Dane County Judge Jill Karofsky (right) beat incumbent Justice Daniel Kelly handily in the April 7 election.
Like most observers I was surprised to see Jill Karofsky beat conservative incumbent Daniel Kelly for the state Supreme Court. I had thought that Republicans’ insistence on moving forward with in-person voting amid a pandemic would suppress vote totals enough to help Kelly over the finish line.
The fact that the Republican vote suppression strategy proved to be such a spectacular failure is great news for November, though there is still likely to be a cost to public health because of Republican callousness.
While Republicans want to write this off as just the result of a high Democratic turnout due to the presidential primary, that won’t cut it. After all, the nomination had been all but wrapped up by Joe Biden weeks before Wisconsin voted. Instead, it looks like Karofsky won because of several factors that might still be in place for the presidential election in the fall. There was tremendous turnout in Democratic strongholds, a flip to the left in counties that had narrowly gone the other way in last year’s Supreme Court race, and a pronounced erosion in Republican votes in the Milwaukee suburbs.
While it’s pure speculation on my part, I think Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald’s push for in-person voting on April 7 backfired on them. It aroused an already white-hot Democratic voting base and it turned off moderate Republican suburban voters already averse to what has become the party of Trump. Also, there’s some speculation that older Republican voters, who didn’t want to risk going to the polls, found the hoops that Vos and Fitzgerald set up to make it harder to vote by mail, like needing to scan your driver's license to request a ballot, too daunting. If that isn’t poetic justice, I don’t know what is.
While all that can only make Democrats more optimistic about November, you can’t help but feel the pain of what might have been. But for 6,000 votes in the 2019 Supreme Court contest between the liberal-backed Lisa Neubauer and the ultra-consevative Brian Hagedorn, there would be a 4-3 liberal majority on the court when Karofsky is sworn in come August. But Hagedorn beat Neubauer by a half a percentage point and so, even with Karofsky joining the court, the conservatives will still enjoy a 4-3 advantage.
(And, by the way, since Kelly will be on the court until August, don’t be surprised if he now joins in a decision to purge about 200,000 voters from the rolls before November. He had recused himself from that case, but now he’s got nothing to lose.)
And that in turn means that there is little chance for fair maps when legislative districts are redrawn following the 2020 census. Republicans will certainly again heavily gerrymander the districts, Gov. Tony Evers will certainly veto the maps and it will all almost certainly wind up in the state Supreme Court, where the conservative majority will almost certainly rule in favor of the Republicans. The result will be a heavy GOP advantage for another decade despite the will of the voters as reflected in statewide vote totals.
There is no humility, much less a sense of fair play or decency, among Republican leaders or their friends on the Supreme Court. They hold power by the grace of their manipulation of the system and by one extremely narrow court victory a year ago. The state as a whole is nowhere near as far-right as their policies suggest and yet they operate as if they have some sort of overwhelming mandate. And none of that is likely to change anytime soon because the die was cast a year ago when Neubauer lost her race.
So, cheers to Jill Karofsky and to the state Democratic Party operation under its new leader, Ben Wikler. By all accounts they out-organized the other guys and that bodes well for the fall.
But pardon me if I take a moment to be wistful about what might have been.
