Wisconsin’s election last week
grabbed national headlines
due to partisan battles over opening polling places during a pandemic, but
followers of Wisconsin politics suggest the crucial partisan divide was over
the state Supreme Court. “[T]he battle over the court is the reason that the
GOP defied pleas to postpone the vote: Republicans calculated that holding the
election in the midst of the pandemic gave incumbent conservative justice Dan
Kelly a better chance of holding his seat,” according to veteran commentator
Charles Sykes writing in Politico.
The winner of last week’s election, however,
was liberal challenger Judge Jill Karofsky who beat incumbent Kelly by 10%, thus reducing conservatives’ edge on the court
from 5-2 to 4-3.
Although Wisconsin Supreme Court
elections are nominally non-partisan, the usual Red and Blue teams routinely
dominate. As Sykes puts it, “While the election of
judges is technically nonpartisan, over the past two decades all pretenses have
been dropped, as the races have become high-stakes proxy battles between
Democrats and Republicans. Spending on the current campaign between Kelly and
progressive challenger Jill Karnofsky topped $8 million and, following the
pattern of recent elections, the contest was both intensely ideological and
personally bitter.” And: “During the campaign, Karnofsky, who is running as an
advocate of ‘social justice,’ accused Kelly of ‘running his Supreme Court
campaign out of the Wisconsin GOP headquarters,” and noted that he was touting
the support of President Donald Trump.”
Other than coronavirus, this Supreme
Court race “in most other respects resemble[d] those before it: intensely
partisan, even though its nominally nonpartisan; awash in campaign spending;
and high-stakes for the ideological balance of the court,” observed Riley Vetterkind in the Wisconsin
State Journal. These elections first turned boisterous in 1999, where the court
saw its first million dollar election battle, and
Marquette University Professor Paul Nolette considers
this transformation “a
reflection in part of the polarization in Wisconsin in general.”
Battles over the Wisconsin Supreme
Court, and within the court, have been raging for years. Formerly, the role of
chief justice fell to the court’s most senior member, but a 2015 constitutional amendment changed
this selection process to election by the other justices. Democrats derided that amendment as a veiled attempt
to unseat then incumbent liberal Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, but it
nonetheless passed the legislature and a statewide ballot. I observed in a
previous post that tensions heightened even
further as Chief Justice Abrahamson subsequently sued the other six members of
her court after losing reelection as chief under the new rules.
#scowi
