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The Most Important Election of 2023 Is Taking Place in Wisconsin
In 2011, as tens of thousands of left-leaning demonstrators occupied the Wisconsin state capitol to protest a new bill gutting public employee unions, a prank caller posing as the right-wing billionaire David Koch got the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, on the phone. Just two years after Barack Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points, Walker had been swept into office by the Tea Party wave. He saw the anti-union law, Act 10, as his chance to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Ronald Reagan, who’d fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, a devastating blow to the labor movement. Republican governors nationwide, Walker boasted, would follow his lead. “This is our moment,” he told the man he thought was Koch.In addition to eviscerating unions, Act 10 was designed to undermine the Democratic Party that depended on them. If similar bills were “enacted in a dozen more states,” wrote the right-wing activist Grover Norquist, “the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics.” Pro-union forces in Wisconsin tried hard to fight back. Democratic legislators fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum. Students walked out of schools and teachers held sickouts. People camped at the capitol for almost three weeks, with sympathizers around the world sending them pizzas. As demonstrations spread to other states, The New York Times drew comparisons to the Arab Spring, asking if Wisconsin was “the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights.” But Republicans jammed the law through, and Wisconsin’s hard right turn was underway.Walker and his party would go on to lock in G.O.P. rule, enacting shockingly lopsided electoral maps and assuring continuing Republican control of the state legislature, as well as dominance of Wisconsin’s national congressional delegation. Nothing since, not even the election of a Democratic governor, has been able to loosen Republicans’ gerrymandered grip on the state. That grip has been used to restrict voting rights, pass an anti-union right-to-work law, cut funding to education, dismantle environmental protections and make Wisconsin one of the hardest states in the country in which to cast a ballot.Democrats, on the other hand, are powerless to pass laws of their own. In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that the state must adopt new, even more gerrymandered maps passed by the legislature. As Craig Gilbert wrote in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, under those maps, to win a bare majority in the Assembly, Democrats would have to win the statewide popular vote by double digits. The Wisconsin Democratic representative Mark Pocan put it this way: For Democrats to win a majority in the legislature, “The Republican Party would have to come out and say we’re now the party of the Chicago Bears and the Minnesota Vikings.”Impervious to voter sentiment, the Republican edifice of power has appeared unbreakable. But a contentious state Supreme Court election on April 4 could finally put a crack in it.A judicial election in a state you probably don’t live in — it might be hard to get excited about. But the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, pitting the mild-mannered, liberal-leaning family court judge Janet Protasiewicz against the Trumpist former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly, is by far the most important political contest of the year.Janet Protasiewicz won’t say how she’d rule on specific abortion cases, but she’s made her view on the issue clear. The race, which has gotten quite vicious, is ostensibly nonpartisan; candidates are not affiliated with a party on the ballot. But its political stakes are clear. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court currently has a 4-3 conservative majority, and one of the conservatives is retiring. If elected, Protasiewicz hopes to take a fresh look at the maps. She wants to revisit Act 10, which the state Supreme Court upheld in 2014. “Since 2011,” she told me in Madison last week, “it’s just been a spiral downward to a place where our democracy is really at peril.” This election is a singular chance to reverse that spiral.It could also determine whether the next presidential election is free and fair, shaking up a swing state court that came frighteningly close to overturning the 2020 vote. And if that isn’t enough, this election will also be a referendum on abortion rights, which is turning out to be the key issue in the race. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, an 1849 Wisconsin law banning almost all abortions went into effect. The state’s Democratic attorney general has filed a lawsuit challenging the ban, and the case will almost certainly make its way to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.“The state Supreme Court has always been the trump card for Republicans,” Charlie Sykes, once an influential right-wing radio host in Wisconsin and now the co-founder of the Never Trump conservative publication The Bulwark, told me. “You flip that and it changes the rules and dynamics of Wisconsin politics pretty fundamentally.”Like anyone auditioning for a judicial role, Protasiewicz, a former prosecutor who likes to tout her “common sense,” won’t say explicitly how she’d rule on the state’s abortion ban. But she offers strong hints. “You’ve had women and families counting on the protections of Roe for 50 years, right?” she told me. “Three generations of women, probably, counting on those protections, and now they’re gone.”Abortion is the primary reason that Protasiewicz’s race is garnering both national attention and, more importantly, national money, becoming the most expensive state Supreme Court contest in American history. After all, in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision scrapping Roe, state courts have emerged as crucial backstops for abortion rights, blocking abortion bans in states including South Carolina and North Dakota. “We’ve got this 1849 ban, and I think it is certainly motivating people to get out and vote,” said Protasiewicz.Democrats are hoping Wisconsin’s abortion ban will motivate the pro-choice vote. This protester is dressed as a uterus outside of the State Bar Center before last week’s debate. When a group of obstetrician-gynecologists held an event for her earlier this month, Protasiewicz said they told her they feared that doctors would no longer want to practice in Wisconsin, worried that routine medical care would run afoul of the law.These fears are well-grounded. One doctor told The New York Times about a patient who was denied standard care for a miscarriage and left bleeding for days. NBC News reported on a Wisconsin doctor who had to jump through hoops to care for a woman whose water had broken at 18 weeks, giving her baby almost no chance for survival and putting her at risk for sepsis. Protasiewicz recounted that the ob-gyns told her, “We don’t want to practice someplace where we can’t provide the necessary services that we feel we need to provide.”“I can’t tell you what I would do in a particular case,” Protasiewicz told me. But, she added, her “personal value” is that “those reproductive health choices should be able to be made by a woman who’s carrying a fetus.”Protasiewicz’s frankness about her views, and the policy implications of this election, seem to infuriate her opponent. In a contentious debate in Madison last week, in front of a standing-room-only crowd, the mutual contempt between candidates was palpable. Kelly kept pointing at Protasiewicz and calling her a liar as she looked straight ahead; the event had a bit of the same vibe as the infamous second presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Kelly inveighed against Protasiewicz for speaking in terms of policy outcomes rather than legal doctrine, calling her “a candidate who does nothing but talk about her personal politics.”“See, this is a judicial election,” Kelly said, his voice oozing with condescension. “You should be talking about things that the courts do.” On the trail, Kelly refers to his opponent as “Politician Protasiewicz” and claims that she’ll replace the rule of law with the “Rule of Janet.”Yet there’s little doubt that Kelly, who was appointed to the bench in 2016 by Walker when another justice retired, will be a reliable vote for the right. That’s why Wisconsin Right to Life has endorsed him and the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List is running ads on his behalf. It’s why a well-known MAGA influencer and a hard-core Christian nationalist have been campaigning for him. As a former Republican, Sykes was bombarded with pro-Kelly mailings before the February primary. Two-thirds of them, he said, were about Kelly’s anti-abortion bona fides. (Kelly’s campaign did not respond to a request for an interview.)A crowd gathered in Sheboygan to hear Scott Presler, a right-wing influencer who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, campaign for Daniel Kelly.The current Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Jill Karofsky, who beat Kelly when he ran to retain his seat in 2020, was in the audience at the debate, and found his pretensions to neutrality risible. “Kelly always ruled in favor of the right-wing special interests,” Karofsky told me. “He was put on the court to carry the water of the right wing, and he did that job phenomenally.”The combination of strenuous claims of neutrality and consistently partisan rulings is, of course, a familiar one in judges who come out of the right-wing legal movement, including those who sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Again and again, conservative justices have insisted that the ideological beliefs that fueled their careers will have no bearing on their jurisprudence, then used the bench to shore up Republican power. One result is that, for Democrats, the courts have become utterly demystified. They are done pretending that judges are merely legal umpires.Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, pointed out that in 2019, Lisa Neubauer, the Democratic-leaning Supreme Court candidate, ran a largely nonpartisan race focused on her experience and qualifications. “In the final stretch of that campaign, the Republican apparatus came in with the singular goal of getting every Republican to vote for the conservative candidate,” said Wikler, knowing that Neubauer “hadn’t made a partisan appeal to Democrats to counterbalance that.” Though Neubauer had been ahead in internal polls, she lost by 5,981 votes. “That was probably the last election in which someone tries to run a campaign that isn’t explicit about the values of the candidate,” Wikler said.In 2018, a Democrat, Tony Evers, defeated Walker in the governor’s race. Another Democrat, Josh Kaul, won the race for attorney general. Republicans in the Legislature responded by weakening the powers of both offices. Among other things, they passed laws, signed by a lame-duck Walker, giving themselves more authority over key appointments, blocking Evers and Kaul from withdrawing from a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act and ensuring that Evers would be unable to get rid of work requirements for some Medicaid recipients. (They also cut early voting in Democratic strongholds from six weeks to two.) The Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the laws along ideological lines.An even bigger challenge to democracy came in 2020. Had Karofsky not replaced Kelly, it’s likely that the court would have overturned Wisconsin’s presidential vote, plunging the country into chaos. As it was, the state Supreme Court decided by a single vote to toss out the Trump campaign’s suit seeking to reverse his Wisconsin loss. Even though there was no evidence of fraud, the Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Rebecca Frank Dallet told me, “there were still three people who were willing to throw out people’s ballots.”Daniel Kelly calls his opponent “Politician Protasiewicz.”After Kelly left the court, he was paid by the Wisconsin Republican Party and the Republican National Committee to work on “election integrity.” His name surfaced in Congress’s Jan. 6 investigation, with the former Wisconsin Republican chair Andrew Hitt saying that Kelly had been part of “pretty extensive conversations” on the scheme to create a slate of fake Republican electors who would attempt to cast votes for Trump.The one right-leaning judge who voted against the Trump campaign in 2020 was Brian Hagedorn. Kelly has blasted him for it, calling him “supremely unreliable.” Even if Kelly wins in April, Hagedorn will still be on the court, so Republicans can’t count on a majority if they contest the state’s election results in 2024. Nevertheless, several people I spoke to said they think Hagedorn might sign on to a less preposterous challenge than the one brought by the Trump team. “I don’t take him for granted at all,” said Sykes, whose ex-wife is a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. “Because the pressures are so intense here on these kinds of things. So I’d be very worried.”As of this writing, there’s been no public polling on the Supreme Court race. Protasiewicz’s internal polling shows her ahead by the mid-to-high single digits. A poll by Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, a right-wing group supporting Kelly, also had Protasiewicz ahead, but only by two points, within the margin of error.Last week, Kelly campaigned with Matthew Trewhella, a fundamentalist pastor who has defended the murder of abortion providers, and Scott Presler, a right-wing influencer who was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “What that tells me is that Kelly has gotten so deep into swimming in that really hard-right cesspool, that I’m not sure he’s really reaching out to the swing voters,” said Sykes.Still, given that April elections historically have low turnout, getting out the base can be enough to win. “The fact that both sides are spending heavily at the end certainly suggests that both sides believe the race may still be within reach,” said Charles Franklin, a political scientist and the director of the Marquette Law School Poll.Early voting in Wisconsin has begun. With so much riding on the outcome, the contest has turned extraordinarily ugly. During the primary election that whittled the field to Kelly and Protasiewicz, the right-wing radio host Dan O’Donnell boasted of his readiness to play dirty. “I can do dirty tricks too,” O’Donnell said, suggesting he’d put out ads claiming that Protasiewicz opposed abortion. He added: “We can fool them. We can trick them.” In a Twitter group chat about plans for anti-Protasiewicz disinformation, later leaked online, one right-wing troll wrote, “I could doctor a couple videos or articles about how she said the N-word or something.”In what may or may not be a coincidence, earlier this month a conservative website, Wisconsin Right Now, published allegations that, in the 1990s, Protasiewicz used the N-word, and that she’d abused her ex-husband, Patrick Madden, who is deceased.Protasiewicz was married to Madden, a much older conservative judge, for 10 months when she was in her 30s, and their divorce was acrimonious. The sources named by Wisconsin Right Now were an old friend of her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s son, with whom Protasiewicz had a hostile relationship. According to divorce records, one reason Protasiewicz and her ex split up was that Prostasiewicz was unhappy that Michael Madden, who was on probation after serving a prison term for marijuana trafficking, was living with them. The divorce records make no mention of abuse, though O’Donnell, who has amplified the story, argued on his radio show that Patrick Madden must have been too ashamed to admit it.The Wisconsin Republican Party has repeatedly tweeted about the Wisconsin Right Now stories. In a press release, Kelly said that the allegations “are troubling to say the least,” calling for a “swift and full explanation.” At first, it seemed the issue might remain confined to the fever swamps. Last week, though, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel asked Protasiewicz about the claims during a videotaped editorial board meeting.“It’s an absolute lie, 100 percent. To me it smacks of some type of level of desperation,” she said. (The Journal Sentinel later reported, of Madden, “Some details of the stepson’s story have changed, and his siblings did not confirm either allegation.”)These accusations now seem set to become part of the right’s closing pitch. “Like everybody around politics, I get a ton of emails from both sides,” said Franklin, the political scientist from Marquette. “And those claims are being pushed very heavily in the Republican and allied group emails I get.”Still, said Franklin, this is an election that is overwhelmingly about abortion and redistricting. These are issues that affect people’s real lives, and they’re deeply intertwined. In a decade of polling, Franklin said, roughly 60 percent to 65 percent of Wisconsin voters have consistently said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances. Gerrymandering means that the majority cannot enact its beliefs into law.“If I had one big thing that I want to get across to you, it’s that the deadlock between the political branches, which is related to districting, is one of the reasons why the Supreme Court has become such a hot race,” said Franklin. “Because it’s become the arbiter of that deadlock.”If Democrats can flip the Supreme Court, that “changes the rules and dynamics of Wisconsin politics pretty fundamentally,” said Charlie Sykes. There’s a certain irony here. For decades, conservatives have crusaded to overturn Roe v. Wade, nurturing a bench of right-wing judges and building the political power needed to confirm them. In Wisconsin as elsewhere, opposition to abortion motivated the grass roots and united most of the right’s factions. As BuzzFeed News reported, it was probably the central issue fueling the political rise of Scott Walker, who served as president of the Students for Life chapter at Marquette University. “Support of abortion opponents is credited in Walker’s victory,” a 1993 Milwaukee Journal headline said when he won the primary for an assembly seat.But in finally triumphing, the right created a backlash that threatens their durable hold on power in a crucial swing state. “Now that Roe v. Wade is gone, we move from the court of law to the court of public opinion,” Walker tweeted after the Dobbs decision. Inasmuch as that’s true in Wisconsin, it could mean the beginning of the end of what Walker built there. And because Wisconsin has been a pioneer in minority rule, the restoration of democracy there would resonate nationally.“In my election in 2020 we worked really, really hard to try to explain to people why the court matters. How it’s relevant to their everyday life,” said Karofsky. “And I think that the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Dobbs decision, made that crystal clear for everyone.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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Republicans Face Setbacks in Push to Tighten Voting Laws on College Campuses
Party officials across the country have sought to erect more barriers for young voters, who tilt heavily Democratic, after several cycles in which their turnout surged.Alarmed over young people increasingly proving to be a force for Democrats at the ballot box, Republican lawmakers in a number of states have been trying to enact new obstacles to voting for college students.In Idaho, Republicans used their power monopoly this month to ban student ID cards as a form of voter identification.But so far this year, the new Idaho law is one of few successes for Republicans targeting young voters.Attempts to cordon off out-of-state students from voting in their campus towns or to roll back preregistration for teenagers have failed in New Hampshire and Virginia. Even in Texas, where 2019 legislation shuttered early voting sites on many college campuses, a new proposal that would eliminate all college polling places seems to have an uncertain future.“When these ideas are first floated, people are aghast,” said Chad Dunn, the co-founder and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project. But he cautioned that the lawmakers who sponsor such bills tend to bring them back over and over again.“Then, six, eight, 10 years later, these terrible ideas become law,” he said.Turnout in recent cycles has surged for young voters, who were energized by issues like abortion, climate change and the Trump presidency.They voted in rising numbers during the midterms last year in Kansas and Michigan, which both had referendums about abortion. And college students, who had long paid little attention to elections, emerged as a crucial voting bloc in the 2018 midterms.But even with such gains, Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights program for the Brennan Center for Justice, said there was still progress to be made.“Their turnout is still far outpaced by their older counterparts,” Mr. Morales-Doyle said.Now, with the 2024 presidential election underway, the battle over young voters has heightened significance.Between the 2018 and 2022 elections in Idaho, registration jumped 66 percent among 18- and 19-year-old voters, the largest increase in the nation, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The nonpartisan research organization, based at Tufts University, focuses on youth civic engagement.Gov. Brad Little of Idaho gave his approval to a law that bans student ID cards as a form of voter identification.Kyle Green/Associated PressOut of 17 states that generally require voter ID, Idaho will join Texas and only four others — North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee — that do not accept any student IDs, according to the Voting Rights Lab, a group that tracks legislation.Arizona and Wisconsin have rigid rules on student IDs that colleges and universities have struggled to meet, though some Wisconsin schools have been successful.Proponents of such restrictions often say they are needed to prevent voter fraud, even though instances of fraud are rare. Two lawsuits were filed in state and federal court shortly after Idaho’s Republican governor, Brad Little, signed the student ID prohibition into law on March 15. “The facts aren’t particularly persuasive if you’re just trying to get through all of these voter suppression bills,” Betsy McBride, the president of the League of Women Voters of Idaho, one of the plaintiffs in the state lawsuit, said before the bill’s signing.A fight over out-of-state students in New HampshireIn New Hampshire, which has one of the highest percentages in the nation of college students from out of state, G.O.P. lawmakers proposed a bill this year that would have barred voting access for those students, but it died in committee after failing to muster a single vote.Nearly 59 percent of students at traditional colleges in New Hampshire came from out of state in 2020, according to the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at Tufts.The University of New Hampshire had opposed the legislation, while students and other critics had raised questions about its constitutionality.The bill, which would have required students to show their in-state tuition statements when registering to vote, would have even hampered New Hampshire residents attending private schools like Dartmouth College, which doesn’t have an in-state rate, said McKenzie St. Germain, the campaign director for the New Hampshire Campaign for Voting Rights, a nonpartisan voting rights group.Sandra Panek, one of the sponsors of the bill that died, said she would like to bring it back if she can get bipartisan support. “We want to encourage our young people to vote,” said Ms. Panek, who regularly tweets about election conspiracy theories. But, she added, elections should be reflective of “those who reside in the New Hampshire towns and who ultimately bear the consequences of the election results.”A Texas ban on campus polling places has made little headwayIn Texas, the Republican lawmaker who introduced the bill to eliminate all polling places on college campuses this year, Carrie Isaac, cited safety concerns and worries about political violence.Voting advocates see a different motive.“This is just the latest in a long line of attacks on young people’s right to vote in Texas,” said Claudia Yoli Ferla, the executive director of MOVE Texas Action Fund, a nonpartisan group that seeks to empower younger voters.Students at the University of Texas at Austin lined up to cast their ballots on campus during the 2020 primary. A new proposal would eliminate all college polling places in the state.Tamir Kalifa for The New York TimesMs. Isaac has also introduced similar legislation to eliminate polling places at primary and secondary schools. In an interview, she mentioned the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers — an attack that was not connected to voting.“Emotions run very high,” Ms. Isaac said. “Poll workers have complained about increased threats to their lives. It’s just not conducive, I believe, to being around children of all ages.”The legislation has been referred to the House Elections Committee, but has yet to receive a hearing in the Legislature. Voting rights experts have expressed skepticism that the bill — one of dozens related to voting introduced for this session — would advance.G.O.P. voting restrictions flounder in other statesIn Virginia, one Republican failed in her effort to repeal a state law that lets teenagers register to vote starting at age 16 if they will turn 18 in time for a general election. Part of a broader package of proposed election restrictions, the bill had no traction in the G.O.P.-controlled House, where it died this year in committee after no discussion.And in Wyoming, concerns about making voting harder on older people appears to have inadvertently helped younger voters. A G.O.P. bill that would have banned most college IDs from being used as voter identification was narrowly defeated in the state House because it also would have banned Medicare and Medicaid insurance cards as proof of identity at the polls, a provision that Republican lawmakers worried could be onerous for older people.“In my mind, all we’re doing is kind of hurting students and old people,” Dan Zwonitzer, a Republican lawmaker who voted against the bill, said during a House debate in February.But some barriers are already in placeGeorgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, so students at private institutions, including several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification.Georgia has accepted student IDs only from public colleges and universities since 2006, a rule that means students at private institutions, like several historically Black colleges and universities, must use another form of identification. Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York TimesIn Ohio, which has for years not accepted student IDs for voting, Republicans in January approved a broader photo ID requirement that also bars students from using university account statements or utility bills for voting purposes, as they had in the past.The Idaho bill will take effect in January. Scott Herndon and Tina Lambert, the bill’s sponsors in the Senate and the House, did not respond to requests for comment, but Mr. Herndon said during a Feb. 24 session that student identification cards had lower vetting standards than those issued by the government.“It isn’t about voter fraud,” he said. “It’s just making sure that the people who show up to vote are who they say they are.”Republicans contended that nearly 99 percent of Idahoans had used their driver’s licenses to vote, but the bill’s opponents pointed out that not all students have driver’s licenses or passports — and that there is a cost associated with both.Mae Roos, a senior at Borah High School in Boise, testified against the bill at a Feb. 10 hearing.“When we’re taught from the very beginning, when we first start trying to participate, that voting is an expensive process, an arduous process, a process rife with barriers, we become disillusioned with that great dream of our democracy,” Ms. Roos said. “We start to believe that our voices are not valued.” More
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Costly Court Race Points to a Politicized Future for Judicial Elections
A crucial election for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has drawn tens of millions of dollars in spending, turning an officially nonpartisan contest into a bare-knuckle political fight.MADISON, Wis. — It is a judicial election like no other in American history.Thirty million dollars and counting has poured into the campaign for a swing seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, with TV ads swamping the airwaves. The candidates leave no illusions that they would be neutral on the court. And the race will decide not only the future of abortion rights in Wisconsin, but the battleground state’s political direction.Yet in other ways, the contest resembles an obscure local election: There are no bus tours or big rallies. Out-of-state political stars are nowhere to be found. Retail politicking is limited to small gatherings at bars that are not advertised to the public in advance.The result is a campaign — officially nonpartisan but positively awash in partisanship — that swirls together the old and new ways of judicial politics in America, and that offers a preview of what might be to come. It is the latest evidence, after the contentious recent confirmation battles and pitched decisions on the U.S. Supreme Court, that judges increasingly viewed as political are starting to openly act political as well.Officials in both parties believe the Wisconsin race could lead to a sea change in how State Supreme Court races are contested in the 21 other states where high court justices are elected, injecting never-before-seen amounts of money, politicization and voter interest.“If you elect a candidate who is focusing on politics and agenda and values, that’s going to reward that behavior, and it will just repeat,” said Shelley Grogan, a state appellate court judge in Wisconsin who is backing Daniel Kelly, the conservative candidate for the Supreme Court, and plotting a future high court run of her own.Judge Grogan was alluding to the fact that Justice Kelly’s liberal rival, Janet Protasiewicz, has been far more open about her political views, seeking to turn the April 4 general election into a single-issue referendum on abortion, which is now illegal in Wisconsin. And she appears to have the advantage, with a lead in private polling and a major fund-raising and advertising edge.Justice Kelly, who served for four years on the court before being ousted in a 2020 election, has a long conservative record and endorsements from Wisconsin’s largest anti-abortion groups. But he has centered his campaign on the argument that he is not a political actor and will decide cases solely based on the Wisconsin Constitution, a message that even some conservatives worry is less compelling than Democrats’ pleas to protect abortion rights.Judge Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge, has emphasized her support for liberal issues and her opposition to conservative policies. She is, she says, sharing her values without explicitly stating how she would rule on particular cases.But few are fooled. During their lone debate last week, Judge Protasiewicz barely bothered to disguise how she would rule on the state’s 1849 abortion ban, a challenge to which is expected to reach the Wisconsin Supreme Court this year.Sarah Godlewski, a Democrat who was appointed this month as Wisconsin’s secretary of state, said last week at a stop in Green Bay that “when we’re talking about abortion, when we’re talking about reproductive freedom, we’re going to be able to win on these messages.”Janet Protasiewicz, the liberal candidate in the race, has been remarkably open about her political views.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesWhoever wins will earn a 10-year term and be the deciding vote on a four-to-three majority on the court, which is likely to rule on voting issues before and during the 2024 presidential election. If Judge Protasiewicz wins, Democrats are certain to challenge the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps — and during the campaign, she has called them “rigged.”The Protasiewicz strategy is to pound away on advertising to energize Democrats while depressing Republican support.“For the typical voter, 90 percent of what they learn about this election is probably going to wind up being from campaign ads,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the state Democratic Party.Virtually all of the state’s Democratic players are united behind Judge Protasiewicz’s campaign — with some notable exceptions.In Milwaukee, the Black community organizing group BLOC, which formed in 2017, has refused to back Judge Protasiewicz because she sentenced the son of one of the group’s leaders to 20 years in prison for a 2019 hit-and-run crash that killed 6- and 4-year-old sisters.“It’s obviously not ideal, as it is for all the marbles,” said Angela Lang, BLOC’s executive director. “But it is one that I have to stand in. I would not force folks who have had family members locked up by her to be put in the position of supporting her.”Wisconsin Republicans face more familiar divisions.Some conservative voters have been turned off by the torrent of negative ads about Justice Kelly, said Matt Batzel, the Wisconsin-based executive director of American Majority Action, a conservative grass-roots training group.Mr. Batzel’s canvassers, who typically focus on conservative homes, found that in a suburban Milwaukee State Senate district that is also holding a special election on April 4, two-thirds of people who said abortion was their top issue in the race said they were in favor of abortion rights.“‘Let’s interpret the Constitution as written and follow the rule of law’ hasn’t historically motivated that many people,” Mr. Batzel said.Daniel Kelly, the conservative candidate, has centered his campaign on the argument that he is not a political actor, a message that even some conservatives worry is less compelling than Democrats’ pleas to protect abortion rights.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesDuring the debate, Justice Kelly insisted he had not made up his mind on how he would rule on the challenge to the 1849 law.“Dan is such a purist that he doesn’t want to appear to be a politician,” said David Prosser, a conservative former justice on the court.Republican legislative leaders in Wisconsin, aware that abortion rights are a potent motivator for Democrats, have sought to create some exceptions to the 1849 law, but the effort has made little headway.“The Republican Party should have passed an abortion bill and put it on the governor’s desk a long time ago,” said Van Mobley, the Republican village president of Thiensville, who was the first Wisconsin elected official to endorse Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign. “They still haven’t. So I don’t think that that’s very helpful to create a climate for us.”Justice Kelly’s biggest hurdle may be the financial disparity — which is the result of campaign finance rules written by Wisconsin Republicans in 2015.Before then, the state provided modest public funding for statewide judicial campaigns and capped the amount of money candidates for any office could receive from the state parties.But that year, Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-led Legislature passed a law allowing individual donors to give unlimited amounts to the state parties and allowing the state parties to transfer unlimited sums directly to candidates.This, combined with the fund-raising acumen Mr. Wikler brought for Democrats when he became party chairman in 2019, has put Republicans at a significant financial disadvantage in races where their billionaire donors do not underwrite candidates.Republicans now find themselves bemoaning the spending imbalance that has allowed Judge Protasiewicz to broadcast more than $10 million in television ads while Justice Kelly has spent less than $500,000 on them.Judge Grogan lamented that Republicans did not have access to the national fund-raising network that has propped up the Protasiewicz campaign. But she declined to say whether it had been a mistake for Republicans and Mr. Walker to lift the cap on contributions to state parties, and would not offer an opinion about whether donors should be allowed to make unlimited contributions.“What we should not let money do in the state of Wisconsin is buy a seat on any court,” Judge Grogan said. “Outside money should not buy a seat on a Wisconsin court. The voters in Wisconsin should decide.” More
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Wyoming becomes first US state to outlaw use of abortion pills
Wyoming has become the first US state to outlaw the use or prescription of medication abortion pills after the governor, Mark Gordon, signed into law a bill that was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this month.The crux of the two-page Wyoming bill is a provision making it illegal to “prescribe, dispense, distribute, sell or use any drug for the purpose of procuring or performing an abortion”.So-called “morning-after” pills, prescription contraceptive medication used after sex but before a pregnancy can be confirmed, are exempted from the ban.The measure also includes an exemption for any treatment necessary to protect a woman “from an imminent peril that substantially endangers her life or health”, as well as any treatment of a “natural miscarriage according to currently accepted medical guidelines”.Violation of the ban is to be treated as a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $9,000.The measure stipulates that a woman “upon whom a chemical abortion is performed or attempted shall not be criminally prosecuted”.In a statement, Wyoming ACLU advocacy director Antonio Serrano criticised the governor’s decision to sign the law.“A person’s health, not politics, should guide important medical decisions – including the decision to have an abortion,” Serrano said.The governor said he was also allowing enactment, without his signature, of a separate bill passed by state lawmakers to prohibit conventional abortion procedures except when necessary to protect the health and life of the mother, or in case of rape or incest. Exception is also permitted to end a pregnancy if doctors determine there to be a lethal abnormality of the foetus.Wyoming’s new law comes as a rightwing push to crack down on medication abortions gathers momentum, with a federal judge in Texas currently considering a nationwide ban on the abortion pill mifepristone in response to a lawsuit by anti-abortion groups.A two pill combination of mifepristone and another drug is the most common form of abortion in the US.Medication abortions were the preferred method for ending pregnancy in the US even before the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the ruling that protected the right to abortion for nearly five decades.Since that decision last June, abortion restrictions have been up to states and the landscape has shifted quickly. Thirteen states are now enforcing bans on abortion at any point in pregnancy, and one more, Georgia, bans it once cardiac activity can be detected, or at about six weeks’ gestation.Courts have put on hold enforcement of abortion bans or deep restrictions in Arizona, Indiana, Montana, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming. Idaho courts have forced the state to allow abortions during medical emergencies.Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report More
- in Elections
In Iowa, Kamala Harris Says Republicans Won’t Stop at Abortion
“If politicians start using the court to undo doctors’ decisions, imagine where that can lead,” Ms. Harris said at a discussion on abortion with local lawmakers and medical officials.DES MOINES — Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that a lawsuit seeking to overturn federal approval of a widely used abortion pill amounted to an attack on “our public health system as a whole.”During her first trip to Iowa as vice president, Ms. Harris portrayed Republican attempts to impose a nationwide ban on abortion as immoral and extreme.“If politicians start using the court to undo doctors’ decisions, imagine where that can lead,” Ms. Harris said as a judge in Texas considered whether he would issue a preliminary injunction that could take the pill, mifepristone, off the market.Ms. Harris has taken a lead role on abortion as President Biden prepares to announce an expected run for re-election. Without the votes in Congress to enshrine abortion protections into law, the White House hopes Ms. Harris can help sustain the sort of anger that motivated Democratic voters during the midterm elections.In her appearance Thursday at Grand View University, Ms. Harris framed the abortion issue as part of a broader struggle for health care and privacy, a strategy aimed at galvanizing the broadest coalition of voters.“This is not only about reproductive health,” Ms. Harris said, adding that overturning F.D.A. approval for abortion medication could set a dangerous precedent, potentially affecting the availability of other medications.The last-minute trip to Iowa, planned by the vice president’s team only in the past few days, is part of a push by Ms. Harris to get out into the country more to overcome an impression from allies and critics alike that she has not forged a definitive role in the administration.Top Republicans have flocked to Iowa in recent weeks in anticipation of the 2024 Iowa caucuses, including former President Donald J. Trump; former Vice President Mike Pence; Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador; Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.Democrats have overhauled their primary calendar, replacing Iowa with South Carolina as the party’s first nominating contest. But the rush of Republicans to Iowa presented an opportunity for Ms. Harris to call attention to restrictions that could be imposed by Republican-led legislatures.“We need to show the difference that while Republicans are taking health care rights away from them, we in the Democratic Party are saying that is not acceptable,” said Elizabeth Naftali, a deputy finance chair of the Democratic National Committee.Ms. Naftali said that Democrats could not allow a “steamroll by Republicans” just because the primary calendar had changed.Most abortions are now banned in more than a dozen states following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year. While Iowa has not banned abortion, it is one of many states the administration fears could soon enact more severe abortion restrictions.Last year, the Iowa Supreme Court found that there was no right to an abortion under the state’s constitution. A ban on the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy has been blocked by a state judge since 2019 but Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, has appealed the decision to the higher court. The state currently bans abortion after 20 weeks.Most Iowans — 61 percent — believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll last fall. Thirty-three percent say it should be illegal in most or all cases, and 6 percent are not sure.“We have just seen a lot of panic and fear among patients who are worried,” said Mazie Stilwell, the director of public affairs for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa.White House officials acknowledged that there was only so much that they could do to protect abortion access without Congress, but many abortion advocates are calling for policies that would protect both medical officials providing abortions and those seeking them.“What I know feels frustrating for me and many organizers on the ground is we keep having meetings but there’s not any action,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, the founder and executive director of the reproductive rights advocacy group We Testify.No major policy announcements came on Thursday. But Ms. Harris described those pushing for abortion restrictions as “extremist so-called leaders who purport and profess to hail themselves as a beacon of freedom and opportunity.”Stefanie Brown James, a co-founder of the Collective PAC, an organization dedicated to electing African American officials, said such blunt messaging would be imperative for both Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden in the months ahead.“In the event Kamala Harris continues to be his second in command, it’s important for her now to be out having conversations as much as it is for him to be,” Ms. James said. “This issue is not going away anytime soon.” More
- in US Politics
The right is stealthily working to remove Americans’ access to abortion medication | Moira Donegan
This week a Republican-appointed federal judge weighed whether to grant an injunction that could remove mifepristone, the drug used in most American abortions, from the market nationwide. And the hearing almost happened in secret.US district court judge Matthew Kacsmaryk had initially planned to keep Wednesday’s hearing in the case – in which a group of rightwing anti-abortion groups are suing the FDA to reverse its 20-year-old approval of mifepristone – quiet. In a conference call with lawyers for the anti-choice groups and the Department of Justice, Kacsmaryk asked attorneys not to disclose the existence of the hearing (“This is not a gag order,” he said repeatedly), and said that the event would only be made public late on Tuesday to minimize popular awareness. “It may even be after business hours.” The judge’s courtroom in Amarillo, Texas, is hours away from any major city. It was only because of a press leak that the hearing was known to the public at all.It was just one of many of the alarming irregularities in the lawsuit, in which Kacsmaryk seems poised to grant the plaintiffs’ wish and issue an injunction that will radically reduce access to abortion nationwide.For one thing, the plaintiffs’ standing is exceptionally shaky: it’s not clear why the collection of abortion opponents – including one doctor, George Delgado, whose attempt to design an abortion-reversal clinical trial sent 25% of the test subjects to the hospital – have standing to sue the FDA. It’s especially unclear why they have standing to sue in Amarillo; the federal judicial district has become a popular venue for rightwing litigation in part because Kacsmaryk, an exceptionally conservative jurist willing to publish poorly reasoned, policy-driven opinions, is the only federal judge there.For another thing, the plaintiffs’ requests are exceptionally far-reaching. The anti-abortion groups want Kacsmaryk to declare the FDA’s approval of mifepristone illegal, even though the drug has been available in the US, and proven to be safe, for more than 20 years, and even though a judicial reversal of FDA approval for a medication would be highly unusual and only dubiously legal. At the hearing on Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs acknowledged that there was no precedent for the court to order the suspension of a long-approved medication. If Kacsmaryk approves the injunction – and all indications are that he will – the drug could become inaccessible nationwide, even in Democratic-controlled states where abortion is legal.For another thing, the plaintiffs’ claims are so profoundly divorced from fact that it is difficult to believe that they are being made in good faith. The anti-abortion groups – including the doctor whose study sent women to the hospital – say that they are challenging the drug because they believe, falsely, that mifepristone is unsafe. Lawyers from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the rightwing legal outfit that is representing the plaintiffs and which is designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, pursued this idea on Wednesday in court. “How many more women have to die?” attorney Erik Baptist asked.In fact, no one dies from mifepristone. One of the most aggressively studied and tested drugs in the world since its creation in France in 1987, mifepristone, which blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone and stops a pregnancy from progressing, has been found effective and overwhelmingly safe; it has a lower rate of serious complications than Tylenol. One study found that “significant adverse outcomes” occurred in less than 1% (0.65%) of mifepristone patients; the most common of these was continued pregnancy.What women do die from – died from in massive numbers before Roe, and will die from again, if medication abortion becomes unavailable – is illegal surgical abortions.Since Dobbs, the abortion rights movement has correctly been aiming to de-stigmatize illegal, self-managed abortions, encouraging women to stock up on the pills in advance so that they have them if they need them. The idea was that women shouldn’t be scared to use the pills: mifepristone, taken together with the contraction-inducing drug misoprostol, is so overwhelmingly safe and effective that women who could access the pills could confidently and secretly manage their own abortions, even in ban states. But if medication abortion becomes inaccessible, women may attempt more dangerous methods to self-induce. This is the real reason anti-abortion groups are targeting mifepristone: not because it endangers women, but because it keeps them safe.The injunction doesn’t necessarily have to end medication abortion in America as we know it. For one thing, there are already groups, both foreign and domestic, that are mailing abortion medication, including mifepristone, to all 50 states, regardless of local law. Women’s solidarity, inventiveness and determination will always outmatch punitive anti-abortion regimes. For another, an established misoprostol-only protocol for abortion has already been proven effective.Some abortion providers have already signaled their intention to switch to misoprostol-only; the drug is available over the counter in Mexico. But though they are effective, misoprostol-only abortions are also significantly more painful than those conducted with mifepristone. For the anti-abortion groups in court, that’s likely part of the point.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More - in Elections
In Wisconsin, Liberals Barrage Conservative Supreme Court Candidate With Attack Ads
Daniel Kelly, the conservative candidate for a swing seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, promised that help was on the way. But his campaign has already been outspent on TV by $9.1 million to nothing.As conservatives in Wisconsin seek to maintain control of the State Supreme Court in an all-important election for a crucial swing seat, they would appear to be fighting uphill.The conservative candidate, Daniel Kelly, is trailing in limited private polling of the race. Abortion rights, which powered Democrats in the midterm elections, are driving the party to shovel enormous sums of money into the campaign. And perhaps most significantly, Justice Kelly’s campaign has been outspent by a staggering margin on television since the Feb. 21 primary: $9.1 million to nothing.But Justice Kelly, who sat on the court before losing re-election in 2020, appears unfazed. He told supporters on Sunday in northwest Wisconsin that help was on the way from unidentified outside groups in his race against Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge opposing him in the April 4 election.“Because there are nationwide organizations that care about the rule of law, about the constitutional order, and they are spending to promote our campaign, you should start seeing the effects of them this coming week,” Justice Kelly told a gathering of the Northland Freedom Alliance in Webster, Wis. “Right now, it’s kind of wall-to-wall Janet. And I object to that. There, I’m told the cavalry is on the way. And so hopefully, they’ll have some good and smart and true ads.”Wisconsin is at the midway point of a six-week general election for a seat that will determine the balance of the State Supreme Court. Victory by Justice Kelly would preserve conservatives’ sway over the court, which they have controlled since 2008, while success by Judge Protasiewicz would give Wisconsin liberals an opportunity to legalize abortion rights and invalidate the state’s Republican-drawn gerrymandered legislative maps, as well as roll back other measures put in place by the court and G.O.P. lawmakers.The New York Times obtained a recording of Justice Kelly’s remarks, in which he addressed an array of issues likely to be decided in the high-stakes race and estimated that his campaign would raise $2 million to $2.5 million. He also again sought to draw a contrast with Judge Protasiewicz, who has been remarkably open about her political views, by asserting that his comments articulating his judicial philosophy do not constitute broadcasting his personal political positions.“I don’t talk about my politics for the same reason I don’t campaign on who the Packers’ next quarterback should be,” he said. “It has no effect on the job.”While Justice Kelly promised that the cavalry was on the way, it’s unclear whether it will be enough to turn the tide of the battle.Only one national organization has spent anything on television to support the Kelly campaign: the super PAC Fair Courts America, which is backed by Richard Uihlein, the conservative billionaire. So far in the general election, Fair Courts America has spent $2.3 million on TV ads. This week, it began a further $450,000 in statewide radio advertising, but the group has not yet committed to investing more in the race, according to a person familiar with Mr. Uihlein’s decisions who was not authorized to speak publicly.The biggest pro-Kelly spender, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s business lobby, has spent $3.4 million on his behalf so far. Nick Novak, a spokesman for the group, declined to comment on the group’s future plans. A Fair Courts America spokesman did not respond to messages on Tuesday. The flood of Protasiewicz ads have attacked Justice Kelly for his opposition to abortion rights, past statements attacking Social Security and his association with Republican attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, among other issues.Mr. Kelly’s spokesman, Ben Voelkel, said Mr. Kelly was filming a television ad on Tuesday. He predicted the Kelly campaign and its allies would soon catch up with Judge Protasiewicz and Democrats in overall television spending, but at the same time suggested the millions of dollars spent of television time was wasted in a relatively low-turnout April election.“We’re reaching out to voters in a lot of different ways,” Mr. Voelkel said. “They are spending millions of dollars for an election that’s not going to have a big turnout. We’ve taken a slightly different approach.”Wisconsin’s municipal clerks began placing absentee ballots for the Supreme Court election in the mail this week, and in-person ballots can be cast starting next Tuesday. Private polling conducted by officials on both sides of the race shows Judge Protasiewicz with a lead over Justice Kelly in the mid-to-high single digits. Mr. Voelkel disputed that Justice Kelly was trailing but declined to reveal the campaign’s figures.The court election is formally a nonpartisan contest, but there is little mystery about where the candidates stand politically. The bulk of Judge Protasiewicz’s campaign money has come from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which can transfer unlimited amounts under state law. Justice Kelly has worked as a lawyer for the Republican National Committee, which hired him to focus on “election integrity” issues for the party during and after the 2020 election.On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton endorsed Judge Protasiewicz. Justice Kelly was endorsed by President Donald J. Trump during the justice’s 2020 re-election campaign, which he lost.In the last three weeks, the Protasiewicz campaign has spent $9.1 million on television advertising, and outside groups supporting her have spent $2.03 million, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.The imbalance on Wisconsin’s television airwaves is even greater than the spending figures suggest.Because the Protasiewicz campaign is able to buy television advertising at about one-third the rate of independent expenditure groups, she alone has broadcast more than three times as many TV advertisements in Wisconsin as the pro-Kelly groups combined, according to AdImpact’s data.“Dan Kelly has been relying on extreme right-wing groups to save his campaign with millions of dollars in ads that lie about Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s record,” said Sam Roecker, a spokesman for the Protasiewicz campaign.The election is already the most expensive judicial race in American history, with at least $27 million spent so far on television alone. A 2004 contest for the Illinois Supreme Court previously had the most spending, at $15 million, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.In an interview on the eve of the primary last month, Justice Kelly said he had not received any private spending commitments from Mr. Uihlein and had not spoken with him since last summer. More
