Justice Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal, won a hot race for an open Wisconsin Supreme Court seat Tuesday, switching positions power balance in the supreme court of the country from conservative to liberal for the first time since at least 2008.
Although Wisconsin judicial races are officially nonpartisan, Protasiewicz’s victory over former Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly, a conservative, in the most expensive judicial race in US history, was a game-changer for the state’s defeated Democrats.
Without saying exactly how he would rule, Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge, is running as a supporter of abortion rights and an opponent of Wisconsin’s Republican state legislative and congressional map, which he called “unfair.”
“I believe in things that are universal to Wisconsinites across our state, and that everyone should get a fair shot at demanding justice and not feel like a thumb is on the scale against them,” Protasiewicz told supporters in Milwaukee during his victory. party on Tuesday night.
In his comments to supporters, Kelly conceded defeat but did not wish Protasiewicz the best.
“I don’t like to say this: I wish that in a situation like this, I could recognize a worthy opponent,” said. “But I have no enemy worthy of me.”
The court’s new 4-3 liberal majority is expected to strike down state-level abortion bans that took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturned the federal right to abortion in June. The law, which dates back to 1849, made abortion a crime punishable by up to six years in prison.
Assuming that Democrats and their allies challenge the state map again, the liberal majority court will be sympathetic to throwing that map out as well.
Referring to the latter possibility, Wisconsin Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki told HuffPost in March that candidate Protasiewicz’s win was “a chance to have a chance.”
With that in mind, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin is putting the full weight of infrastructure behind Protasiewicz’s campaign. The state party’s efforts included direct transfers of $8 million to Protasiewicz’s campaign.
The transparent way Wisconsin Democrats have treated the race as a contest over liberal priorities and political power has prompted Kelly and his conservative allies to accuse Protasiewicz of judicial activism that will shape court decisions for their preferred policy outcomes.
“Democrats have tipped their hands enough that they see this as a policy-making opportunity,” Ben Voelkel, a spokesman for Kelly’s campaign, told HuffPost. “This is a complete misunderstanding of the role of the judiciary.”
But Protasiewicz, who has pledged to recuse himself from the case involving the Wisconsin Democratic Party, insists Kelly is a candidate with worrisome partisan bias. He noted, in particular, the paid work he has done to represent the Republican Party of Wisconsin as it explores ways to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The former chairman of the party testified to Congress that he even asked Kelly about his plan to choose an alternative electorate that would vote to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. Kelly said she was only asked if she knew about the plan and she said she didn’t. But in an attempt to revive the base in terms of the closure of the campaign, Kelly appeared in an event with Scott Presler, a strong supporter of Donald Trump who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, which spilled into the US Capitol riots shortly after.
“I don’t think he believes in representative democracy,” Protasiewicz told HuffPost in a late March interview in Milwaukee.
To move the terms of the debate away from abortion rights, Kelly and outside groups supported his arrest in Protsaiewicz’s public safety record, arguing that he had been sentenced to a violent crime too lightly.
Based on HuffPost’s conversations with some voters in the city of Milwaukee and surrounding suburbs, that message got through — even to some solid Democrats.
Less than two weeks before Election Day, Neal Bryant, a production supervisor at a rodenticide factory and lifelong Democrat, told HuffPost that he needed to do “more research” on the judicial race.
“They released a lot of inmates who committed a lot of rape and sexual assault,” Bryant said, describing the dilemma over breakfast at a restaurant on Milwaukee’s predominantly Black North Side. “And another thing, he’s against a woman’s right to have an abortion.”
In the field for Wisconsin’s right-wing voters, Kelly also claimed that the liberal majority in the Supreme Court of the state is in danger of more than ten years worth of conservative reforms from permissive gun rights laws to red union rights and strict voter ID laws.
Jeff and Karen Grossman, conservative former Illinois residents who work at a Lutheran church in the Milwaukee suburb of Mequon, worry that a Protasiewicz win will open the door to Democratic hegemony in the Badger State.
“I’m also not saying Republicans are perfect,” Jeff Grossman told HuffPost after the pair cast their ballots for Kelly in late March. have no more rights. He has no say.”
In the end, the concerns of liberal and moderate voters about abortion rights and fair election administration came to the fore, driving turnout in off-season, off-year races, and helping Democrats maintain the gains they had made in recent years over their predecessors. Republican voters in suburban Milwaukee.
HuffPost spoke with a former company executive in Mequon, who declined to give his name, citing tensions with his conservative neighbors over his political views. In 2020, someone pulled a Biden lawn sign from his family’s front yard.
Fiscally conservative, Mequon voters previously supported former Republican Gov. Scott Walker because he likes “anti-union stuff.” But since Trump’s election in 2016, he told HuffPost, he’s been “all over the Democrats.” Some neighbors’ opposition to wearing masks and taking the COVID-19 vaccine pushed them further away from the GOP.
“I strongly believe in human dignity and gay rights, women’s rights,” he added, summarizing the liberal position on social issues.