GOP State Sen. Chris Kapenga, one of three Republicans who voted against the tax relief deal, says Republican leaders never conducted a vote count ahead of the deal being announced publicly.

“Absolutely not,” Kapenga said on WISN 12’s “UpFront,” which is produced in partnership with WisPolitics. “There was no vote count taken at any point in the time up until probably the Monday before they started pinging people, and what happened was there were a couple of leaders in both the Assembly and in the Senate, along with the governor, who said we’ll just get it done and we’ll just push it to the floor and they’ll vote for it without talking to their caucus, which was really upsetting for me.”

“The governor also assumed that there were going to be some Democrat votes for this, too,” Kapenga added. “So I think it was failed leadership on all three fronts.”

Kapenga defended his decision to vote against the deal alongside Republican Sens. Steve Nass and Rob Hutton.

“There never was a deal,” Kapenga said. “The leaders said there was a deal, but leaders never actually checked with the people that vote on it, so there was never a deal to kill.”

Kapenga said there was a “zero percent” chance he’d back another tax relief vote ahead of November.

Meanwhile, Democrat State Sen. Mark Spreitzer says Senate Dems proposed hours before the floor vote to add a $15 minimum wage to the tax relief deal to get caucus members on board. The provision wasn’t added, and all 15 ended up voting against the deal.

“We were trying to come up with as many creative ideas as we could of what we could do that would actually help people as part of this,” Spreitzer said. “So, you know, there was certainly never a ‘you must do this in order to get our votes,’ but we were trying to put ideas on the table as part of a very last-minute conversation to see if there was a way to get to yes here.”

Spreitzer criticized both Republican leaders and Gov. Tony Evers for leaving Senate Dems out of negotiations.

“Frankly, I think our Senate Republican colleagues, including Sen. LeMahieu, should have known from the start that just like the budget, there were likely going to need our help,” Spreitzer said. “During the budget process, we were able to negotiate alongside Gov. Evers to actually improve the budget that we ended up with, and I think if we had been able to play that role here, we could have ended up with a much better deal that could have actually become law.”

Last week on “UpFront,” Evers criticized Senate Democrats for voting against the deal and said it put the party in an “untenable position” ahead of the November elections.

“Well, we absolutely understand that people are hurting right now, and we also understand that schools are hurting and are in this endless cycle of having to go through referendum to pay for basic needs,” Spreitzer said in response to the governor’s comments. “So we are looking at how do we come up with a sustainable proposal that actually puts dollars into our classrooms, cuts property taxes in a meaningful way, and provides targeted relief to those who really need it, while doing that in a sustainable way that works within our budget.”

The Marquette Law School poll is out Tuesday, asking Wisconsinites for their views on the failed tax relief deal.

“Fundamentally, we’re asking them: do they think the bill that was proposed should have passed by the state or by the legislature or should it have been defeated?” Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told “UpFront.” “That’s really the number one question I have, is whether people are happy or unhappy about the ultimate outcome of the bill. But we’re also going to ask about the fiscal impacts of the bill, an issue that’s come up initially and now has come up more recently as well, about whether this bill should have been delayed rather than passed right now.”

The snap poll was not previously planned and is the result of the unusual votes that didn’t fall along party lines.

“We’ve very rarely done something like this, but we have the technology to do a quicker poll now that we did not have in the past,” Franklin said. “This bill may not be the most important bill the Legislature has ever considered, but it was certainly one of the more surprising outcomes, at least to me, of a governor, a Democratic governor, united with Republican leadership on a major bill that they’ve been working on since the winter. And for that to go down in the way it did, defeated by three Republican Senate votes and all of the Democratic votes, was really a surprising outcome to me. And I really wanted to know, how is the public reacting to this?”

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