Are the Wisconsin Supreme Court Results Really a ‘Five-Alarm Warning’ for Republicans in 2024?

A “five-alarm warning to Republicans about 2024.” That’s what the Wall Street Journal editorial board said of the results of last week’s Wisconsin supreme court race, which saw liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz defeat conservative judge Dan Kelly by ten points.

After the race, which cemented a liberal majority on the state supreme court for the first time in 15 years, the editorial board warned that the GOP’s “legislative majorities will soon be imperiled, and you can move Wisconsin out of the swing-state column for the Presidency in 2024” if Republicans can’t keep hold of a longtime GOP stronghold in the Milwaukee suburbs, where a Republican candidate for the state Senate “barely won.”

Former Republican governor Scott Walker, during an appearance on Fox News, agreed it’s a “five-alarm warning,” while Ben Wikler, the chair of the state Democratic Party, said the race was “a release valve for twelve years of Democratic rage in Wisconsin about Republicans rigging our state and smashing our democracy.”

But not everyone is so sure.

Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the state GOP, told me the latest punditry falls into an old pattern of reading too much into the state’s supreme court races.

“The last time that the court was liberal” was 2008, he said. “We flipped it to conservative in April of 2008. A lot of folks said, ‘Well, that means Wisconsin’s going to go red.’ Well, [Republican presidential candidate John] McCain lost the state by 14 points.”

In April 2020, Kelly lost his state supreme court race by ten points, and then Biden won the state by a narrow margin in the fall. Walker survived a recall election in June 2012, but in November, Obama won the state by more than six points.

“I don’t think this election is indicative of 2024 at all, but I do think there are lessons that we need to learn, and learn them nationally, going into 2024,” he said, adding that it is “absurd” to suggest Wisconsin won’t be a swing state in 2024.

But a “five-alarm” warning about the abortion issue in 2024 “is understandable,” he said.

Wisconsin-based Republican political strategist Mark Graul similarly said he expects Wisconsin will remain up for grabs in 2024, just as it always has.

“I think if people step back and look more closely at the Supreme Court race, they realize the margin was due to a bad candidate on our side and a humongous resource advantage on their side,” he told me. “And that’s not reflective of the close nature of the state of Wisconsin.”

Heather Smith, who has worked as a political operative in Wisconsin for decades, said that “more sophisticated people and virtually any woman that you spoke with knew that [Kelly] had an electability problem.”

“He was about the worst matchup that you could possibly have put forth in an election where their obvious candidate was going to be a middle-aged lady who prosecuted crime for a while and was obviously pro-choice,” she said. “Putting her up against a guy who was pompously dismissive of the issue and at the extreme edge of where Republicans are on the issue of abortion . . . I think that’s a really bad matchup to begin with.”

Kelly had previously been appointed to the state supreme court by Walker, but later lost a bid to keep the seat by ten points in 2020. Democrats helped handpick Kelly in the Republican primary for the 2023 race, spending $1 million to defeat Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Jennifer Dorow.

Graul said his biggest takeaway is that the party must run better candidates who will appeal to a broader class of voters, particularly suburban voters and female voters.

Asked how that lesson might play out in 2024, Graul acknowledged that former president Trump “does not fit that bill.”

“I think there’s fatigue with him. I think we’ve seen in Wisconsin, really the erosion of suburban voters to be traced to his rise, frankly,” he said.

Kelly, for his part, also failed to participate in the political battle the Left waged. Protasiewicz was willing to shirk norms by getting extremely political in a judicial race. Kelly, on the other hand, was “really dismissive of the idea that he should need to talk about issues other than the Constitution,” Smith said.

Wisconsin-based GOP strategist Brandon Scholz said the Left viewed the race as a political one, not a judicial one. “Dan Kelly . . . sat there and mumbled about protecting the Constitution. Nobody really understood what the Hell he was talking about.”

“From an election standpoint, it was a complete disaster,” he said.

Abortion, meanwhile, was a major issue in the race, but far from the only issue.

Still, Smith warned there is a reckoning coming on the issue of abortion for the GOP and suggested a small, but vocal group of ardent pro-lifers are “pulling us at odds with the general population.”

“I think when you have a huge middle where, I mean, most people are not for the full ban and most people are not for abortion in the ninth month, right? But there’s a huge middle and gray area,” she said. “And I think that it’s important to seem reasonable on the issue. And Janet seemed reasonable on the issue. And Dan didn’t seem reasonable on the issue.”

But Heritage Action executive director Jessica Anderson suggested the path forward for Republicans is to lean into protecting life.

“If you listen to what the Left and the mainstream media say, is that the losses in the 2020 and the 2022 midterms were because voters want full access to abortion. I don’t think that’s true at all,” she told me, pointing to losses by Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke, and Tim Ryan.

“The American public recognizes that there needs to be reasonable exceptions and that they want to see conservatives, they want to see Republicans talk specifically about what they’re going to do to protect life,” she said. She pointed to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who is widely considered a likely 2024 contender and who won reelection in a landslide in November after a 15-week abortion ban passed in the Sunshine State.

“When you talk straight on about the need to protect life, you’re right over the target of where voters are at,” she said.

After the race, RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the party has a messaging issue on abortion.

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RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel blames pro-life messaging for the Supreme Court loss in Wisconsin:

“There is a messaging issue, and abortion is still an issue… I’m a suburban woman. I know this is an issue.”pic.twitter.com/DCTgvHpNtw

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) April 5, 2023

In response, Anderson said: “There’s a messaging issue only in so much that Republicans need to talk about why they’re supportive of life and they need to point out the extremism of the Left.”

Graul also suggested Republican candidates must reframe the way they talk about abortion. “When conservatives and Republicans were doing well on abortion messaging, we were talking about partial birth abortion, parental consent, taxpayer-funded abortions, things of that nature that most people agree with us on.”

But he said the “most important piece of the puzzle was the resource disadvantage.”

The race was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, with $42 million spent. Protasiewicz and her backers spent $23.3 million, while Kelly and his supporters spent $17.6 million. While Protasiewicz’s campaign bought ads directly at a cheaper rate, Kelly relied on anti-Protasiewicz purchased by third-party groups that are charged several times more for the same airtime.

Additionally, “nobody was spending any money to promote or defend Dan Kelly for a couple of weeks because they bled themselves dry trying to make sure that he won [in the primary],” Smith said.

Jefferson said the “targeting and the quality of our ads and our engagement is lacking right now.”

Protasiewicz’s ads helped keep abortion at the forefront of the conversation, with the issue mentioned in roughly a third of television ads from her campaign and her supporters, according to AdImpact data cited by Politico. Meanwhile, abortion was mentioned in just 1 percent of Kelly’s ads.

“I think our side thought we can attack her weak-on-crime record . . . and that will pull back enough people who were not agreeing with our position on the abortion issue, enough so that we can win,” Jefferson said. “But it wasn’t. People didn’t care about the crime issue as much as they did about the abortion issue.”

Yet the approval of three ballot measures offered a sign that conservatives still hold winning policy positions in Wisconsin. A proposition to make it harder for people accused of crimes to be released ahead of trial passed with a 33-point margin. Broader bail requirements also passed with a 35-point margin in a second proposition. Meanwhile, a ballot measure that said “able-bodied, childless adults” should be “required to look for work in order to receive taxpayer-funded welfare benefits” passed with 80 percent of the vote.

On the abortion issue, candidates will have to come up with their own plans on abortion going forward, Jefferson said, but Kelly’s tactic of failing to fight back against attacks on the issue will not work, he warned. Senator Ron Johnson’s position of calling for a referendum on abortion was a winning position in the midterms and could be something to replicate, if abortion remains on the table in the Badger State in 2024.

Smith said, “People are going to have to figure out their crap on abortion. And we’re gonna have to not just pick the most batsh** crazy person to run in the primary.”

“Dan Kelly was never going to win this race,” she said. “He was never going to win this race. And most of the people, most of the insiders are not going to say that. But he was never going to win this race.”

As pundits work to read the tea leaves on 2024, Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) has waded into the race. Scott, who has been traveling to early primary states as part of his “Faith in America” tour,  launched a presidential exploratory committee on Wednesday. “I will never back down in defense of the conservative values that make America exceptional,” he said.

Trump, meanwhile, sat down with Fox News on Tuesday for his first interview since his indictment.

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• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has mounted a 2024 bid as a Democrat. Kennedy, the son of Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, is an anti-vaccine activist. He and Marianne Williamson are, so far, the only two candidates to challenge President Biden in the Democratic primary, as Ari Blaff reports.

• How long will Trump’s indictment bump last? Judson Berger writes that while the Manhattan DA’s prosecution “lets Trump reorient the universe to once more focus it on himself,” likely future indictments may “serve to remind primary voters why it’s a good idea to shop around for their 2024 standard-bearer.”

Even if every point Trump gains reflects genuine backing, there’s no guarantee he can hold together the sympathy coalition once his legal woes deepen, as seems likely, and less ridiculous prosecutors enter the arena. A bookkeeping case concerning payments to a porn star is one thing; an ever-expanding suite of cases, of which the dark and Stormy business is the least significant, is another.

• Trump is now leading DeSantis in a hypothetical 2024 head-to-head matchup among likely Republican voters in the Sunshine State, according to a new poll from Victory Insights. More from me here.

The survey shows Trump winning support from 46.6 percent of likely voters, while DeSantis notched support from 31.8 percent of voters. Another 21.6 percent of likely voters said they are undecided. The results mean Trump has enjoyed a 25.7 point swing in his favor since Victory Insights conducted a similar poll in November, when Trump formally announced his campaign and DeSantis was riding high from a landslide reelection win. At the time, polling showed DeSantis with a 10.9-point lead over Trump in Florida.

• Chicago bested New York City and Atlanta this week to become the site of the Democratic Party’s 2024 convention. Committee members chose Chicago “because of the appeal of the United Center, the venue where the convention will be hosted, as well as the city’s hotels and restaurants. DNC members also believed Pritzker’s political and financial power would not allow the convention to fail.” More from Jeff Zymeri here.

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