in Wisconsin. For years, the WOW counties have been the GOP stronghold, but that has been changing, as those previously deep-red counties continue to purple. With Tiffany atop the ticket, that could indicate that more rural or exurban areas in northern and western Wisconsin have emerged as the site of the GOP base in the Trump era.
Trump’s election last year showed that there may still be room for Republican margins to grow in some parts of northern and western Wisconsin. And college campuses that shifted significantly to the right in 2024 will certainly be in focus for any candidate running for governor in 2026, particularly with the growing influence of Turning Point USA in the state — Tiffany even said as much in a press conference following his official gubernatorial campaign launch event (see above). But trends in the more populous, high-turnout suburbs in the Milwaukee metro or Dane County could prove challenging for the Northwoods congressman.
Let’s take Waukesha County, for example. It’s the state’s third most populous with more than 417,000 residents, and over the last 15 years, it’s gone from a county that routinely saw more than 70% voting Republican to one where the last Republican gubernatorial candidate, Tim Michels, failed to crack 60% there in 2022. In the Spring Election race for Wisconsin Supreme Court, Brad Schimel, who is from Waukesha County and had been serving as a judge there, posted even worse results there than twice-failed candidate Dan Kelly did in 2023, and Schimel even lost in the city of Waukesha in 2025. The trends are clear, and Tiffany does not seem like the kind of candidate who is going to reverse them. Something like Ozaukee County going blue in 2026 can’t be entirely ruled out as a possibility, especially in what could prove to be a Trump backlash election like we saw in 2018, where Democrats swept every statewide race.
But we will have a whole lot of time to analyze and break down all of the ins and outs of the 2026 gubernatorial race in the months to come.
The bottom line, though, is this: Tiffany is in pole position to become the Republican nominee for governor, and because this is Wisconsin — where statewide elections are often decided by decimal-point margins — any nominee from one of the two major parties will have a real chance to win. Take Tiffany seriously. He’s probably going to be atop the ticket for Wisconsin Republicans in November 2026.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he became the Political Editor of Civic Media. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 23 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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Follow Dan Shafer on Twitter at @DanRShafer and at BlueSky at @danshafer.bsky.social.
