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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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      The Election That Could Reshape Wisconsin, and the Country

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      Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano, Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicWisconsin will hold an election for a seat on its Supreme Court today, and it is no exaggeration to say that the result could end up reshaping U.S. politics for years to come.The Times political correspondent Reid J. Epstein explains why the race to replace a single judge has become the most important American election of 2023.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a political correspondent for The New York Times.Janet Protasiewicz, left, and Daniel Kelly during a debate in Madison, Wis., last month. Ms. Protasiewicz is a liberal, while Mr. Kelly is a conservative.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesBackground readingCash is pouring in to the Wisconsin race, and some of the candidates have shed any pretense of judicial neutrality.Here’s what you need to know about the battle for the seat.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Reid J. Epstein 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 Year’s Biggest Election

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      The battle for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin.Wisconsin is a microcosm of the country. It is narrowly divided politically, though Democrats have a slight advantage in the popular vote in statewide elections. And, as in Washington, Republicans have structural advantages in the government that give them outsize power.Conservatives have controlled the state’s Supreme Court since 2008, and Republicans have held a hammerlock on the Legislature since 2011, when the party drew itself an impenetrable majority after taking control in a wave election.Tomorrow, Wisconsin will hold an election for a seat on its Supreme Court, and it is no exaggeration to call the race, for a 10-year term, the single most important American election of 2023. It is already the most expensive judicial race in the nation’s history. The candidates and the super PACs supporting them have spent nearly three times as much on this race as in any prior court election.Why is a single state race crucial? Because whichever side prevails will hold a 4-to-3 court majority, and this is the first American election in which the winner will single-handedly determine two big issues: the fate of abortion rights and whether the state has a functional representative democracy. The winner will also set the course for the 2024 presidential election in a state where fewer than 23,000 votes decided four of the last six such races.If the liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, wins, Wisconsin will almost certainly become the first state to allow abortion again after outlawing it with last summer’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. And because Democrats are likely to challenge the makeup of the state’s legislative districts if the court has a liberal majority, the near supermajorities that Republicans enjoy in the State Legislature would also probably not survive until the 2024 election.A victory for the conservative candidate, Daniel Kelly, would mean abortion remains illegal, the gerrymandered maps stay in place, and Wisconsin remains a dysfunctional democracy for the foreseeable future.Janet Protasiewicz and Daniel Kelly.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesThe biggest prizeAbortion became illegal in the state last June, when the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, throwing the question to the states. Wisconsin’s near-total ban on abortion — enacted in 1849, a year after statehood and seven decades before women could vote — suddenly became the law again.Protasiewicz (pronounced pro-tuh-SAY-witz) is a judge and former prosecutor from Milwaukee who has so emphasized her support for abortion rights that nobody could be confused about how she’d rule on the 1849 law. In interviews and television advertisements and during the lone general election debate, she has stressed her belief that abortion decisions should be left to women and their doctors, not to state legislators.Kelly, a conservative former state Supreme Court justice who lost a re-election bid in 2020, has the backing of the state’s leading anti-abortion organizations and has repeatedly stressed his opposition to the practice.Protasiewicz has bet that her support for abortion rights will energize Democratic voters and persuade enough independents and moderate Republicans to win. It is a big wager on the continuation of the politics that helped Democrats exceed expectations in last year’s midterm elections.Democracy is on the lineWhen I got my first full-time job in journalism at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2002, Wisconsin was an evenly divided state but one where control regularly switched back and forth between the two parties.That ended after the 2010 Republican wave, when the party took both chambers of the Legislature and Scott Walker was elected governor. The G.O.P. weakened public-sector labor unions and drew itself the most aggressive gerrymander in the country — near supermajority control of both chambers in a 50-50 state. In 2020, Joe Biden won Wisconsin but carried only 37 out of 99 State Assembly districts.Republicans also changed state law to make voting more onerous, enacting a strict voter ID law, while the state’s Supreme Court banned drop boxes for absentee ballots last year. Wisconsin now ranks 47th out of 50 states on how easy it is to vote, according to the 2022 Cost of Voting Index.Protasiewicz calls the Republican-drawn maps “rigged,” has suggested the labor law is unconstitutional and says she agrees with the liberal dissent in last year’s Supreme Court drop box ruling. Kelly says redistricting is a political problem to be solved by legislators — the very people who created it.This race will have real impact on national issues, too.Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was the only one in the country that agreed to hear Donald Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election, eventually rejecting — by a single vote — his attempt to throw out 200,000 ballots in the state’s two big Democratic counties. Kelly, when I interviewed him in February, declined to say whether he agreed with the decision to uphold the 2020 results.The 2024 presidential election in the state may be close enough to be contested in the courts again. New congressional maps could also put up to three Republican-held House seats in play.Tomorrow’s other big election: Chicago’s mayoral runoff race has focused on crime. The election pits a former schools executive, Paul Vallas, who is campaigning largely on a pro-police platform, against Brandon Johnson, a county commissioner who favors solutions that go beyond policing. Here’s what matters in four of the city’s wards.More politics newsDemocrats are using messages about abortion in their campaigns, even when the office they’re running for has little say on the issue.Asa Hutchinson, a former governor of Arkansas and a Trump critic, announced his bid for the 2024 Republican nomination.The Biden administration blacklisted a spyware firm. But the government signed a secret contract with the company.THE LATEST NEWSTrump’s IndictmentDonald Trump is using his criminal indictment to raise money and promote his 2024 presidential campaign.Trump spent the weekend making plans for his arrest, while officials in New York prepared for potential turmoil.War in UkraineThe Russian authorities said they had detained a woman in the killing of a pro-war blogger in a bombing in St. Petersburg, Russia, yesterday.In a call with his Russian counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded the release of the imprisoned American journalist Evan Gershkovich.A Russian children’s rights advocate says she’s rescuing abandoned Ukrainian children. The International Criminal Court accuses her of abducting them.Residents in a Ukrainian city near active combat refuse to leave. The Times rode with the police trying to evacuate them.InternationalSaudi Arabia, Russia and their oil-producing allies said they would cut production, an apparent effort to increase prices.The Israeli government moved forward with a plan to establish a national guard, a political victory for a far-right minister.Sanna Marin, Finland’s prime minister who found international popularity, lost a national election.Pope Francis left the hospital after receiving treatment for bronchitis.Other Big StoriesStorms have resurrected a California lake that was drained.Mark Abramson for The New York Times“This could be the mother of all floods”: California residents are bracing for the melt of this winter’s snowfall.Anti-abortion groups argue abortion pills are dangerous. More than 100 scientific studies have concluded that they are safe.The police found the body of a 2-year-old boy in the jaws of an alligator in Florida after his mother was stabbed to death.OpinionsGail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss Trump’s indictment and the 2024 election.Women’s sports deserve to be mythologized like men’s sports are, Kate Fagan writes.“The Last of Us” is right: In a warming world, fungal infections are a public-health blind spot, Dr. Neil Vora says.MORNING READSSecret to happiness: People in Finland say it’s knowing when you have enough.Looking for love? Move abroad.Metropolitan Diary: Getting his daily steps in. (All 113,772 of them.)Quiz time: Take our latest news quiz and share your score (the average was 8.8).Advice from Wirecutter: The best creamy peanut butter.Lives Lived: Seymour Stein championed acts including the Ramones, Talking Heads and the Pretenders on his label Sire, and helped found the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He died at 80.SPORTS NEWSThe victorious L.S.U. players.Tony Gutierrez/Associated PressN.C.A.A. champions: Louisiana State beat Iowa, 102-85, winning its first national title in women’s basketball, The Athletic writes. “I think we have a lot to be proud of,” an emotional Caitlin Clark, Iowa’s star, said after the game.Colorful and divisive coach: Kim Mulkey, L.S.U.’s coach, wore a tiger-striped pantsuit of pink and gold sequins. But don’t mistake her for any triviality, Jeré Longman writes in The Times. It was Mulkey’s fourth national title as head coach.Chaos on the track: Max Verstappen won the Australian Grand Prix yesterday, but it was not a leisurely competition for the title front-runner, The Athletic’s Madeline Coleman writes.ARTS AND IDEAS Leonard Scheicher and Girley Jazama in “Measures of Men.”Julia Terjung/Studiocanal GmbHHistory on screenModern Germany has frequently grappled with the Holocaust, but it has not paid much attention to its role in the 20th century’s first genocide, when German colonial forces killed many people in what is now Namibia. A movie, “Measures of Men,” aims to change that.The film tells the story of the killings through the eyes of a German anthropologist who becomes complicit in the slaughter. It has been screened for lawmakers in Germany’s Parliament and will be shown in schools too. “Cinema allows us to awaken emotions, and implant images that can let you see events differently,” Lars Kraume, the director, said.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookLinda Xiao for The New York TimesMaqluba is a Palestinian dish made with rice, meat and fried vegetables.TheaterThe Broadway adaptation of “Life of Pi” is rich and inventive.Now Time to PlayThe pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was pocketbook. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Get down (five letters).And here’s today’s Wordle. Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.P.S. Wordplay columnist Rachel Fabi’s mom engaged in some lighthearted trolling in the comments section of a recent Times Crossword puzzle.Here’s today’s front page. “The Daily” is about Trump’s indictment.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. Reach our team at themorning@nytimes.com. 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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      Arizona Supreme Court Turns Down Kari Lake’s Appeal in Her Election Lawsuit

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      The justices refused to hear Ms. Lake’s claims disputing her loss in the governor’s race, but sent one part of her lawsuit back to a trial court for review.Arizona’s Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a request from Kari Lake to hear her lawsuit disputing her loss last year in the governor’s race. The lawsuit was based on what the court said was a false claim by Ms. Lake, a Republican, that more than 35,000 unaccounted ballots were accepted.In a five-page order written by Chief Justice Robert Brutinel, the court determined that a vast majority of Ms. Lake’s legal claims, which had earlier been dismissed by lower courts, lacked merit.“The Court of Appeals aptly resolved these issues,” Chief Justice Brutinel wrote, adding that the “petitioner’s challenges on these grounds are insufficient to warrant the requested relief under Arizona or federal law.”But the justices on Wednesday ordered a trial court in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, to conduct an additional review of that county’s procedures for verifying signatures on mail-in ballots, keeping one part of her lawsuit alive.The decision dealt another setback to Ms. Lake, a former television news anchor whose strident election denialism helped her to gain the endorsement of former President Donald J. Trump.Ms. Lake tried to put a positive spin on the ruling, contending on Twitter that remanding the signature verification aspect of her case back to the trial court was vindication.“They have built a House of Cards in Maricopa County,” Ms. Lake wrote. “I’m not just going to knock it over. I’m going to burn it to the ground.”Ms. Lake had argued that “a material number” of ballots with unmatched signatures were accepted in Maricopa County. The Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court ruling on the matter, effectively saying that she would have to show the numbers that prove the election outcome “would plausibly have been different, not simply an untethered assertion of uncertainty.”She fell to Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who was Arizona’s secretary of state, by just over 17,000 votes out of about 2.6 million ballots cast in the battleground state — less than one percentage point.Representatives for Ms. Hobbs, a defendant in Ms. Lake’s lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.Ms. Lake has repeatedly pointed to technical glitches on Election Day, which disrupted some ballot counting in Maricopa County, to fuel conspiracy theories and baseless claims.Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder and a Republican who helps oversee elections, said in a statement, “Since the 2020 general election, Maricopa County has won over 20 lawsuits challenging the fairness, accuracy, legality and impartiality of its election administration.”He added, “This case will be no different, and will simply add another mark to Lake’s impressively long losing streak.”Ms. Lake’s chief strategist, Colton Duncan, vowed that Ms. Lake’s lawyers would expose more fraud and corruption.“Buckle up, it’s about to get fun,” he said. 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