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      ‘A truly incredible amount of money’: millions ride on one US judicial election

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      More than $37m has already been spent in an election that will this month determine control of Wisconsin’s supreme court, easily making it the most expensive judicial contest in US history.Spending in the race easily shatters the $10m spent in the 2020 Wisconsin supreme court race, the previous record in the state. It also easily surpasses the previous national record, $15m spent on an Illinois supreme court race in 2004. The race has national implications – it will probably ultimately determine the legality of abortion in the state as well as play a key role in setting voting rules for the 2024 election in one of America’s most competitive states.“It’s just a truly incredible amount of money,” said Douglas Keith, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice who closely follows state courts. “It’s a sign of what we should expect to see in the future in other state supreme court elections in other states provided that for some reason a particular seat is seen as important.”A once-in-a-generation set of circumstances have come together to make the state supreme court race between liberal Janet Protasiewicz and conservative Daniel Kelly – typically a little-noticed contest outside Wisconsin’s borders – the most important election this year.First, the ideological balance of the seven-member court is up for grabs. Second, the outcome of the race will probably directly determine whether abortion is legal in Wisconsin, as the court is expected to weigh in soon on the state’s 1849 abortion ban. Third, the court could strike down Wisconsin’s gerrymandered legislative maps, ending Republicans’ unshakable majority in the state. Lastly, the court is expected to weigh in on a range of disputes over election rules ahead of the 2024 presidential election in Wisconsin, a key battleground state.Protasiewicz and Kelly have taken different approaches to how that money has been raised. Protasiewicz’s campaign has raised $14.5m in total, a vast haul that dwarfs the $2.7m Kelly has raised. But Kelly has benefited from an influx of outside spending from third-party groups, most notably Fair Courts America, a Super Pac backed by the GOP mega-donors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, which has spent nearly $4.5m on advertising so far. Women Speak Out Pac, which is connected to the anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, has also pledged to spend $2m in support of Kelly and has spent nearly $1.3m on advertising so far.The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) – which focuses on state-level elections – has also spent about $200,000 in support of Kelly through its Judicial Fairness Initiative, according to an analysis by the Center for Political Accountability, a watchdog group. Some of the RSLC’s donors since the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade have been companies like Google, Comcast and Amazon that have pledged to support their employees if they want an abortion, according to the Center for Political Accountability.“You have so many major household name companies come out in support of their employees’ access to abortion rights. Offering to cover travel expenses, offering to cover medical expenses, that sort of thing,” said Jeanne Hanna, the Center for Political Accountability’s research director, “but then continuing to fund these groups that elect openly anti-abortion judges in battleground states where one judicial seat could make the difference of whether people in this state can access abortion care at all. They’re saying one thing and doing another with their political spending.”Kelly has openly touted his support from outside groups, telling supporters earlier this month not to worry because a “cavalry” of outside money was coming to support him.“What has been most surprising is that Dan Kelly has basically raised no money as a candidate … So all of his backing has been from outside groups,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s hard to understand. Legally, they’re not allowed to coordinate. So he’s essentially handed over messaging to groups that he cannot control.”Protasiewicz’s fundraising has been prolific. She has spent more than $10.5m on television advertisements alone, compared with Kelly’s $580,000, according to a Brennan Center tracker. And while she has benefited from considerable spending from liberal outside groups – A Better Wisconsin Together, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Everytown for Gun Safety among them – the bulk of the money she’s raised has come from the state Democratic party.The party’s $8.8m contribution to her campaign was made possible by a 2015 Republican rewrite of the state’s campaign finance rules. Those changes removed a cap on the amount of money candidates could receive from state parties. They also allowed individual donors to make unlimited contributions to the political parties.“When the Republicans rewrote the laws in 2015 … they did it with the expectation that it would advantage them. They felt that the sources of money they could rely on, both outside groups and big contributors, would mean they would always have financial advantages in races like this. Just the opposite has happened,” said Jay Heck, the executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group. “That is the reason why [Wisconsin Democratic party chair] Ben Wikler and the Democrats have been able to be such a powerhouse.”Protasiewicz has said she would recuse herself from cases involving the Wisconsin Democratic party. Kelly has declined to make a similar recusal pledge for cases involving his major donors.“Judges should not be able to hear cases involving major donors or supporters,” said Keith, the Brennan Center expert. “One of the issues that comes with all this money being as opaque as it is is that the public doesn’t actually know who the judge’s major supporters are often. And if the judges do know, then that’s even more troubling that the judge has information that the public doesn’t about what cases they may have a conflict in.” More

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      The $37m question: why do US states elect judges in expensive, partisan elections?

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      While the 4 April Wisconsin supreme court race is technically non-partisan, the two candidates have not shied away from taking positions on policies that align with political parties. The Democratic party has spent heavily on the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz, while conservative candidate Dan Kelly has the backing of Republicans and top conservative donors.The race is already the most expensive state supreme court election in US history, with over $37m in spending. The unprecedented spending and political debate begs the question of why partisan groups are permitted to get involved in the selection of supposedly nonpartisan judges, and why judges are directly elected at all?It’s not uncommon for state supreme court judges to be selected through partisan elections in the United States. Thirty-eight states elect the people who sit on their highest courts in some way, whether it’s partisan elections, non-partisan competitive races, or retention elections where voters get to decide whether to keep someone on the bench.These judges often have the last word on major policy decisions in their states, from reproductive rights to voting policy and redistricting. Since the US supreme court overturned the right to an abortion with its Dobbs decision last year, attention on state supreme court races has intensified, with groups on both sides of the debate recognizing that state courts will have the last say on whether abortion is legal.Douglas Keith, counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice’s democracy program, explained that this political landscape comes at the same time that campaign spending on state supreme court races has already been increasing. Meanwhile, research has shown judges tend to rule in favor of their donors.According to the Brennan Center, the 2019-2020 election cycle set an overall national spending record of $97m. The group is still crunching numbers from 2022, but “I expect to see that we have enter for these races once again,” Keith said.A number of factors have contributed to the record spending, including the fact that the partisan balance of the court is up for grabs.“It’s a little bit of a perfect storm in that we are immediately post-Dobbs and so the awareness of how important these courts are is maybe at a peak,” Keith said, adding that Wisconsin’s election had added significance because it’s a swing state and the winner will determine the ideological leaning of the court heading into the 2024 presidential election.Have US states always allowed voters to elect state supreme court judges?The concept of having voters directly elect state supreme court judges dates back to the mid-19th century when there was a growing frustration that these top decision makers were being selected in “smoke-filled rooms, behind closed doors”, Keith said.“There was a sense that there wasn’t enough transparency,” he added. “That there was political deal-making and horse-trading that people didn’t want in the selection of judges, and there was a movement towards partisan elections.”Each state has a unique history when it comes to deciding who will sit on its top bench. Of the 38 states that currently use some kind of election to select judges for the high court, 16 states empower the governor to appoint judges, who are then reselected in retention elections. Another 14 states have voters select judges in contested, nonpartisan elections and eight states allow voters to select judges in contested, partisan elections.What’s the alternative?A few decades after states moved to partisan elections, some states began taking issue with the political influence involved in these elections and moved towards merit selections. Since 1940, more than half of states have switched at least in part from popular elections or solely appointments to experiment with merit selection.In states that use a merit system, the governor ultimately appoints judges with the help of a nominating commission or board, which is usually composed of a combination of attorneys, other judges, and the general public. The board considers applicants for the position and forwards the best candidates to the governor.Some research has shown that judges selected through a merit process produce higher-quality work than judges selected by partisan elections.The American Bar Association recommends against judicial elections, calling out the “corrosive effect of money on judicial election campaigns” and “attack advertising”.But for the most part, state policy on how to select judges has not changed in recent history, and judicial elections are used to select the vast majority of state judges.“There hasn’t been significant change in a long time,” Keith said. He explained that some states, like Ohio and North Carolina, made smaller changes more recently – both added party labels to their ballots, making these races partisan. But the last state to dramatically change how it selects judges was Rhode Island in 1994.Why have these races drawn such a large increase in spending in recent years?Before recent years, there were sporadic elections that drew large spending. In the 1980s and 1990s, big businesses and trial lawyers were frequently at odds over tort reform, which sometimes led to high-cost elections.The type of spending we see now did not become possible until the 2010 supreme court Citizens United decision, which prohibited the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, opening the floodgates for outside groups to pour money into political races.The Brennan Center has tracked spending in these races through 2020 and found that the 2019-2020 state supreme court election cycle was the most expensive in history, but this year’s Wisconsin race has already broken records for spending in a single election.Is the spending equal on both sides of the political divide?Republicans were first to dedicate vast amounts of financial resources to state supreme court races. In 2014, the Republican State Leadership Committee – which is now the leading spender in state judicial elections – tested whether money could influence the North Carolina supreme court election. The group launched its Judicial Fairness Initiative, a project aimed at backing conservative judges, explaining that it wasn’t enough to elect legislators and governors if they would run into state supreme courts who rejected their policy priorities.It took longer for Democrats to try to match Republicans’ level of spending, but they began to increase spending in state supreme court races as they focused more attention on races that would impact redistricting, especially around the 2020 cycle. According to the Brennan Center, 44% of outside-group spending in 2019-20 state supreme court elections came from groups on the left, marking a higher percentage than in previous cycles.In Wisconsin, Democrats have poured millions of dollars into advertising for Protasiewicz. Of the more than $25m booked in television advertising as of 22 March, Protasiewicz has ordered more than $10m, and outside groups supporting her including A Better Wisconsin Together, Planned Parenthood, and the American Civil Liberties Union have spent an additional $5.4m, giving her a roughly $5m spending advantage in booked advertising over Kelly.Does the increased political spending affect how judges rule once elected to the bench?Though it’s hard to measure the impact of campaign spending and how winning judges will ultimately act on the bench, there has been some research and analysis showing that judges are more likely to rule in favor of major donors and political parties that support them.In their forthcoming book Free to Judge, law professors Michael S Kang and Joanna M Shepherd find that the desire to win re-election results in judges who lean toward the interests and preferences of their campaign donors across all cases.Other research shows that judges tend to be harsher in criminal cases during election years than they are during non-election years, especially when there are more TV ads. 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      Will Wisconsin decide who wins in 2024? Politics Weekly America podcast

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      Voters in the swing state Wisconsin will head to the polls on 4 April to determine who will replace Justice Patience Roggensack on the state supreme court.
      It is down to the final two – a liberal and a conservative – and the outcome will determine majority control of the court for at least the next two years, including during the presidential election in 2024.
      It is expected to be the most expensive election of its kind in history. Joan E Greve speaks to Alice Herman and Sam Levine about what is at stake

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know 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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      This Wisconsin judicial election could decide the next US president | Andy Wong

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      The Wisconsin supreme court election – which has been described as the most important election this year – takes place on 4 April, in less than three weeks, and is already the most expensive of its kind in US history. In this race, voters of color will once again be the key to electing a candidate who can safeguard our democracy.The question of whether Trump or another Republican election denier will have a second chance to try to disrupt a democratically decided election – and this time perhaps succeed – could be determined by this one judicial election in the midwest. Recognizing what is at stake, both sides have spent a staggering $27m so far on this race.The election will probably be tight and every vote will count. Wisconsin is majority white, at around 80%, but the state is also at least 20% people of color, according to census data. If Democrats fail to prioritize investing in mobilizing voters of color and inspiring them to turn out to vote, they may lose.Typically, this type of judicial election would barely register as a blip in Wisconsin, let alone gain this much national attention. But the stakes in this battleground state are sky-high, not only because Wisconsin’s future hangs in the balance when it comes to abortion, voting rights, redistricting and elections policy, but also because the judicial seat could be crucial to ensuring a fair presidential election outcome in 2024.In 2020, the Wisconsin supreme court rejected by a one-vote margin an effort by Trump allies to challenge the election result. The state’s seven-member court has been controlled by conservatives since 2008, and the winner of this race will serve a 10-year term.The progressive Milwaukee county circuit judge Janet Protasiewicz is up against conservative Daniel Kelly, a former state supreme court justice who lost his seat in 2020. Kelly is a Trump ally who provided legal support to an effort by Republicans to overturn the 2020 election results through the use of “fake electors”.On the surface, Protasiewicz may seem to be in the better position, funding-wise. According to AdImpact, Protasiewicz campaign has spent $9.1m in the past few weeks on TV ads, and outside groups supporting her have spent $2m.But forces on the right – namely conservative billionaires like Barre Seid, Trump’s “judge whisperer” Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, and the Uihleins shipping supply magnate family – are expected to inject millions for Kelly, most likely in TV ads painting Protasiewicz as soft on crime. Already $3.9m has poured in for Kelly from these and other outside funders, and there’s plenty more where that came from.Yet Democrats might sleep on properly investing in mobilizing voters. How do we know? Because national Democrats failed to truly step up when it came time to support Mandela Barnes’s US Senate campaign last fall.Groups on the right spent $62m on behalf of Republican Ron Johnson, compared with the left’s $41m for Barnes. The right’s $29m last-minute attacks included unabashedly racist ads against Barnes, who is Black. In the end, Johnson – a skeptic of Covid-19 who was tied to a 2020 Republican scheme to have the state’s Republican-dominated legislature choose Wisconsinites’ presidential electors – won narrowly, 50.5% to Barnes’s 49.5%.With the fate of access to safe abortions on the line, Protasiewicz’s campaign, as well as the Democratic and progressive ecosystem at large, will understandably focus on turning out pro-choice white women voters, mostly via ads. Her campaign’s messaging is heavily centered on protecting abortion rights and painting Kelly as an anti-abortion extremist. Yet there’s reason to be concerned that very little of Protasiewicz’s campaign funds, or any money raised from the outside, will be spent on targeting and mobilizing voters of color.According to the census, Wisconsin is about 7% Black, 3% Asian, 7.5% Latino, and 1% Native. Republicans in Wisconsin are well aware of the power of voters of color, and of the fact that they tend to vote Democratic. That’s why Wisconsin Republicans have been working hard to suppress voters of color and to create division between white voters and voters of color, especially in Milwaukee, which is home to close to 70% of the state’s Black population.In an example of saying the quiet part out loud, the Wisconsin elections commissioner Robert Spindell, a Republican, gloated after the 2022 election about depressing Black and brown turnout in Milwaukee. Spindell was tacitly admitting that when the multiracial Obama coalition turns out, Republicans lose.Democrats and progressives must increase investing in on-the-ground grassroots organizations with track records of turning out voters of color – especially Black voters – and fast. The work of organizations such as Souls to the Polls, Voces de la Frontera and the Workers Center for Racial Justice can make all the difference in this year’s most important election. Our democracy can’t afford to continue to overlook voters of color.
      Andy Wong is president of PowerPAC, a non-profit advocacy and political organization dedicated to building political power within communities of color and supporting progressive candidates of color 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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      Wisconsin judicial race: contenders chosen in pivotal election for 2023

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      Wisconsin judicial race: contenders chosen in pivotal election for 2023Liberal Janet Protasiewicz and conservative Daniel Kelly advance to final vote in state supreme court election Wisconsin voters on Tuesday chose one liberal and one conservative candidate to face off in a race to determine control of the state supreme court in what is likely the most important election of 2023.Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee circuit court judge, will be on the ballot against Daniel Kelly, a conservative former supreme court justice, in the state’s 4 April general election. Protasiewicz, who received 46% of the statewide vote, and Kelly, who received 24% of the statewide vote, advanced from a four-member field that included Everett Mitchell, a liberal judge in Dane county, and Jennifer Dorow, a conservative judge in Waukesha county.In Wisconsin’s supreme court race, a super-rich beer family calls the shotsRead moreConservatives currently have a 4-3 majority on the court, but if Protasiewicz wins, the balance of the court would flip.That would have enormous impact in Wisconsin, one of the most politically competitive states in America that often determines the outcome of the presidential election. The court is expected to have a say in the near future on a range of major voting rights and abortion decisions.In 2020, the state supreme court narrowly turned away a lawsuit from Donald Trump seeking to throw out votes. It is likely to weigh in on a range of election disputes ahead of the 2024 election in Wisconsin, where races are regularly decided by razor-thin margins. A shift in the balance of the court would also likely prompt a request asking the justices to reconsider striking down the state’s legislative maps, which are so severely gerrymandered in favor of Republicans, it is virtually impossible for Democrats to ever win control of the state legislature.The court will likely ultimately decide whether the state’s 1849 abortion ban is legal. A shift in the balance of the court may also prompt another lawsuit asking the high court to consider striking down the state’s legislative maps, which are among the most gerrymandered in the country.“Everything we care about is going to be determined by who wins this election,” Protasiewicz said in victory remarks on Tuesday evening.“Never before has a judicial candidate openly campaigned on the specific intent to set herself above the law, to place her thumb on the scales of justice to ensure the results satisfy her personal interest rather than the commands of the law,” Kelly said in his victory speech.The race is already projected to shatter the $10m spending record for a state supreme court race, which was set in 2020. There were nearly $7m in political ad orders placed in the primary, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which is tracking that spending.Spending in the race is expected to be dominated by outside groups. Fair Courts America, a Super Pac backed by GOP megadonor Richard Uihlein, has pledged millions in support of Kelly. The anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America has also pledged six figures in support of Kelly. A Better Wisconsin Together, a liberal group, also spent nearly $1.8m so far, according to the Brennan Center’s database.TopicsWisconsinThe fight for democracyUS politicsnewsReuse this content More