If the GOP wants to win more elections, what it really needs to do is terminate Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations.
If the GOP wants to win more elections, what it really needs to do is terminate Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations.
“Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is . . . maybe he didn’t.” — Eli Cash, The Royal Tenenbaums
A mericans emerged from last week believing a number of unassailable, lead-pipe truths: The new pitch clock has once again made Major League Baseball watchable, the cast of Succession is going to sweep the Emmy Awards next year, and the April 4 Wisconsin supreme court race was a catastrophic loss for pro-life Republicans.
The latter point took hold on both sides of the partisan divide. “At some point, the GOP might want to acknowledge its glaring abortion problem—and do something about it,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel. The New York Times claimed that the race “signaled just how much last summer’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has transformed American politics.”
One of the most regrettable parts of modern politics is how every election has been transformed into a national one. State elections based on candidates and their personalities have been conscripted in the war for the national culture. The supply of meaningful national races falls short of cable news’ demand to fill airtime, so if, say, a Prius-driving Arkansas mayor gets elected, it is held up as a talisman for environmentalists in the next presidential election.
So now everyone thinks a conservative losing to a liberal in Wisconsin is a microcosm of the national mood on abortion. But to paraphrase Eli Cash: Maybe it’s not.
A perfectly plausible story about conservative Dan Kelly’s embarrassing loss can be written without using the word that, to quote Jonah Hill’s Knocked Up character, “rhymes with shmashmortion.”
To start, one can look at Kelly’s personal toxicity with the voters of Wisconsin. This is a guy who was appointed to the state supreme court by former governor Scott Walker in 2016, then proceeded to lose as an incumbent by eleven percentage points just four years later. This, of course, was a full two years before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which sent the abortion issue back to the states.
Upon losing, Kelly said, “God has a different plan for my future.” But the Lord evidently keeps sending him the same text.
Last week, Kelly again lost to a liberal female candidate, this time by . . . you guessed it, eleven points. It is clear Wisconsin voters think Kelly is exactly eleven points worse than a progressive woman, whether abortion is on the table or not. The lesson is that Gwyneth Paltrow is a better skier than Dan Kelly is a supreme court candidate.
(After losing, Kelly verified everything voters thought about him by going on an ungracious rant detailing how Janet Protasiewicz wasn’t a “worthy opponent,” further calling her a “serial liar.” If your opponent is not “worthy,” what does that say about you when they hand you your backside?)
How powerful is abortion in Wisconsin as a motivating issue? Well, just last November, Ron Johnson — a man who actually voted to confirm three U.S. Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade — won reelection to the U.S. Senate. At the state level, businessman Tim Michels — who until the late stages of his campaign supported flat-out banning abortion with no exceptions — lost to incumbent Tony Evers by a thin 3.4-percent margin. Again, this was months after the Dobbs decision; rather than being a post-Roe apocalypse, it shook out as a pretty standard election year.
The same held true nationally. It is difficult to make the case that Republicans had a down year because of abortion; one could easily point to the crackpot election-denying candidates the GOP ran as the reason they are currently in the minority in the Senate. In fact, the Senate might very well have been tied if Georgia GOP candidate Herschel Walker hadn’t allegedly urged multiple women to get abortions on his dime.
Instead, the Kelly race last week seems more like a continuation of a Jordan Peele–worthy horror movie the GOP has found itself in since the election of Donald Trump as president. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016; when he took office, conservatives held virtually every elected office in the state and enjoyed a seemingly insurmountable 5–2 majority on the state supreme court.
Since then, it has since been a cataclysmic run, with Republicans/conservatives losing 14 of 17 statewide races, including two gubernatorial races and control of the supreme court. As Trumpism infected the state party, it hemorrhaged talent, letting its most feral members call the shots.
In doing so, the party threw away its best chance of winning major races. In 2022, party primary voters opted for Michels, an unsuccessful Senate candidate 18 years ago, instead of TV-ready former lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch. Michels was woefully underprepared, sweating like a honey ham under the lights of the debate stage. And yet he still almost won.
And this year, the party chose Kelly over Waukesha judge Jennifer Dorow, who could have been the perfect candidate to parry Protasiewicz’s blows on abortion. Dorow earned national fame as the judge handling the hearing against a man who plowed his car into a Christmas parade in the Milwaukee suburb. But Democrats, knowing Dorow could catch fire in a general election, spent $2 million against her in the primary, trying to throw it to Kelly, the more beatable wet-mop candidate.
And it worked.
(Side note: if Republicans had meddled in a Democratic primary and succeeded in getting an unelectable progressive candidate the nomination, there would be howls of injustice and calls for a congressional investigation, and the national media would treat it as a scandal that could end democracy.)
In both the 2022 and 2023 Wisconsin elections, had there been a living, breathing Republican Party, its leader would have commandeered these races and chosen to back the candidate who had the best chance to win. Instead, Kelly’s loss became the latest botched opportunity during the GOP’s Trump era, which began long before the Dobbs decision. (And the latest case in which primary voters eschewed an attractive young female candidate in favor of an old, male, proven loser.)
Under this framing, the Wisconsin supreme court race looks a lot less like a referendum on abortion and more like the anti-GOP pattern the state has seen since 2016. Which is why it is silly to pin it on one issue. Campaigns are complicated organisms with myriad personalities, local quirks, and ideas. In the end, voters elect people, not issues.
Could Dorow have held off Protasiewicz’s unrelenting attacks on the abortion issue? Maybe. Could the state GOP have relieved the pressure on the race by passing exceptions for rape and incest in the animating 1849 state abortion law? Perhaps.
But we now do know what happened, and it was the most predictable outcome possible — since it had already happened, just three years earlier.
It is understandable why the national media would want to make a single Wisconsin spring election a national referendum on a “woman’s right to choose.” Politics is our entertainment, and Taylor Swift can break up with another boyfriend only so often — those thirsty for news have to find it somewhere.
But pinning Dan Kelly’s loss solely on abortion is a case of the wish being the father to the thought. It is simply the continuation of a Republican Party drowning itself under the weight of a historically unpopular leader. The GOP won state races before Roe was overturned, and it has won them since. What it really needs now is to terminate Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations.