NEWS ANALYSIS
Source: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign
It’s all over but the voting.
Next Tuesday, April 2, one of two state appeals court judges — Brian Hagedorn or Lisa Neubauer — will win a 10-year term to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a race that could shape the ideological balance of the court for years to come.
As of early this week, Neubauer appeared to be the clear frontrunner.
“I expect her to win and potentially by a large margin,” Barry Burden, a UW-Madison professor of political science and director of its Elections Research Center, said in an interview last week. He speculated that the decision of outside conservative groups “not to invest in Hagedorn’s campaign tells me that they have concluded that the campaign is in trouble, and don’t want to throw good money after bad.”
That was before the Republican State Leadership Committee announced Tuesday that it plans to spend at least $1 million on Hagedorn’s behalf.
In years past, conservatives have repeatedly ridden to court victory with major help from outside special-interest groups. But last year, despite significant spending by these groups, the more-or-less avowedly liberal Rebecca Dallet prevailed over an opponent who, like Hagedorn, is extremely conservative with close ties to Republicans. That was followed last fall by the election of all five Democratic contenders for state constitutional offices, including Gov. Tony Evers over two-term incumbent Scott Walker.
One major state lobby group, the Wisconsin Realtors Association, rescinded its endorsement of Hagedorn after news broke that he helped found and still serves on the board of a Christian school that disallows gay teachers, students and parents. The business lobby group Wisconsin Manufacturer and Commerce has also elected to sit this one out, as it has in previous races where it sees no chance of prevailing.
Neubauer had been leading handily in terms of attracting outside spending — $1.2 million of the $1.3 million poured into the race as of last week had gone to help her prospects, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, including $835,000 from the pro-Democrat Greater Wisconsin Committee. The $1 million-plus from the Republican State Leadership Committee’s Judicial Fairness Initiative erases that advantage.
Neubauer still leads in terms of candidate fundraising — a total of about $1.8 million through March 25, according to reports filed this week, including $250,000 of her own money, compared to about $1.4 million raised by Hagedorn, including a late influx of more than $100,000 from the Republican Party of Wisconsin.
In all eight contested state Supreme Court cases since 2007, the candidate with the most dollars spent on his or her behalf won.
The April 2 election is for the seat held for 43 years by Justice Shirley Abrahamson, one of the court’s three liberals. If Neubauer wins, that could set the stage for liberals to gain control of the court next year, when conservative Justice Dan Kelly, like Hagedorn an appointee of Walker, is set to face voters.
But all of this depends on whether Neubauer is in fact a liberal. And that is something she absolutely refuses to admit. In fact, Neubauer, who has personal and family ties to Democrats (her husband, Jeff, is the former state party chair; her daughter, Greta, is a Democratic lawmaker), has run one of the most opaque campaigns for state Supreme Court in recent years.
At the candidates’ March 15 debate before the State Bar of Wisconsin, she ducked questions, endlessly repeated her campaign talking points — that she is “fair, impartial and independent” and backed by 345 past and present Wisconsin judges, way more than Hagedorn — and falsely claimed that the Code of Judicial Conduct prohibited her from commenting on any issue that may come before the court. (Other candidates have gone much further in answering questions about where they stand, without any knocks on the door by the Judicial Police.)
Hagedorn clobbered Neubauer on these evasions, and pushed back hard on the few substantive criticisms she did advance. On three occasions, he managed to get extra time by asking to respond to her comments; she never asked once. He named as influences three of the most conservative justices in recent history: Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Neil Gorsuch. She refused to name any.
Asked about Roe v. Wade, Neubauer allowed that this was “settled law,” but pledged to keep an “open mind” about any cases that might come her way. It was a commitment to reproductive freedom no more stirring than Hagedorn’s own stated position, which is that he will “apply all binding precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court, including Roe v. Wade.”
This is an election in which one candidate wants voters to believe he will have no trouble upholding what he has called “one of the worst and most unjustifiable decisions in history” while the other is signaling that she could very well restrict it.
Neubauer, 61, may be running a cautious campaign because she knows, through outward signs and internal polling, that she has an edge in the race. And she may feel it is unnecessary to make an effort to appeal to left-leaning voters because, really, who else can they vote for?
Besides his ties to the discriminatory school, Hagedorn has written blog posts likening homosexuality to bestiality, accepted money to speak before a group that has advocated for the forced sterilization of transgender people, called Planned Parenthood “a wicked organization,” and blasted Roe v. Wade as having “caused immeasurable harm to our legal system.” Yet he says he would not recuse himself from cases involving LGBT issues, Planned Parenthood or abortion rights and might even take part in cases regarding legislation he played a direct role in crafting as Walker’s former chief legal counsel.
Hagedorn, 41, claims that what he thinks about anything is irrelevant to his role as a judge, and that anyone who brings it up is attacking his religion. It’s a remarkably dishonest contention, especially given that he has in the past personally urged people to back the election of a conservative justice to preserve Walker’s attack on public employee unions and other explicitly political reasons.
In all, through March 25, Hagedorn received nearly 5,000 donations, averaging $282. This includes the maximum $20,000 from Michael White, the chairman of Rite-Hite who in 2012 threatened his employees with “personal consequences” if President Barack Obama were reelected. Hagedorn also received $2,500 from Stephen Einhorn, a Milwaukee-area businessman whose family foundation paid to erect billboards during the 2010 and 2012 elections warning residents of minority neighborhoods that they may be committing a felony if they vote.
Neubauer, meanwhile, has snared about 5,500 individual donations besides her own, averaging $277 each. This includes contributions from 33 labor unions totaling $286,250, including $18,000 each from AFSCME, WEAC, UAW, Wisconsin Carpenters, Operating Engineers 139, Wisconsin Laborers District Council, the National Education Association, and two branches of the American Federation of Teachers.
Hagedorn’s campaign has not gotten large contributions from political action committees other than the $108,168 he received from the Republican Party and $18,000 from the Realtors, which asked for its money back.
