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    Wisconsin Supreme Court Election: Protasiewicz Wins With Abortion Message

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    Janet Protasiewicz prevailed in the state’s highly consequential contest for the Supreme Court, which will now be likely to reverse the state’s abortion ban and end the use of gerrymandered legislative maps.MILWAUKEE — Wisconsin voters on Tuesday chose to upend the political direction of their state by electing a liberal candidate to the State Supreme Court, flipping majority control from conservatives, according to The Associated Press. The result means that in the next year, the court is likely to reverse the state’s abortion ban and end the use of gerrymandered legislative maps drawn by Republicans.Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, defeated Daniel Kelly, a conservative former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who sought a return to the bench. With more than 75 percent of votes counted, Judge Protasiewicz led by more than 10 percentage points, though the margin was expected to narrow as rural counties tallied ballots.“Our state is taking a step forward to a better and brighter future where our rights and freedoms will be protected,” Judge Protasiewicz told jubilant supporters at her victory party in Milwaukee.The contest, which featured over $40 million in spending, was the most expensive judicial election in American history. Early on, Democrats recognized the importance of the race for a swing seat on the top court in one of the country’s perennial political battlegrounds. Millions of dollars from out of state poured into Wisconsin to back Judge Protasiewicz, and a host of national Democratic groups rallied behind her campaign.Judge Protasiewicz, 60, shattered long-held notions of how judicial candidates should conduct themselves by making her political priorities central to her campaign. She made explicit her support for abortion rights and called the maps, which gave Republicans near-supermajority control of the Legislature, “rigged” and “unfair.”Her election to a 10-year term for an officially nonpartisan seat gives Wisconsin’s liberals a 4-to-3 majority on the court, which has been controlled by conservatives since 2008. Liberals will hold a court majority until at least 2025, when a liberal justice’s term expires. A conservative justice’s term ends in 2026.As the race was called Tuesday night, the court’s three sitting liberal justices embraced at Judge Protasiewicz’s election night party in Milwaukee, as onlookers cried tears of joy. During her speech, the judge and the other three liberal justices clasped their hands together in the air in celebration.“Today’s results mean two very important and special things,” Judge Protasiewicz said. “First, it means that Wisconsin voters have made their voices heard. They have chosen to reject partisan extremism in this state. And second, it means our democracy will always prevail.”Justice Kelly, 59, evinced the bitterness of the campaign with a testy concession speech that acknowledged his defeat and portended doom for the state. He called his rival’s campaign “truly beneath contempt” and decried “the rancid slanders that were launched against me.”“I wish that I’d be able to concede to a worthy opponent, but I do not have a worthy opponent,” Justice Kelly told supporters in Green Lake, Wis. He had not called Judge Protasiewicz by the time she delivered her victory remarks.He concluded the final speech of his campaign by saying, “I wish Wisconsin the best of luck, because I think it’s going to need it.”Judge Protasiewicz made a calculation from the start of the race that Wisconsin voters would reward her for making clear her positions on abortion rights and the state’s maps — issues most likely to animate and energize the base of the Democratic Party.In an interview at her home on Tuesday before the results were known, Judge Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz) attributed her success on the campaign trail to the decision to inform voters of what she called “my values,” as opposed to Justice Kelly, who used fewer specifics about his positions.“Rather than reading between the lines and having to do your sleuthing around like I think people have to do with him, I think I would rather just let people know what my values are,” she said. “We’ll see tonight if the electorate appreciates that candor or not.”Over the last dozen years, the court has served as an important backstop for Wisconsin Republicans. It certified as constitutional Gov. Scott Walker’s early overhauls to state government, including the Act 10 law that gutted public employee unions, as well as voting restrictions like a requirement for a state-issued identification and a ban on ballot drop boxes.In 2020, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was the only one in the country to agree to hear President Donald J. Trump’s challenge to the presidential election. Mr. Trump sought to invalidate 200,000 ballots from the state’s two largest Democratic counties. The Wisconsin court rejected his claim on a 4-to-3 vote, with one of the conservative justices siding with the court’s three liberals on procedural grounds.That key vote gave this year’s court race extra importance, because the justices will weigh in on voting and election issues surrounding the 2024 election. Wisconsin, where Mr. Trump’s triumph in 2016 interrupted a string of Democratic presidential victories going back to 1988, is set to again be ferociously contested.The court has acted in Republicans’ interest on issues that have received little attention outside the state.In 2020, a year after Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, succeeded Mr. Walker, conservative justices agreed to limit his line-item veto authority, which generations of Wisconsin governors from both parties had used. Last year, the court’s conservatives allowed a Walker appointee whose term had expired to remain in office over Mr. Evers’s objection.Once Judge Protasiewicz assumes her place on the court on Aug. 1, the first priority for Wisconsin Democrats will be to bring a case to challenge the current legislative maps, which have given Republicans all but unbreakable control of the state government in Madison.Jeffrey A. Mandell, the president of Law Forward, a progressive law firm that has represented Mr. Evers, said he would file a legal request for the Supreme Court to hear a redistricting case the day after Judge Protasiewicz is seated.“Pretty much everything problematic in Wisconsin flows from the gerrymandering,” Mr. Mandell said in an interview on Tuesday. “Trying to address the gerrymander and reverse the extreme partisan gerrymandering we have is the highest priority.”The state’s abortion ban, which was enacted in 1849, seven decades before women could vote, is already being challenged by Josh Kaul, Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general. This week, a circuit court in Dane County scheduled the first oral arguments on Mr. Kaul’s case for May 4, but whichever way a county judge rules, the case is all but certain to advance on appeal to the State Supreme Court later this year.Dan Simmons More

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      This Wisconsin Court Race Is Highly Partisan. It Wasn’t Always That Way.

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      Supreme Court races were once more swayed by endorsements from legal and law enforcement officials. Now they’re indistinguishable from other elections.Today’s election in Wisconsin will be closely watched for its impact on the partisan makeup of the state’s top court, with abortion rights and election rules frequent topics of the campaign. The contest between Daniel Kelly, a conservative former state Supreme Court justice, and Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, is set to be one of the most consequential — and expensive — elections in the country this year.Judicial elections in Wisconsin are officially nonpartisan, but the races have become increasingly political. While it used to be common for voters to cast ballots for judges with whom they weren’t ideologically aligned, Democratic counties now heavily favor the liberal judicial candidates and Republican counties the conservative ones.The trend has been turbocharged in recent years as partisan polarization has grown nationally and as overt partisanship has crept into the dialogue among candidates for the court.It wasn’t always this way. In the 1980s and 1990s, races were largely seen as less partisan and more swayed by endorsements from leaders in the legal and law enforcement community, according to Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette University Law School Poll. He has studied the relationship between the ideological voting patterns in state Supreme Court races and presidential races.“Supreme Court races at the time seemed to be about who had more endorsements from sheriffs and prosecutors than anything else,” he said.While many candidates during the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s had discernible ideological leanings, there was almost no relationship between electoral support for judicial candidates and presidential candidates of the corresponding political party. A notable example is Dane County, a longtime Democratic stronghold that is home to the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 2000, a majority of voters in Dane County voted for Diane Sykes, a conservative judicial candidate, while also voting for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate for president.Partisanship began creeping into races over the next decade. In a particularly vicious 2008 campaign, the conservative candidate, Michael J. Gableman, ran TV ads falsely accusing his opponent, the only Black justice on the state Supreme Court, of securing an early release of a rapist who was also Black. Mr. Gableman won by a narrow margin. After leaving the bench, he led a partisan inquiry into whether there was election fraud in Wisconsin during the 2020 presidential election.The Relationship Between the Judicial and Presidential VoteState Supreme Court and presidential election results have become increasingly correlated in Wisconsin. More

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      Wisconsin’s High-Stakes Supreme Court Race: What to Watch

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      The election for a swing seat on the court is likely to determine whether abortion remains illegal in Wisconsin, as well as the future of the state’s heavily gerrymandered political maps.WAUKESHA, Wis. — American political candidates routinely drum up support by warning voters that this election, really, is the most important of their lifetimes.It’s almost always an exaggeration, but the description might just fit for Wisconsin’s deeply polarized voters, who on Tuesday will choose a justice to fill a swing seat on the state’s Supreme Court.The winner — either Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, or Daniel Kelly, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice — will have the deciding vote on a host of major issues, including abortion rights, gerrymandered political maps, and voting and election cases surrounding the 2024 presidential contest.Officials on both sides have described the stakes of the officially nonpartisan race in existential terms — either they win and democracy survives, or they lose and it perishes.Wisconsin Democrats, who have been lost in the political wilderness for a dozen years, cast Judge Protasiewicz as their path to a promised land of abortion rights and fair maps. The state’s Republicans say Justice Kelly is their last hope to ward off liberal tyranny by fiat.Here are four themes animating Tuesday’s election:Wisconsin could turn sharply back to the left — or not.Wisconsin Republicans tend to talk about the election as if Judge Protasiewicz would roll onto the Supreme Court with a giant eraser to wipe out all of the legislative policies and structural advantages the G.O.P. has built for itself since Scott Walker became governor in 2011.They’re not entirely wrong.“A lot of the duly passed laws by the elected representatives of the state of Wisconsin would be deemed invalid,” Duey Stroebel, a Republican state senator from Cedarburg, said last week. “It wouldn’t be the people electing their representatives that would be making decisions, it would be her, based on her personal beliefs.”Indeed, Judge Protasiewicz has been clear about her views. She has signaled her opposition to Wisconsin’s 1849 law banning abortion in nearly all cases, which went back into effect when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer, and she has called the legislative maps Republicans drew to give themselves a durable near-supermajority in the State Legislature “rigged” and “unfair.”But the state’s Democrats sound similarly apocalyptic about the prospect of Justice Kelly, who lost a 2020 bid to retain his seat on the court, returning to deliver conservatives a majority. He is aligned with the state’s anti-abortion groups and has said there is no legal problem with the maps.He also worked as a legal adviser for the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Wisconsin when they sought to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. That Republican effort to undo Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in Wisconsin was only narrowly rejected by the State Supreme Court, which voted 4 to 3 to uphold the results.“Dan Kelly advised fake electors in 2020,” said Greta Neubauer, the Democratic leader in the Wisconsin State Assembly, referring to a brazen plan by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to overturn results in several states. “I absolutely fear what he would do in 2024 if a challenge to the popular vote and the election results came in front of him.”Abortion and crime are the two main issues.From the beginning of her campaign, Judge Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz) has sought to make the race a referendum on abortion rights in Wisconsin. Her campaign has spent $12 million on television ads in the last six weeks reminding voters that she supports them and Justice Kelly does not.“Judge Janet Protasiewicz believes in women’s freedom to make their own decisions when it comes to abortion,” her closing television ad states.It is a bet on the power of the most potent issue for Democrats since last summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court left the issue to the states.Even Republicans acknowledge privately that if the election is about abortion, Judge Protasiewicz has the advantage. Justice Kelly has not been as explicit, but he has implied that because legislators enacted the state’s abortion ban 174 years ago, they would need to rescind the law — something the current Republican majorities are unlikely to do.Hundreds of abortion rights supporters marched to the State Capitol in Madison, Wis., in January. Nearly all abortions became illegal in Wisconsin when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times“He’s running a bit of a traditional campaign talking about larger issues of judicial restraint and things of that nature,” said Mr. Walker, the former governor who appointed Justice Kelly to the State Supreme Court in 2016. “She just spelled it out, and that very well may be the case for the left and the right in the future, just people saying, ‘Here’s how I’m going to vote.’”Republicans, as usually happens in Wisconsin, have tried to make the election about crime. Outside groups backing Justice Kelly have bombarded Judge Protasiewicz with ads attacking her as soft on violent criminals.Last week, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s business lobby, removed from the television airwaves an ad claiming that Judge Protasiewicz had issued a soft sentence to a convicted rapist. The victim in that case had told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the ad had caused her new trauma and that she had no problem with the length of the sentence.In another episode, the Republican Party of Wisconsin, while southern Wisconsin was under a tornado watch last week, texted to voters a replica of an emergency weather alert warning that Judge Protasiewicz was “a soft-on-crime politician with a long history of letting dangerous criminals go free.”The cash-filled contest is all over Wisconsin TV screens.All indications are that more people will vote in this Supreme Court election than any other in Wisconsin history.More people voted in the Feb. 21 primary contest than participated in the state’s primaries in August, when there were races for governor and Senate. According to data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission, the early-vote total as of Monday amounted to about a third of the total turnout of the 2019 State Supreme Court race, the last one that did not fall on the same day as a presidential primary.The record-smashing spending in the race — $39 million on television alone, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm — has ensured that just about every Wisconsinite is at least aware of the race, a key hurdle in typically low-turnout spring elections.The ultimate cost is expected to triple the previous high-water mark for spending on an American judicial election, which was $15 million for a 2004 Illinois Supreme Court race.Weeks ago, Wisconsin Democrats switched their strategy. Instead of sending door-to-door canvassers to visit voters who typically cast ballots in spring elections, they focused on reaching out to a broader group of people who tend to vote in November general elections.“When I was out knocking on doors a month or two months ago, people were aware that this election was coming, because they were seeing YouTube ads with their kids,” Ms. Neubauer said. “They were being bombarded with information about this election.”A key State Senate race is also unfolding.Wisconsin is also holding a special election on Tuesday for a vacant State Senate seat that covers parts of four counties in the suburbs north of Milwaukee.The district has long been held by Republicans but is trending away from the party. Mr. Trump carried it by 12 percentage points in 2016 but by only 5 in 2020. The Democratic candidate, Jodi Habush Sinykin, is contesting it with a heavy emphasis on abortion rights.Jodi Habush Sinykin, a Democrat, is running for a State Senate seat in suburbs north of Milwaukee. Morry Gash/Associated PressIf the Republican candidate, State Representative Dan Knodl, wins, his party will have a two-thirds supermajority in the State Senate, which would allow the G.O.P. to impeach and remove judges, statewide elected officials and appointees of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Mr. Knodl, in an interview with PBS Wisconsin, said the impeachment powers granted to State Senate Republicans with his election “certainly would be tested.”Mr. Stroebel, the Republican state senator from Cedarburg, called impeaching Judge Protasiewicz over expected rulings on abortion and gerrymandering unlikely “but certainly not impossible.”If Dan Knodl wins his race for State Senate, Republicans will have a two-thirds supermajority, which would allow them to impeach and remove judges, statewide elected officials and appointees of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.Mark Hoffman/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, via Associated Press“If she truly acts in terms of ignoring our laws and applying her own personal beliefs, then maybe that’s something people will talk about,” he said. “If the rulings are contrary to what our state laws and Constitution say, I think there could be an issue.”Even if Republicans do not seek to impeach Democratic officials, the mere possibility could limit Democrats’ ambitions.“Just the threat of it obviously changes the way that public officials will act,” said Kelda Roys, a Democratic state senator from Madison. “It will make agency heads and civil servants be extremely timid and feel like they can’t carry out their job responsibilities.” More

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      The Most Important Election of 2023 Is Taking Place in Wisconsin

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      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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      Costly Court Race Points to a Politicized Future for Judicial Elections

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      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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      In Wisconsin, Liberals Barrage Conservative Supreme Court Candidate With Attack Ads

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      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

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      In Wisconsin Supreme Court Race, Democratic Turnout Was High

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      Democratic turnout was high in the Tuesday primary for the State Supreme Court, ahead of a costly general election that will decide the future of abortion rights and gerrymandered maps in the state.MILWAUKEE — Eight months after the nation’s highest court made abortion illegal in Wisconsin, a liberal State Supreme Court candidate who made reproductive rights the centerpiece of her campaign won more votes than her two conservative opponents combined.The Wisconsin Supreme Court primary election on Tuesday was a triumph for the state’s liberals. In addition to capturing 54 percent of the vote in the four-way, officially nonpartisan primary, they will face a conservative opponent in the general election who was last seen losing a 2020 court election by double digits. It proved to be a best-case scenario for Wisconsin Democrats, who for years have framed the April 4 general election for the State Supreme Court as their last chance to stop Republicans from solidifying their grip on the state. Republicans took control of the state government in 2011 and drew themselves legislative maps to ensure perpetual power over the state’s Legislature, despite the 50-50 nature of Wisconsin politics.“If Republicans keep their hammerlock on the State Supreme Court majority, Wisconsin remains stuck in an undemocratic doom loop,” said Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.Now, with an opportunity to retake a majority on the State Supreme Court that could undo Wisconsin’s 1849 ban on nearly all abortions and throw out the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps, Democrats have the general election matchup they wanted. Janet Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz), a liberal circuit court judge in Milwaukee County, will face off against Daniel Kelly, a conservative former State Supreme Court justice who lost a 2020 election for his seat by nearly 11 percentage points — a colossal spread in such an evenly divided state. Abortion rights demonstrators gathered in Madison, Wis., in January 2022. Judge Protasiewicz has sought to put abortion, which is now illegal in most cases in Wisconsin, at the center of the campaign. Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesTuesday’s results suggested that the state’s Democratic voters are more energized than Republicans. While the number of ballots cast statewide represented 29 percent of the 2020 presidential electorate, the turnout in Dane County was 40 percent of the 2020 total, a striking figure for a judicial election. In Dane County, which includes the liberal state capital of Madison, Joseph R. Biden Jr. took three out of every four votes.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Black Mayors: The Black mayors of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston have banded together as they confront violent crime, homelessness and other similar challenges.Wisconsin Supreme Court: Democratic turnout was high in the primary for the swing seat on the court, ahead of a general election that will decide the future of abortion rights and gerrymandered maps in the state.Mississippi Court Plan: Republican lawmakers want to create a separate court system served by a state-run police force for mainly Black parts of the capital, Jackson, reviving old racial divisions.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Republicans will also face the financial might of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which on Wednesday transferred $2.5 million to the Protasiewicz campaign. Justice Kelly did not spend a dollar on television advertising during the primary, but he was aided by $2.8 million in spending from a super PAC funded by the conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. Democrats also helped Justice Kelly by spending $2.2 million to attack his conservative opponent, Jennifer Dorow, a circuit court judge in Waukesha County. Justice Kelly has said he expects Mr. Uihlein’s PAC, Fair Courts America, to spend another $20 million on his behalf for the general election. That money will not go as far as the cash transferred directly to the Protasiewicz campaign because candidates can buy television advertising at far lower rates than PACs. Wisconsin’s conservatives, who have controlled the court since 2008, fear a rollback not just of their favorable maps but also of a host of Republican-friendly policies that were ushered in while Scott Walker was governor, including changes to the state’s labor and voting laws. “She’s going to impart her values upon Wisconsin regardless of what the law is — does that seem like democracy to you?” said Eric Toney, the district attorney for Fond du Lac County, who was the Republican nominee for attorney general last year. “This isn’t Republicans and Democrats. It’s democracy and the rule of law that is on the line.”There is also the question of how Wisconsin Republicans coalesce after their second bruising primary contest in six months. Throughout the campaign, Justice Kelly declined to say that he would back Judge Dorow in the general election, while her supporters flatly said that he would lose the general election.It was a bit of a replay of the governor’s race last year, when bitter intraparty feelings remained after Tim Michels, with former President Donald J. Trump’s endorsement, defeated former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch in the primary. Ms. Kleefisch then did little to encourage her supporters to back Mr. Michels, who later lost the general election to Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat.“With Michels and Kleefisch, there wasn’t that come-together-to-Jesus moment,” said Stephen L. Nass, a Republican state senator from Whitewater. “I think people realize now that was a mistake. It should have happened. And now we’ve got to do it.”Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was one vote away from overturning Mr. Biden’s 2020 victory in the state, deciding in a series of 4-to-3 decisions to reject Mr. Trump’s efforts to invalidate 200,000 votes from the state’s two largest Democratic counties.Judge Protasiewicz speaking at her primary night party on Tuesday in Milwaukee. She has openly declared her views in support of abortion rights and against Wisconsin’s gerrymandered legislative maps.Caleb Alvarado for The New York Times“What our Supreme Court did with the 2020 presidential election kind of turned people’s stomachs,” Judge Protasiewicz said in an interview on Tuesday over coffee and paczki, a Polish pastry served on Fat Tuesday. “We were one vote away from overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election.”Judge Protasiewicz has pioneered what may be a new style of judicial campaigning. She has openly proclaimed her views on abortion rights (she’s for them) and the state’s legislative maps (she’s against them). That has appeared to offend Justice Kelly, who devoted chunks of his Tuesday victory speech to condemning the idea that Judge Protasiewicz had predetermined opinions about subjects likely to come before the court.“If we do not resist this assault on our Constitution and our liberties, we will lose the rule of law and find ourselves saddled with the rule of Janet,” Justice Kelly told supporters in Waukesha County. But Judge Protasiewicz has considerable incentives to put her views on hot-button topics front and center for voters. (She calls them “my values” to remain within a law that prohibits judicial candidates from plainly stating how they would rule on specific cases.) Democrats learned in last year’s midterm contests just how potent and motivating abortion is for their voters. Judge Protasiewicz, in the interview, recounted how voters had come to her campaign stops wearing sweatshirts bearing the words “Fair maps now.” “The voters are demanding more,” said Rebecca Dallet, a liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, at the Protasiewicz victory party on Tuesday in Milwaukee. “People want to know more about their candidates. And I think there’s a way to communicate that without saying anything that shouldn’t be said about future cases.”Justice Kelly’s views are hardly opaque, either.Appointed to the court by Mr. Walker in 2016 before losing his re-election bid in 2020, Justice Kelly went on to work for the Republican National Committee as an “election integrity” consultant. He has the endorsement of the state’s three major anti-abortion groups.Justice Kelly speaking at a party on Tuesday night in Okauchee Lake, Wis. He said in an interview that only state legislators, not the State Supreme Court, could overturn Wisconsin’s abortion ban.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesDuring an interview on Monday night in Sheboygan, Justice Kelly said only legislators could overturn the state’s 1849 abortion ban, enacted decades before women were allowed to vote. He said that complaints about the maps amounted to a “political problem” and that they were legally sound.Yet in the same interview, conducted in the back of a bar during a meeting of the Sheboygan County Republican Party, Justice Kelly declined to say whether he supported the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling in December 2020 that rejected Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the state’s presidential election results.“If I were to say it was decided correctly, then the hullabaloo would be, ‘Justice Kelly doesn’t care about election integrity,’” he said. “If I say it was decided incorrectly, the hullabaloo would be, ‘Justice Kelly favors overthrowing in presidential elections.’ And so I don’t think there’s any way to answer that question in a way that would not get overcome by extraneous noise.”Still, he said he had “no reason to believe” Wisconsin’s 2020 election was not decided properly.Since Justice Kelly lost in 2020, he and other Republicans have taken it as an article of faith that the wide margin of his defeat could be attributed to the Democratic presidential primary, which fell on the same day. Several Republicans asserted that Wisconsin’s Democratic Party leadership had colluded with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose presidential campaign was by then a lost cause, to remain in the race to lift the chances of the liberal candidate, Jill Karofsky.“It still pains me to admit that, as it turns out, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders combined can turn out more votes than little old me,” Justice Kelly said Monday.Faiz Shakir, who was the campaign manager for the Sanders campaign, said in an interview that Mr. Sanders had indeed decided to suspend his campaign and concede to Mr. Biden days before Wisconsin’s April 2020 primary, but encouraged his supporters to vote in the primary anyway to influence the court election.One thing that is clear is that the next six weeks in Wisconsin politics will be dominated by the Protasiewicz campaign’s effort to place abortion rights at the center of the race. The issue will feature heavily in her television advertising, while Republicans will try to change the subject to crime — or anything else. “Everybody is very emotional about abortion, so that’s the tail that’s going to wag the dog,” said Aaron R. Guenther, a conservative Christian minister from Sheboygan. “It’s not what all of life is about, but it’s what the election is going to be about.”Dan Simmons contributed reporting from Okauchee Lake, Wis. More

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      Liberal Judge Is First to Advance in Major Wisconsin Supreme Court Election

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      Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal judge from Milwaukee County, will face one of two conservatives in a race that could tilt the balance of the court, with abortion rights, gerrymandered maps and more in the balance.MILWAUKEE — Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, won her race on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, and advanced to the general election for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the most consequential American election on the 2023 calendar.On April 4, Judge Protasiewicz will face one of two conservatives for a 10-year term on the court: Daniel Kelly, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, or Jennifer Dorow, a Waukesha County judge known for presiding over the trial last fall of a man who killed six people by driving through a 2021 Christmas parade. Late Tuesday, The A.P. had not yet projected which candidate would advance along with Judge Protasiewicz.The winner of the officially nonpartisan race will tip the balance of the state’s seven-member Supreme Court, which has been controlled by conservatives since 2008. If Judge Protasiewicz prevails, the court will have a four-member liberal majority that would be likely to overturn the state’s 1849 law forbidding abortion in nearly all cases, redraw Wisconsin’s heavily gerrymandered legislative and congressional maps, and influence how the state’s 10 electoral votes are awarded after the 2024 presidential election.“Everything we care about is going to be determined by who wins this election,” Judge Protasiewicz told supporters in a victory speech on Tuesday night. Influential Democrats in Wisconsin coalesced long ago behind Judge Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz), who has endorsements from a range of top party officials and de facto support from many others. The other liberal candidate in the race, Everett Mitchell, a judge in Dane County, which includes Madison, lagged far behind the other three major candidates in fund-raising.More on Abortion Issues in AmericaAbortion Bills: More than 300 abortion-related bills — a majority of which seek restrictions — have been proposed around the United States. Doctors are the most vulnerable to punishment.A Missed Opportunity: Abortion rights activists say President Biden’s State of the Union speech could have done more to address what they view as a national health crisis.State Constitutions: Divergent decisions by state supreme courts in South Carolina and Idaho displayed how volatile the fight over abortion rights will be, as advocates and opponents push and pull over state constitutions.A New Lawsuit: A company that makes an abortion pill filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of West Virginia’s ban on the medication. A wave of similar cases are expected to be filed in coming months.Republicans split between Justice Kelly, who lost a 2020 election for a full term after being appointed in 2016 by Gov. Scott Walker, and Judge Dorow, whom Mr. Walker appointed to the Waukesha court.The fight for conservative votes grew increasingly bitter in the closing days before Tuesday’s primary election. Justice Kelly said in interviews on conservative talk radio and at campaign stops that he would not commit to endorsing Judge Dorow if she advanced to the general election, while Judge Dorow’s supporters argued that Justice Kelly was unelectable based on his performance in 2020, when he lost by 10 percentage points.The race is all but certain to become the most expensive judicial election in American history, topping the $15 million spent on a 2004 race for the Illinois Supreme Court. Already, more than $8.7 million has been spent on television and digital advertising in the Supreme Court race, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.Officials in both parties expect tens of millions more to be spent by each side during the six-week general election.Justice Kelly has used his deep-pocketed supporters as a reason to vote for him in the primary. He told conservatives gathered at a Republican Party dinner this month in Sawyer County that they should back him because he had the support of the billionaire Uihlein family, which has pledged to spend millions of dollars on his behalf. Justice Kelly said the Uihleins would not back Judge Dorow in the general election.“If it’s not me in the general election, I don’t think that money just moves over to Jennifer,” Justice Kelly said. “It just won’t be spent. So if I’m not the candidate in the general election, Jennifer will jump in completely unarmed when the left is going to spend up to $25 million.”The state’s Democrats and Judge Protasiewicz’s campaign believe Judge Dorow would be a stronger general election opponent. A Better Wisconsin Together, a Democratic super PAC, spent more than $2 million on television ads before the primary attacking Judge Dorow. The Uihleins’ super PAC, Fair Courts America, spent $2.7 million backing Mr. Kelly and attacking Judge Protasiewicz. More

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      What to Watch For in a Consequential Court Election in Wisconsin

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      Voters are going to the polls today in the primary election for a swing seat on the state’s Supreme Court, with abortion rights, gerrymandered maps and more at stake.BELOIT, Wis. — It is a funny thing about American politics that for one night, the nation’s most important campaign of 2023 descended on Cheezhead Brewing, a tavern where about 50 Republicans gathered to discuss the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.Standing in front of a Green Bay Packers logo made from green, gold and white bottle caps, Jennifer Dorow, a Waukesha County judge who is one of two conservatives running in Tuesday’s four-way primary, told the crowd on Sunday night that “fairness and impartiality are squarely on the ballot this election.”What fairness and impartiality mean, however, depends entirely on one’s political stripes.Democrats say Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, controlled by conservatives since 2008, has enacted unfair legislative maps that have allowed Republicans to take near-supermajority control of the State Assembly and Senate in an evenly divided state — making nearly everything the State Legislature does unfair. The leading liberal candidate in the race, Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge, calls the maps “rigged” and has said she would vote to throw them out.For conservatives like Judge Dorow, publicly telegraphing one’s intentions on the court and prejudging cases are violations of the judicial oath.But few in Wisconsin are fooled about the stakes of this officially nonpartisan race for an open seat on the seven-member court. If a liberal candidate wins a 10-year term, the court will tip in liberals’ favor, and the state would be likely to throw out its 1849 law banning abortion in nearly all cases and to redraw its legislative maps. If a conservative wins, abortion will remain illegal and Republicans will retain a lock on the Legislature for at least another decade.A protest for abortion rights last month in the rotunda at Wisconsin’s Capitol. The Supreme Court race could decide the fate of Wisconsin’s abortion ban.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe top two candidates from Tuesday’s primary will advance to the general election on April 4. As voters cast their ballots, here is what’s happening in the race.The G.O.P. establishment is fighting outsiders.Last fall, Wisconsin’s Republican establishment rallied behind Daniel Kelly, a former Supreme Court justice who, in 2020, lost a bid for re-election — just the second sitting justice to do so since 1958.But whispers soon emerged on the right about Justice Kelly’s ability to win. He lost that 2020 race by 10 percentage points, an enormous margin in battleground Wisconsin, where a three-point victory in a statewide race constitutes a blowout.Around the same time, Judge Dorow was presiding over the most prominent local court case in years — the murder trial of a man eventually convicted of killing six people by driving through a 2021 Christmas parade. She was on the news every night for weeks.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Michigan G.O.P.: Michigan Republicans picked Kristina Karamo to lead the party in the battleground state, fully embracing an election-denying Trump acolyte after her failed bid for secretary of state.Dianne Feinstein: The Democratic senator of California will not run for re-election in 2024, clearing the way for what is expected to be a costly and competitive race to succeed the iconic political figure.Lori Lightfoot: As the mayor of Chicago seeks a second term at City Hall, her administration is overseeing the largest experiment in guaranteed basic income in the nation.Union Support: In places like West Virginia, money from three major laws passed by Congress is pouring into the alternative energy industry and other projects. Democrats hope it will lead to increased union strength.There hasn’t been a Wisconsin Supreme Court race with multiple conservative candidates since the turn of the millennium, and Justice Kelly’s allies were determined to avoid one.“I personally called Jennifer before she entered the race and pleaded with her not to jump in,” Shelley Grogan, an appellate court judge who serves as a Kelly surrogate, told the Cheezhead Brewing audience. “It’s really hard for a conservative to win. So if there’s more than one person interested, they sit down and talk about it and decide who we can all get behind.”(In a subsequent interview, Judge Grogan said she was interested in running for the State Supreme Court in the future. A liberal justice’s term is up in 2025, and a conservative justice’s will expire in 2026.)Jennifer Dorow, a Waukesha County judge, is one of two conservatives running in Tuesday’s four-way primary.Caleb Alvarado for The New York TimesJudge Dorow told the audience she would not wait her turn.“I don’t believe in deciding candidates in a back room,” she said. “I believe it’s important that the voters in the state of Wisconsin do that.”The 2020 election still looms large — for both parties.When the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled, in a series of 4-to-3 votes, to uphold Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 victory in Wisconsin, it was a conservative justice, Brian Hagedorn, who provided the key vote to reject President Donald J. Trump’s argument to invalidate 200,000 votes.Those decisions have energized Democrats, who are poised to pour tens of millions of dollars behind Judge Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz). But they have also animated Justice Kelly, who has repeatedly accused Judge Dorow of being the second coming of Justice Hagedorn — a sort of untrustworthy Trojan horse who would betray Republicans when it counts.Justice Kelly, who The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week revealed has for two years been paid by the Republican National Committee to work on “election integrity issues,” has repeatedly tied Judge Dorow to Justice Hagedorn. Along with voting against Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, Justice Hagedorn sided with several pandemic mitigation efforts by Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, in 2020. Justice Hagedorn has been a reliable conservative vote on most matters, including redistricting, but many on the right have not forgiven him for defying Mr. Trump.“I’m kind of in the same place that I was with Brian Hagedorn, all I have is what she says about herself,” Justice Kelly said at a meeting of Republicans on Monday night in Sheboygan. “Jennifer may very well be a judicial conservative, she might be, I just don’t know because there’s nothing there to tell me that she is.”Justice Hagedorn, in an email, said he was “not interested in commenting at this time.”Republicans are arguing about what it means to be electable.Justice Kelly’s 2020 defeat is the animating feature of Judge Dorow’s campaign.“I’m the only conservative who can win in April,” she wrote on Twitter, linking to a radio advertisement in which one of Milwaukee’s leading conservative talk radio hosts delivered a monologue supporting her candidacy.But besides offering the basic bromides about being a conservative judge who will abide by the Constitution, Judge Dorow has said little else about her candidacy. She has declined nearly all interview requests, and in Beloit a campaign aide said she would respond only to preapproved questions. She did not linger at the bar to speak with voters after her remarks.Judge Janet Protasiewicz is the leading liberal in the officially nonpartisan race.Caleb Alvarado for The New York TimesJustice Kelly has been much more explicit about his political advantages. He has support from the billionaire Uihlein family, whose super PAC, Fair Courts America, has spent $2.7 million on ads backing him and attacking Judge Protasiewicz. Justice Kelly has said major conservative donors will abandon the race if he does not advance to the general election. A spokesman for Fair Courts America did not respond to questions.“You need to be the kind of candidate that will attract the independent expenditures to get the message out across Wisconsin,” Justice Kelly told Republicans gathered at a Lincoln Day dinner in Sawyer County this month. “If it’s not me in the general election, it’s not like that money just moves over to Jennifer. It just won’t be spent. So if I’m not the candidate in the general election, Jennifer will jump in completely unarmed when the left is going to spend upwards of $25 million.”Democrats seem to prefer to face Justice Kelly and the Uihlein money rather than Judge Dorow’s shallower record.A Better Wisconsin Together, a Democratic super PAC, has spent $2 million in TV ads attacking Judge Dorow in the primary but nothing against Justice Kelly. Democratic opposition research has been focused on damaging Judge Dorow, who is less well known but perceived as more likable and reasonable than Justice Kelly by voters in Democratic focus groups.Democrats are vowing not to replay their 2022 Senate race.Last year, Wisconsin Democrats watched as Mandela Barnes, a popular, progressive, young Black candidate coalesced support before losing the general election to Senator Ron Johnson, a better-funded, older white Republican.Determined not to repeat that recent history, the party’s top leaders and fund-raisers coalesced behind Judge Protasiewicz, a white, female career prosecutor and jurist from the suburbs who is not as vulnerable to the types of barely coded attacks that helped doom Mr. Barnes last fall.Judge Protasiewicz built a commanding fund-raising advantage and has opened a wide lead in both parties’ private polling ahead of the primary. She is widely expected to place first on Tuesday, with the other liberal candidate in the race, Everett Mitchell, a more progressive Black judge from Dane County, projected to finish fourth.The near unanimity among Democrats combined with a fractured G.O.P. has Democrats planning and Republicans fearing a mountain of attack ads beginning as soon as Wednesday against whichever conservative candidate advances to a likely matchup with Judge Protasiewicz. A reverse dynamic in August damaged Mr. Barnes, while Mr. Johnson and his allies poured tens of millions into attack ads before the Democrat could recover.“There is no world in which Janet is defined by the right in the first weeks of the race,” said Sachin Chheda, a top strategist on the Protasiewicz campaign. “We are prepared for whatever the results are on Tuesday and will be hitting the pedal to the floor on Wednesday.” More