Republican who left party after Trump thinks appeal to values can win him state senate seat

Mark Becker was never going to be the type of Republican to stand by and watch Donald Trump run roughshod over his party. 

And, while it wasn’t until Trump was surging toward the presidential nomination in 2016 that Becker officially defected, he had begun to sour on Republican thinking well before that, about the time that Scott Walker came into power and launched his Act 10 initiative gutting collective bargaining rights for most public employees. Becker’s grandfather, after all, was a union bargainer for the Luxemburg-Casco area school association.

It also coincided with the Tea Party takeover of the GOP following the 2010 midterms that served as a backlash to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

But it was something more personal than political that left Becker feeling particularly ostracized from a party he had served for years, including as Chair of the Brown County Republicans.

And it was at the Brown County Republican’s Lincoln Dinner in 2013 – the party’s big annual fundraiser – that Becker really found his voice.

“This was one of my last acts of defiance as chairman,” Becker recalls. “I’ve always been pro-marriage equality, and my older brother is gay. And I said to them, ‘Who wants small government?’ Everybody raised their hand. ‘Who has a Don't Tread on Me flag?’ 

“And then I said, ‘Well, you guys, I hear you want government that's so small that it fits inside my brother's bedroom.’”

The following day, Andre Jacque, a conservative Republican state representative, called Becker and read him the riot act, calling him a terrible Republican.

“I remember that vividly,” Becker says. “And that's when it was very clear to me that, hey, you're standing in the wrong room.”

Support coming from across the country

Becker is running for Andres Jacques’ State Senate seat in District 1 this fall as an Independent, which, as a small-government advocate who also cares deeply about democracy, fairness and the common good, he thinks best reflects his values. His opponent will be one of four Republican primary candidates, all of whom fall along some portion of the Trumpism spectrum. 

The district encompasses all of Door and Kewaunee Counties as well as portions of Brown, Outagamie, Manitowoc and Calumet Counties. Among the most pressing issues particular to District 1 are the agriculture and dairy industry, tourism (and, thus, conservation and water quality), workforce housing and roads. But no district is immune from the more wider-ranging issues of public school funding, affordable childcare, affordable healthcare … and affordability in general.

Though the district is roughly 40 percent Republican to 32 percent Democrat, there is a large swath of Independent voters who are likely to figure prominently in the outcome. 

It probably won’t hurt – especially among Never Trump Independents and Republicans – that Becker just received the endorsement of former U.S. House Republican Adam Kinzinger when he made a special trip to Green Bay for a campaign appearance. Among national former Republican figures, none has been more outspoken in their criticism of President Trump’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law than Kinzinger, who was one of only two Republicans to serve on the House Jan. 6 committee investigating the assault on the Capital on the day Joe Biden was to have been certified as the winner of the 2020 Presidential election.

“Authoritarianism is easy. Self-governance is hard,” Kinzinger said on Saturday. “And right now, we're being asked to maintain our hope. That is our challenge to make sure that we stay engaged. And if you have to take a day off and relax and not think about politics, do that. But the biggest thing is to maintain that optimism. 

“And that's why when I heard about what Mark’s doing, and understanding that the most important thing is not whether there's an R or a D or an I by somebody's name; it's the values they represent.”

'We either support democracy or we don't ...'

Becker grew up in a conservative Catholic house and became a Republican by default. For most of his young life he worked on Republican campaigns, becoming a high-level Brown County operative along the way. 

In 2010, his neighbor won election to the State Assembly and, over beers on Becker’s porch, announced something that struck Becker as deeply troubling. It was right before the GOP, which had just won the State Senate, State Assembly and the Governor’s seat, redrew the district maps in what would create the most gerrymandered state in the country.

“He said, ‘you know Mark, there’s not going to be a Democratic majority in the next 10 years and there’s nothing they can do about it,’” Becker remembers him saying. “I was thinking, we either support democracy or we don’t but we can’t just support it when we win. That was the first little chink in the armor.”

In 2016, when Becker watched his fellow Republicans begin to fall in line behind Trump’s candidacy, he felt compelled to write a desperate op-ed.

“I was imploring people, don't do this, don't vote for that guy,” he says. “Because he was running on ‘America is broken and America is wrong and America is bad’ and all of these things. The theme (of the editorial) was, you all, the amber waves are still amber. We are not a bad country because of the things that he’s saying. America is an idea; it is a beautiful idea, but we have to be better than this. Please be better than this.”

Becker says that, ever since Trump came along, Republicans no longer seem to care about such bedrock party principles as limited government. It has become, instead, whether you voted for Trump or not or who you think won the 2020 election. 

As the former chair of one of the largest Republican County parties in the state, Becker’s early and public renunciation of Trump drew the attention of others who likewise saw him as problematic for Republicans and the country. One of those who has since renounced his renunciation and fallen back in line with all things Trump, was presidential candidate Ted Cruz. While trying to earn the 2016 nomination and issuing equally dire warnings about the surging Trump, the Cruz camp actually reached out to Becker to help facilitate an event.

Gaining national attention for taking on Ron Johnson

Another – who has never wavered in his Never-Trump bona fides – was one of the most conservative radio voices in the entire Midwest and a friend of Becker’s, Charlie Sykes. 

“Charlie and I joke all the time about being token former Republicans,” Becker says. “We looked at each other after 2016 and said, ‘What the eff just happened?’ I’ve been proud to be on the right side of history.”

When Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, Becker’s status rose after a contretemps with Sen. Ron Johnson, one of the leading Wisconsin Republicans pushing false claims about election irregularities and who became integrally involved in the fake electors plot, whereby a set of alternative electors would deliver the state to Trump during the Jan. 6 certification process in Washington, D.C.

Becker, an acquaintance of Johnson’s, reached out shortly after Biden had been declared the winner and asked him why he was spreading what he knew Johnson knew were lies about voter fraud. He urged Johnson to stop, arguing that it was doing serious damage to democracy. Johnson, Becker says, admitted that Biden had won but told him it would be political suicide if he stopped pushing Trump’s lies.

“So I sat on that because it had been a private conversation and not something I should be talking about,” Becker remembers. “But he kept going and kept going, and got louder and more dangerous, and I called Charlie Sykes, and I told him about this and he asked if I could write an op-ed exposing Johnson.”

A few days later, Becker got a call from Tim Miller, an editor for The Bulwark, a pro-democracy podcast and media outlet formed in 2018 in response to the first Trump administration. Miller, also a Never Trumper and former high-level operative in the GOP, urged Becker to write an op-ed, which Miller edited and posted at their site the next morning. That evening, Dec. 2, 2020, Becker was a guest on MSNOW’s (then MSNBC) All In with Chris Hayes. 

The New York Times, The Washington Post and ABC News also reached out to Becker, writing stories about his encounter with Sen. Johnson.

That was hardly the end of Becker’s dust-up with Johnson. There was to be one final missive from the Senator when he texted Becker on Jan. 7, calling him a weasel and saying he never wanted to speak to him again.

“That’s high praise,” Becker says. “But I told him, yeah, they’re still cleaning up broken glass and blood on the floor of the Capitol because of the lies that you moved forward. And you have the gall to say that?’”

Paying a high price for bucking Trumpism

Becker thinks America can come back from what he sees as the severe damage Trump has done not only to democracy and politics but to our civic fabric, where families are torn asunder over their disagreements. Becker himself has paid a high personal price for his daring to buck the tides of Trumpism.

“It’s been a lot,” he says. “I mean, one of my friends who I appointed to the Republican Party Board was one of the fake electors. I’ve got aunts and uncles who take exception to something I post on Facebook that has nothing to do with them. It’s just the hypocrisy of everything. My whole message is, we’re not going to agree on everything, but I will fight for your opinion and for your ability to believe what you want to believe. And I don’t think that’s offered back. And that goes back to the reason I left the party in the first place.” 

Becker spent some time as the host of The Rational Revolution podcast and Civic Media radio show, which was first hosted by one of Becker’s good friends, Kristin Dassler-Alfheim. He took over as host shortly after Alfheim began a successful campaign for State Senate District 18 in 2024. Along the way, Becker interviewed a host of political figures from both parties. He calls his interview with Kristina Drye, the former speechwriter for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Ambassador Samantha Power, a powerful episode. He interviewed Drye in March of 2025 right when DOGE (the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency”) was gutting USAID, which the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy estimates has resulted in three-quarters of a million preventable deaths due to starvation and illness from malnutrition.

If Democrats were inclined to doubt Becker’s progressive tendencies his response to that interview might dissuade them. Most Republicans still refer to USAID mockingly, citing money spent on what they consider arcane projects, while ignoring the soft-diplomacy purposes it has served over the past 64 years, including humanitarian aid for developing nations.

Can Becker win in a district held by Republicans for all but six months over the past half-century? He thinks so and he thinks he’s just the candidate to do so. So does his friend, Sen. Dassler-Alfheim.

“Mark is the ideal candidate to flip the deep-red 1st Senate District,” Dassler-Alfheim says. “He has the ability to attract independents and democrats as well as disenfranchised republicans. Mark believes in bringing people together in order to move Wisconsin forward. I look forward to having a colleague like Mark Becker in the State Senate.” 

'My message wasn't different ... but they've changed'

His willingness to go into hostile (formerly friendly) rooms might go a long way toward flipping the district. Two weeks ago, he accepted an invitation to the ultra-conservative Northeast Wisconsin Patriots candidate forum, where he went head-to-head with the four Republican primary candidates. 

“Just coming back in and seeing some of the faces look at me in a different way kind of threw me off a little bit more than I thought it was going to,” he admits. “But, you know, I was there to speak the truth, even though sometimes it wasn't going to be what they would like to hear. My message to them wasn't much different than what my message was as chair of the Republican Party. It’s just that they've changed. But even when I was chair, I talked about if we want to be a group that grows, then we need to be inclusive to people that don't always agree with everything, like abortion and gay rights.”

He says Democrats have been gracious in extending their support even if they don’t agree with everything Becker has stood for.

“As long as the values are there, that’s what matters the most,” he says. “I've always been someone that wants to bring people together because at the end of the day, that's what this is about, not telling you what you should be pissed off about. And in order for you to forget about the fact that they haven't really done anything to help you, we're going to talk about how kids are being indoctrinated in schools, but we don't want to talk about the fact that those schools are dying on the vine because they haven't been funded for 17 years. 

“That’s what we should talk about, and I don't think people understand that.”

On Saturday, Kinzinger said Becker’s campaign is capable of sending a message across America, adding that the country can never go back again to where we are today.

“We will stand up and say that America deserves better, and that's why this fight here in Wisconsin is so important,” he insisted. “That's why Mark's candidacy is so important, because when he wins this race, you're not just going to read about it in the papers in Green Bay, you're not going to just read about it in the papers in Madison. You're going to read about this nationwide because this will take the country by storm.

“And this kind of movement will take the country by storm.”