Wisconsin is Set to Prove Once Again Why It is the Center of the American Political Universe
A State Supreme Court election in the Badger State this week may give us our first look at how Trump's indictment will play out politically
Wisconsin—the home of both “Fighting Bob” La Follette and Joe McCarthy—is not only this polarized nation’s most polarized state, but also one of its most closely contested. This Tuesday, voters in the Badger State will head to the polls once again to play their roles in the latest episode of Wisconsin’s pitched political drama.
This time, the partisan make-up of the Wisconsin Supreme Court hangs in the balance. The retirement of a conservative justice has opened a seat on a court that currently has a 4-3 conservative lean (although it should be noted one conservative justice has sided with liberals on a few important cases, most notably those involving attempts by Donald Trump to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election.) At stake are two critical political issues: Abortion and gerrymandering. In the coming months, the Court will likely have to issue rulings on both an 1849 state law that prohibits abortion in nearly all circumstances and the legislative maps drawn by Republican legislators two years ago that have delivered Republicans 2-1 margins in the State Senate and State Assembly as well as control over six of Wisconsin’s eight congressional seats despite the fact Wisconsin politically is one of the most evenly-divided states in the nation.
The candidates for the open seat are Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz and former State Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly. For her part, Protasiewicz has not shied away from telling voters she believes women ought to have the right to seek an abortion. It’s rather stunning to see a candidate for what is ostensibly a non-partisan position weighing in so directly on a hot button political issue. Protasiewicz has tried to maintain the appearance of impartiality by asserting her moral convictions won’t influence her rulings on legal questions, but it’s hard to believe her personal beliefs and jurisprudence aren’t influencing one another. Protasiewicz has also indicated she believes the state’s legislative maps are “rigged” and that the 2011 law that turned Wisconsin politics into a no-holds-barred cage match—former Republican Governor Scott Walker’s “Budget Repair Bill,” which significantly limited public employees’ collective bargaining rights and led to a failed attempt by Democrats to remove Walker from office via a recall election—is unconstitutional.
Opposing Protasiewicz is former Justice Dan Kelly, who was appointed by Walker to fill a vacant seat on the State Supreme Court in 2016. Democrats mobilized to defeat him when he ran for a full-term in 2020 and succeeded, sending him to an 11-point loss less than a month after the pandemic shut the nation down. That defeat didn’t end Kelly’s political ambitions, though. Running this year to reclaim a seat on the state bench, Kelly positioned himself as the most conservative candidate in the primary field and refused to commit to endorsing his opponent (who was regarded as more electable) in the general if he lost. Democrats rejoiced at the opportunity to run against Kelly once again.
For his part, Kelly is following the playbook Republicans used in the 2022 midterms and campaigning hard on the issue of crime, accusing Protasiewicz of handing down soft sentences to violent offenders. He’s also dragged Protasiewicz for injecting partisan politics into a race for a non-partisan position. Yet Kelly is vulnerable on that charge himself: Since leaving office, Kelly has earned income working on behalf of the Republican Party and other conservative organizations. Most significantly, the Wisconsin Republican Party and RNC paid him $120,000 to work on election-related issues in 2020, which included providing advice to state party leaders during the failed attempt to overturn the state’s presidential election results.
One may wonder why it’s worth paying attention to an off-year judicial election in a mid-sized Midwestern state. The answer is that not only has Wisconsin become a microcosm of the nation’s politics, but that in many ways Wisconsin also holds the political future of the nation in its hands.
If American politics is characterized by polarization and close competition for power between the two parties, then Wisconsin is the United States in miniature. Wisconsin is one of only five states with senators who do not caucus with one another. It is also one of only eleven states with divided state government (that is, a state in which the office of governor and at least one legislative chamber are controlled by different parties.)
If you really want to see Wisconsin’s political divide and the national consequences of that rift in action, however, look at the results of recent presidential elections in the state. For the past two presidential contests, Wisconsin has been part of a trio of states that decided the outcome. It wasn’t always like this: Between 1988 and 2012, Wisconsin formed part of the so-called “Blue Wall” that provided an electoral backstop for Democratic candidates. Sure, George W. Bush nearly cracked Wisconsin twice, coming within 5,000-10,000 votes of a win there. But Barack Obama won the state decisively in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton assumed Wisconsin, along with Michigan and Pennsylvania, would be there for her on Election Day 2016 as well.
She was wrong. That trio of states broke for Trump by the narrowest of margins (roughly 11,000 votes, or 0.23%, in Michigan; 44,000 votes, or 0.72%, in Pennsylvania; and 22,000 votes, or 0.77%, in Wisconsin) delivering him an Electoral College victory despite losing the popular vote. Joe Biden made it his mission to rebuild the Midwestern section of the Blue Wall in 2020, focusing his campaign on a message that would resonate with voters in those three states. He won Michigan by 2.73% and Pennsylvania by 1.16%. Wisconsin, though, was still decided by less than a point (0.63%) and a mere 21,000 votes (nearly identical to Trump’s margin.) This time, though, Wisconsin joined the typically red states of Georgia (0.24% for Biden) and Arizona (0.31% for Biden) to deny Trump the votes he needed to prevail in the Electoral College.
But digging down into the results, it turns out Wisconsin was the tipping-point state in both elections. Clinton could have won Michigan and Pennsylvania—the two states she came closest to winning—but still would have needed Wisconsin to triumph in the Electoral College. And even if Trump had emerged victorious in Georgia and Arizona—the two states he came closest to winning in 2020—he would have needed Wisconsin to put him over the top. Other states have floated in and out of that tipping-point role in recent elections—Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida—but each of those states have since seemingly drifted off the field of play for one party or the other. Wisconsin, on the other hand, sits squarely in the center of the American political universe, with few believing it’s ready to budge.
Nearly every major trend shaping modern American politics roils Wisconsin’s closely divided politics. You can begin with the legacy of Scott Walker, who rode the Tea Party wave to power in 2010 and decided as governor to court his conservative base rather than stake out a position toward the center of the ideological spectrum. He also made it a point to “own the libs,” and, most importantly, pursued policies like the aforementioned Budget Repair Bill that solidified his party’s hold on power. His most enduring legacy is an aggressive, data-driven gerrymander that has locked Republicans into power at the legislative level with huge majorities that are out of proportion to their actual share of the statewide vote. (Democratic Governor Tony Evers won re-election in 2022 with 51% of the vote yet Republicans in the state legislature walked away with near veto-proof majorities.) Walker practiced a surprisingly confrontational, hardball brand of politics for a state where political control at the state level could easily swing between parties. It’s also a style of politics other Republican governors—including Florida’s Ron DeSantis—have emulated and super-charged.
Walker succeeded because he sensed there was more to be gained by activating voters on the right with appeals to orthodox conservatism and negative partisanship than by persuading politically ambivalent Wisconsinites to support him. His background in Milwaukee-area politics probably keyed him in to this. For much of the twentieth-first century, the Milwaukee metro area was just about the most polarized place in the United States, with the majority-minority city itself a Democratic bastion and its predominantly white suburbs solidly Republican. State-wide politics soon came to reflect that racial, urban-rural divide. Rural counties, some of which had a history of working-class progressivism, began shifting to the right. Meanwhile, the population of Dane County, home of the state’s capital Madison and the University of Wisconsin, exploded as college-educated progressives moved into the city. Dane County began delivering massive margins for Democrats. Then Trump came along and amplified all these trends.
But nearly eight years after Trump began his first run for president, some are wondering if something is about to give politically in the United States. Again, nearly all these assumptions can be tested in Wisconsin. Trump’s base is in rural areas, and many rural swing counties (including those in southwestern Wisconsin) have moved into his column. But those older, rural counties are also losing population and may not be able to sustain electoral state-wide majorities for much longer. Additionally, even though Republicans continue to win Milwaukee’s suburban counties, their margins are narrowing as the college-educated voters living there are increasingly turned-off by Trump’s brand of politics.
In the meantime, Democrats are trying to manage a racially and ideologically diverse coalition of voters with little room for error. If they move too far to the left to satisfy their progressive base in Madison, they risk alienating more conservative suburban voters who are fed up with Trump. The opposite is true if they run too far to the center. There is also concern they aren’t doing enough to motivate minority voters in Milwaukee or connecting with white working-class voters. When every statewide election feels like it can be decided by the slimmest of margins, Democrats need every part of their coalition to turn-out in force.
The election this Tuesday in Wisconsin will pit two hot-button issues against one another: Abortion and crime. Kelly likely hopes he can use worries about rising crime rates to win over suburban voters. Yet it’s not every day that the future of abortion rights becomes an issue voters can weigh-in on directly at the ballot box, and that may prove exactly what Protasiewicz needs to prevail with suburban voters on Election Day. Prognosticators think Protasiewicz has the upper-hand due to the salience of the abortion issue, her huge advantage in televised advertising, and Kelly’s rough outing three years ago. But Democrats can’t take a positive outcome for granted: They figured they were in a good position to defend a seat on the Supreme Court in 2019 just a few months after voting Scott Walker out of office, but the Republican-backed candidate that year came out on top by just under half a percentage point, or roughly 5,000 votes.
Democrats would also be wise to remember a key factor in their 2020 victory. In the Democratic presidential primaries that year, Joe Biden emerged as the inevitable nominee by mid-March. Yet Bernie Sanders stayed in the race until April 8, the day after the Wisconsin primary, which coincided with the State Supreme Court election. Biden defeated Sanders by a 2-1 margin, but Sanders still brought nearly 300,000 voters to the polls that day during COVID lockdown. That Biden-Sanders sideshow likely boosted turnout for Democrats. This year’s election is also taking place alongside another political sideshow. The question this time around is if Republicans, furious over Trump’s indictment, will turn out in droves and use the State Supreme Court election to vent their anger. We’ll know soon enough. If they do, that could be an ominous sign for Democrats as well as American democracy.
But even if Protasiewicz does prevail on Tuesday, her victory may be short lived. It turns out there is a special State Senate election taking place the same day in Milwaukee’s northeastern suburbs that would restore Republicans’ supermajority in that chamber should the Republican candidate prevail. (The seat was recently vacated by a Republican.) The Republican candidate in that race has indicated he would consider voting to remove Protasiewicz from office if the State Assembly impeached her. It’s just another example of how competitive, cutthroat, and crazy Wisconsin politics—as well as American politics generally—has become in these polarized times.
Further reading: “How Wisconsin Democrats Learned to Play Hardball in the Country's Biggest Judicial Election” by David Weigel (Semafor)
Also, from Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “As southern Wisconsin braced for a tornado watch Friday afternoon, conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly and the Republican Party of Wisconsin issued its own emergency alert warning voters not to elect liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz on Tuesday. The text message included a video that used alert tones and a scratchy radio voice found on official emergency alerts aired on television and radio. The screen read, ‘*** Emergency Alert System ***’ and ‘Wisconsin Voter Alert’ on the backdrop of differently colored bars that sometimes appears on screen when TV programming is interrupted. After three beeps, a voice says, ‘This is a State of Wisconsin voter alert. Attention citizens: our Second Amendment rights are under attack by Judge Janet Protasiewicz.’”
Signals and Noise
The Washington Post looks at how the AR-15 became a symbol of modern America.
Guns are now the leading cause of death among children in the United States.
Muizz Akhtar of Vox posits we should regulate guns the way we regulate cars. Meanwhile, the Florida legislature has voted to make it legal to carry a loaded concealed weapon anywhere without a permit. Republican-led states elsewhere have continued to pass laws this year that expand access to guns.
Marin Cogan of Vox talks to a pediatric surgeon about the devastation bullets do to the bodies of children.
Rep. Andrew Ogles, who represents the congressional district in Nashville that includes the site of last week’s school shooting, took to Twitter to offer his “thoughts and prayers” to the families of the victims. But…
From Tim Miller of The Bulwark:
In Tennessee as of April 1, you can bring a loaded firearm to brunch without a permit but a guy could not dress up like Dolly Parton and sing Jolene without risking a misdemeanor. https://t.co/2EiIHeJvZXTennessee governor Bill Lee issued a statement recently about how the drag ban in Tennessee “protects children” If only he would have instead focused on laws that might have prevented the mass murder of children in his state today https://t.co/l5VMocgaUx
Tim Miller @TimodcBy Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post: “We Will Stop at Nothing to Protect the Children” (“I can think of nothing worse than children — in school, sitting at their desks, reading banned books. A horrible thought, all those children solemnly holding books in their hands and reading them and putting the thoughts in those books into their minds. Learning the wrong lessons and growing up — the wrong way. Growing all the way up.”)
Well, Don Trump got indicted. As a follow-up to last week’s article, from The Atlantic: “Indicting a Former President Should Always Have Been Fair Game” by Tim Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.
Nicole Gaudiano and Brent D. Griffiths of Insider note that once Trump is arraigned, he’ll likely be put under a gag order that will prevent him from talking about the case. The punishment could range from $1000 to 30 days in jail.
Just Security has a detailed timeline of Trump’s hush money scandal.
Republicans as expected rallied around Trump. Mark Leibovich of The Atlantic believes, however, that his rivals are missing a golden opportunity to undercut him and that Republicans could be using the news to finally break with him. Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic that Trump’s legal problems are putting his party in a vise, as the legal circus highlights everything anyone who is not a Trump supporter hates about the man, while Republicans in the conservative echo chamber have convinced themselves the country will rally to Trump’s defense.
Gov. Ron DeSantis says he won’t assist in an extradition request for Trump. That would violate the US Constitution, a 1793 federal statute, and a 1987 Supreme Court ruling.
Trump’s campaign raised over $4 million in the 24 hours after his indictment was announced.
Trump is set to go on trial in April in the civil lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll accusing him of defamation and sexual assault.
Elaine Godfrey of The Atlantic observes that the version of Don Trump on display during his Waco rally was “darker, more vengeful, and, if such a thing is possible, even more self-absorbed” than before. (The comments from Trump supporters in this article are off-the-wall crazy/scary.)
ABC News found 54 cases in which Trump’s name was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence, or allegations of assault.
Michael C. Bender and J. David Goodman of the New York Times look at Don Trump’s enduring appeal among the MAGA right despite (or because of) his increasingly despotic behavior.
According to Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley of Rolling Stone, Don Trump has been asking advisers for “battle plans” to go after drug cartels in Mexico with or without Mexico’s approval should he be re-elected.
Isaac Arnsdorf, Isaac Stanley-Becker, and Hannah Knowles of the Washington Post report DeSantis’s aides have been caught off-guard by Trump’s attacks and GOP reluctance to rally around the governor, and DeSantis’s own struggles with the campaign. His critics in Tallahassee have taken to calling him “JebSantis.”
Article of the Week: “How Did American’s Weirdest, Most Freedom-Obsessed State Fall for an Authoritarian Governor?: A Journey through Ron DeSantis’s Magic Kingdom” by Helen Lewis for The Atlantic (“The paradox of freedom, Florida style, is that it’s really an assertion of control. People like us should be free to do what we want, and free to stop other people from doing what they want when we don’t approve. That’s why it would be deeply unfair to call Ron DeSantis a petty tyrant. If he is a tyrant, he is an expansive one.”)
Meanwhile, DeSantis’ attempt to strip Disney of its control over DisneyWorld appears to have been foiled. The Disney-friendly board that oversaw Disney’s Florida properties (and that was replaced by a board sympathetic to DeSantis) voted to give its powers to Disney the day before DeSantis’ board took over.
Greg Sargent of the Washington Post looks at how Michigan Democrats are tackling economic and social issues at the same time.
Walker Bragman of Important Context reports tech billionaire Peter Thiel gave millions of dollars to a secretive fund that has funneled money to hate groups and COVID denialists.
From Shawn Boburg and Emma Brown of the Washington Post: “A little-known conservative activist group led by Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, collected nearly $600,000 in anonymous donations to wage a cultural battle against the left over three years, a Washington Post investigation found.” This is remarkable for someone like Ginni Thomas, who is known in Washington as an idiot. Or, perhaps, a useful idiot.
FOX News CEO Suzanne Scott told a FOX executive in December 2020 that fact checks concerning the legitimacy of the 2020 election were “bad for business.”
Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz has hired a convicted war criminal who served eight years in prison for executing a civilian during an interrogation as a legislative aide.
Remind me again about all those accusations of “grooming” right-wingers throw around: A federal jury found Minnesota GOP operative and donor Anton “Tony” Lazzaro guilty of sex trafficking five girls aged 15-16.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy is thinking about passing a party-line debt ceiling hike to kick the problem to the doorstep of the Democratic-led Senate. The problem, though, is House Republicans can’t unite over a fiscal way forward.
David Leonhardt of the New York Times shares this map, which shows the number of states that have adopted Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion plan. North Carolina—which has a Republican legislature—did so last week. The title of Leonhardt’s article: “Obamacare Keeps Winning”.
Yet a federal judge struck down an Obamacare mandate requiring insurance companies to cover certain types of free preventive care.
A recent AP poll captures the pinch we’re in: The American people want to cut government, but they don’t want to cut spending on big ticket items like infrastructure, health care, and Social Security.
Michael Tarm and Alanna Durkin Richer of AP report lawyers for inmates on federal death row have not only not seen any sign that President Biden is following through on his pledge to end federal executions, but that his Justice Department continues to defend death sentences in court.
The FDA has approved Narcan—which can reverse an opioid overdose—for over-the-counter sale.
Congress froze the size of the House of Representatives at 435 members in 1929. Yet since then, the United States population has grown from approximately 123 million people to 330 million people. Consequently, Danielle Allen thinks its time to expand the size of the House. She has seven proposals that would see membership increase to anywhere between 572 to 9,400 legislators.
Rapidly melting Antarctic ice is slowing the flow of water through the ocean’s currents at a rate faster than expected. Slow or even stalled ocean currents are expected to have disastrous consequences for the world’s climate, potentially throwing much of the northern hemisphere into a new ice age.
In 2022, for the first time ever in the United States, electricity generated by renewables surpassed that generated by coal.
From Natasha Lomas of TechCrunch: “Twitter is Dying” (“Since Musk took over he has set about dismantling everything that made Twitter valuable — making it his mission to drive out expertise, scare away celebrities, bully reporters and — on the flip side — reward the bad actors, spammers and sycophants who thrive in the opposite environment: An information vacuum.”
Ron Brownstein writes for CNN about the Republican Party’s shift toward isolationism.
Georgi Kantchev and Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal write that Russia’s economy is beginning to unravel.
John Pomfret and Matt Pottinger of Foreign Affairs warn that Chinese leader Xi Jinping is preparing his country for war. Meanwhile, Damien Cave of the New York Times notes Asian nations are arming up as American-Chinese relations hit their lowest point in fifty years.
The Pentagon is requesting funds for space warfare.
Prime Minister Narenda Modi is consolidating power in India and relying on the judiciary to turn the country into a one-party state.
Confronted by mass protests, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed away from his controversial judicial overhaul plan, stating he wanted to “avoid civil war.”
Roger Cohen and Liz Alderman report in the New York Times that French outrage with President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to lift the retirement age from 62 to 64 without consulting Parliament has turned from anger over the policy to disgust with the monarchical Macron himself. Protests in the country have often turned violent.
Well this is great: Looks like the far right is surging again in Austria.