Will democratic elections return to Wisconsin?

We’ll find out this week:

 Control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and likely the future of abortion access, Republican-drawn legislative maps and years of GOP policies in the key swing state rests with the outcome an election Tuesday that has seen record campaign spending.

The winner of the high-stakes contest between Republican-backed Dan Kelly and Democratic-supported Janet Protasiewicz will determine majority control of the court headed into the 2024 presidential election. The court came within one vote of overturning President Joe Biden’s narrow win in 2020, and both sides expect another close race in 2024.

It’s the latest election where abortion rights has been the central issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last June. It’s also an example of how officially nonpartisan court races have grown into political battles as major legal fights play out at the state level.

I don’t know how the election will come out, but it’s good that Democrats are taking it very seriously and not practicing unilateral disarmament as Republicans try to evade their incredibly unpopular views on abortion rights by doing Willie Horton 2.0 ads:

The Wisconsin Democratic Party has put $8.8 million behind Protasiewicz. According to chairman Ben Wikler, it has made as many voter contacts in this race as it did in the 2018 campaign for Gov. Tony Evers.

Democrats looking to graft partisan politics onto the judicial race believe they’re participating in an existing arms race with Republicans, who are more than happy to do the same when it benefits them. Four years ago, Democrats learned what didn’t work, losing a court race they were favored to win after Republicans sent out mailers linking the campaign to elect a liberal judge to the failed effort to keep Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court.

“The more progressive candidate ran a very traditional campaign focused on how qualified she was, and how she had support from across the political spectrum, and endorsements from other judges,” said Wikler. “That was the kind of campaign that used to succeed in this state, and that I think many people would love to see return. But the Republican candidate and his independent expenditure allies ran a scorched earth partisan operation that essentially ensured that every Republican in the state would vote for him.”

[…]

But Democrats know that abortion rights is the issue with the broadest appeal, and that Kelly is vulnerable, citing his legal advice to Wisconsin Right to Life. Kelly has declined to say how he’d rule on abortion cases — “I am campaigning to be the most boring Supreme Court justice in the history of the state,” he said in Madison.

Kelly and his allies, are more comfortable attacking Protasiewicz as pro-criminal, with ad after ad from third-party groups describing the rapes committed by men who didn’t get the maximum sentence from the judge. Some have gone further, citing a conservative Wisconsin news site to accuse the Democrat-backed candidate of elder abuse and racism, charges she denied when asked by Semafor.

This is the most important election of 2023, and I will choose to be optimistic.