A Little Known Upcoming Election in Wisconsin Is a Hugely Important One for the Country

Photo courtesy of Wisconsin Public Radio

Before 2016, I never thought I would care much about Wisconsin state politics. But when that state flipped to Trump that year, I wanted to understand more. And by 2020, I realized that Wisconsin was once again among a handful of states that would decide who would occupy the White House.

The 2020 election, as we now well know, became a contested one, with false election conspiracies abounding, dozens of frivolous lawsuits filed, and the fate of Wisconsin’s crucial 10 electoral votes ultimately in the hands of the state’s Supreme Court, which was and still is controlled by a conservative 4-3 majority. Democracy barely survived that test, and it has been suffering serious blows under that panel since. But now, there is a once-in-a-generation chance to flip a seat on that court, with a conservative justice retiring from the panel.

Today, I explain why the election in Wisconsin for that open seat in early April is the most important race of the year, not just for Wisconsin but for the entire country.

What happened during the 2020 election in Wisconsin?

To understand the stakes, let’s open our modern history books to December 2020 and review what mischief was going down in the Badger State. 

The Trump Campaign had filed what many saw as a “Hail Mary” lawsuit challenging the legality of ballots cast in two of the most populous areas in the state, Dane and Milwaukee counties. By no coincidence, these two counties also had very high numbers of African American voters. Trump’s lawyers argued (checks notes, yes, they really did) that all in-person absentee votes in Dane and Milwaukee counties had been cast using an application form that was somehow legally insufficient—even though that form had been created in 2010 to streamline paperwork and has been used ever since.

Nevertheless, the Trump campaign wanted to throw out the vote counts from those two counties, and those two alone, comprising 220,000 ballots. They of course wanted to keep the votes of the other 70 whiter, more Republican counties, so they did not challenge those in their suit. Sounds crazy, right?

And yet, defenders of democracy barely won this one. In a 4-3 decision, with one conservative justice thankfully siding with the court’s three liberals, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the suit was “unreasonable in the extreme” and came too late in the process to proceed any further.

In other words, we were one vote away from electoral chaos. Had the case gone the other way, it would have emboldened bad actors in other battleground state legislatures (think GOP-controlled chambers in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona) to look for ways to throw out their own results, just as Trump had asked Pence to do on January 6, 2021 during the electoral college count in Congress.

Wisconsin is gerrymandered to the hilt

To understand the significance of that 4-3 majority, let’s take a look at just one issue in the state: gerrymandering. The Wisconsin Supreme Court has been protecting the maps drawn by the GOP assembly, and that is a very big problem. Wisconsin is a evenly divided state when it come to politics. Most statewide elections in Wisconsin come down to less than a percentage point, as we saw in the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests and the recent statewide senate race. In a fair system, you’d expect to see a congressional delegation and a state legislature that reflect this close divide, but that’s not at all the case. 

More than a decade ago, the state assembly drew itself maps that enshrined a GOP supermajority, with the GOP winning nearly two thirds of the 99 seats. This gerrymander is considered one of the worst in the nation, packing Democrats into heavily blue districts to waste their votes while cracking other districts apart with oddly shaped boundaries to dilute Democratic voting strength. That assembly then used its power to weaken the executive power of the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, as soon as he was elected and even to deny him routine appointments.

That same lopsided assembly recently drew maps for the state’s congressional districts, of which there are eight, with six of them drawn purposefully to elect Republicans. Remember, this meant a 6-2 congressional delegation in a state where Democrats frequently win or lose statewide races by under one percent of the vote. It amounts to two freebie House seats for the Republicans in Congress.

The effect of gerrymandering goes beyond how many seats a party wins in an election. It also severely impacts voter sentiment, depressing turnout by thumbing its nose at notions of fairness and equity, and by giving a very real sense that it doesn’t matter whether you vote or not—your vote will be diluted or wasted. 

The party isn’t shy about its goals. A GOP member of the state elections commission sent a letter in December of 2022 to fellow Republicans crowing about their party’s successful efforts to depress minority turnout. His email boasted that Republicans “can be especially proud of the City of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming Black and Hispanic areas.” But elections commissioners shouldn’t be celebrating lower voter turnout anywhere. Democratic participation, regardless of party, should be a goal for all officials. That vote difference, by the way, would have been more than enough to send Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes to Washington to replace Sen. Ron Johnson. Just saying.

The state’s Supreme Court has long been the final arbiter of these contorted district maps, with the most recent 4-3 vote to approve the GOP-approved maps the latest blow to fairness and democracy. But a 4-3 split on the court the other way could result in successful legal challenges to those same maps. This could follow the roadmap laid out in Pennsylvania where Democrats gained control of that state’s supreme court in 2015, and then it redrew the congressional maps more fairly for the 2018 election.

Democrats are fired up

Wisconsin held a primary election on Tuesday to send the two top vote-getters to the general election for the open state Supreme Court seat on April 4. The primary was a strong indication of party enthusiasm, especially among the core base voters. 

Democrats have reason to cheer. Turn out was exceptionally high for a primary in an off-year election for something as normally mundane as a state Supreme Court seat. The enthusiasm was especially notable in Dane County which saw a 40 percent turnout rate against the statewide average of 29 percent. The candidate receiving the most votes was Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal judge who has pledged to protect reproductive rights and democracy. In fact, she received 46.5 percent of the votes—half a percent more than the sum of the two closest conservative candidates. She will face off against extremist former justice Daniel Kelly, who famously lost his last statewide race by 11 percentage points.

That said, big money is now pouring in for Kelly from wealthy GOP donors. Kelly already received $2.8 million from the ironically named “Fair Courts” super PAC funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, and in the general election Kelly expects a whopping $20 million from that same PAC. Democrats are fighting back, however, with massive national fundraising efforts of their own to elect Protasiewicz.

So long as conservatives control the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin, there is no way around the unfairness and anti-democratic actions of the state GOP. Indeed, the state doesn’t even allow for a popular initiative process that might, for example, replace the gerrymandered maps with one drawn by an independent commission as voters successfully approved in neighboring Michigan, where, as a consequence, the state flipped to Democratic control of the legislature.

“If Republicans keep their hammerlock on the State Supreme Court majority, Wisconsin remains stuck in an undemocratic doom loop,” said Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, to the New York Times. And as the 2020 election showed us, that doom loop might also threaten democracy nationwide. 

But a win in April, which Democrats have now shown is very doable given enthusiasm among their core base, could finally break that chokehold and unlock Wisconsin’s true potential under a fair system, just as we have seen in other battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. And that would be a big win for American democracy.