How Wisconsin Democrats learned to play hardball in the country's biggest judicial election
MADISON, Wis. – Daniel Kelly described the crimes in grisly detail. One man had violated his cousin “in the most personal, intimate way.” Another filmed the rape of a 13-year old girl for Facebook. Both, he said, got light sentences from Janet Protasiewicz, his rival for a swing seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court.
And it was her team, he said, that dragged the campaign into the gutter.
“How is it that we came to this point in time where you have to sacrifice your good name to run for office?” Kelly asked a group of college Republicans and conservative activists on Wednesday. “I would hate to see this kind of ugly game prevail.”
The most expensive court race in Wisconsin’s history — $40 million spent, more to come before April 4 — gives Democrats a once-in-a-decade chance of breaking a conservative majority. Their message, years in the making, is that voters can scrap the state’s 1849 abortion ban and replace a lopsided GOP legislative gerrymander by voting for Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County judge. Her campaign has called the attacks on her sentencing “defamatory” and asked for them to be taken off air.
“I decided to run for this seat for really one simple reason, and that is to ensure that far right wing extremists do not hijack our Supreme Court,” Protasiewicz said at a candidate forum on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus on Tuesday. “Every single issue that you care about is going to be on the ballot.”
The Republican response has been twofold: Denouncing Protasiewicz for saying how she’d rule on specific issues, and scorching her reputation with ads that literally invoke the 1988 “Willie Horton” campaign against Mike Dukakis.
“They should not be able to take $10 million from California and New York, and lie to all of you,” said Shelley Grogan, a pro-Kelly judge on the court of appeals, at a Milwaukee County GOP meeting at a supper club this week. “Yet they are doing it in this race against Dan Kelly.”
https://www.semafor.com/article/03/31/2023/how-wisconsin-democrats-learned-to-play-hardball-in-the-countrys-biggest-judicial-election
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