Liberals take control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court

Justice Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal, won a heated race for a vacant seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday, changing the power balance in state high court 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 legal career in US history, it’s a game changer for the state’s embattled Democrats.

Without saying exactly how she would govern, Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge, was running as a supporter of abortion rights and an opponent of state legislative and congressional maps rigged by Wisconsin Republicans, which she called “unfair.”

“I believe in one thing that is universal to Wisconsinites across our state, and that is that everyone should have a fair chance to demand justice and not feel like the thumb is in the balance against them,” Protasiewicz told supporters at Milwaukee in a win. party Tuesday night.

Speaking to his supporters, Kelly acknowledged his loss but did not express his best wishes to Protasiewicz.

“I’m not happy to say this: I wish that, in a circumstance like this, I could concede to a worthy opponent.” he said. “But I don’t have a worthy opponent for him to concede to.”

The new liberal 4-3 majority on the court is expected to strike down a statewide abortion ban that took effect after the US Supreme Court decision that struck down the federal right to abortion in June. That law, which dates back to 1849, makes performing an abortion a crime punishable by up to six years in prison.

Assuming Democrats and their allies challenge the state’s maps once more, a liberal-majority court would likely be sympathetic to throwing out those maps as well.

Referring to the latter possibility, Wisconsin Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki told HuffPost in March that a possible victory for Protasiewicz represented a “chance to have a chance.”

With that in mind, the Wisconsin Democratic Party put the full weight of its infrastructure behind Protasiewicz’s campaign. The efforts of the state party included the direct transfer of $8 million to the Protasiewicz campaign.

The transparent way Wisconsin Democrats treated the race as a contest for liberal priorities and political power led Kelly and his conservative allies to accuse Protasiewicz of judicial activism that would tailor court rulings to their preferred political outcomes.

“Democrats have pretty much realized that they see this as a policymaking opportunity,” Ben Voelkel, a spokesman for Kelly’s campaign, told HuffPost. “That is a completely misattribution of the role of the judiciary.”

But Protasiewicz, who has vowed to recuse himself from cases involving the Wisconsin Democratic Party, insisted that Kelly was the candidate with the troubling partisan bias. He pointed, in particular, to the paid work she had done representing the Wisconsin Republican Party at a time when she was exploring ways to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The former president of the party. testified before Congress that he even consulted Kelly on a plan to name an alternate list of voters who would have voted to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. Kelly said she was only asked if she knew about the plan and she said no. But in an effort to convert his base in the final leg of the campaign, Kelly appeared at events with Scott Presler, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, 2021, which was it spilled into the United States Capitol Riot soon after.

“I don’t think he believes in a representative democracy,” Protasiewicz told HuffPost in an interview in late March in Milwaukee.

To steer the terms of the abortion rights debate away, Kelly and outside groups that support him seized on Protsaiewicz’s public safety record, arguing that he had sentenced violent criminals too lightly.

Based on conversations HuffPost had with various voters in the city of Milwaukee and its surrounding suburbs, that message got across, including to some strong democrats.

Less than two weeks before Election Day, Neal Bryant, a production supervisor at a rodenticide plant and a lifelong Democrat, told HuffPost he needed “more research” into the judicial race.

“He released a lot of inmates who did a lot of rape and sexual assault,” Bryant said, describing his dilemma over breakfast bites at a restaurant on Milwaukee’s predominantly black North Side. “And the other, he is against women’s right to abortion.”

In a speech to Wisconsin’s right-wing voter base, Kelly also asserted that a liberal majority on the state Supreme Court risked jeopardizing more than a decade of conservative reforms, from lax gun rights laws to reductions in union rights and strict voter ID laws.

Jeff and Karen Grossman, former conservative Illinois residents who work at a Lutheran church in the Milwaukee suburb of Mequon, worried that a Protasiewicz victory would open the door to Democratic hegemony in Badger State.

“I’m not saying Republicans are perfect, either,” Jeff Grossman told HuffPost after the couple voted for Kelly in late March. “But I’m afraid the state of Wisconsin looks like the state of Illinois where the voters no longer have the right. They have nothing to say.”

In the end, however, the concerns of liberal and moderate voters about abortion rights and the fair administration of elections took precedence, prompting participation in an off-season and off-year race, and helping Democrats to maintain the gains they have made in recent years with formerly Republican voters in suburban Milwaukee.

HuffPost spoke with a former corporate executive in Mequon, who declined to give her name because she had been at odds with conservative neighbors over her political views. In 2020, someone removed a Biden sign from her family’s front lawn.

A fiscal conservative, the Mequon voter had previously supported former Republican Gov. Scott Walker because she liked his “anti-union stuff.” But since Trump’s election in 2016, she told HuffPost, she has been “fully involved with the Democrats.” Opposition from some of her neighbors to wearing masks and receiving COVID-19 vaccines further alienated her from the Republican Party.

“I’m a big believer in human dignity and gay rights, women’s rights,” she added, summing up her liberal positions on social issues.