Wisconsin GOP — Supreme Losers

The Wisconsin GOP has a problem — they’re losers. They lost a chance at the executive branch in November, and they’re fixing to lose their advantage in the judicial branch in April. 

On Tuesday, Wisconsin held its statewide primary to winnow the field for selecting the next supreme court justice. The open seat on the court — currently held by retiring conservative Patience Roggensack — is a position held for ten years and one that will decide whether the 4-3 majority will skew conservative or liberal.

To the left is Janet Protasiewicz, a graduate of the ostensibly Catholic institution Marquette University, who advertises herself like she’s an abortionist’s best friend; she promises that she will side with “reproductive rights” if given half a chance to do so. Protasiewicz crushed the other liberal-leaning judge, Everett Mitchell, in spending and votes. Both liberal candidates stated that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was the U.S. Supreme Court’s “worst decision in the last 30 years.“

The conservatives consisted of Dan Kelly and Jennifer Dorow. Kelly was a temporary appointee under Scott Walker and would later lose a 2020 run by eleven points — he also was more than happy to question his fellow conservative’s judicial record and demurred when asked if he would support Dorow should she beat him.

Dorow, who presided over the Waukesha Christmas parade massacre trial, seemed like a stronger general-election candidate. In what is becoming a common tactic, the Left heaped attacks on Dorow so that the candidate perceived to be weaker, Kelly, would win. And that’s precisely what happened.

As NR’s John McCormack summarized in his interview with Scott Walker:

Walker says it is “categorically false” to suggest that Kelly would present any danger to the integrity of elections. If Democrats genuinely believed their attacks, they have a strange way of showing it. In the primary campaign, “Democrats also helped Justice Kelly by spending $2.2 million to attack his conservative opponent, Jennifer Dorow, a circuit court judge in Waukesha County,” the New York Times reported this week.

The Times noted that Kelly “lost a 2020 election for his seat by nearly 11 percentage points — a colossal spread in such an evenly divided state,” but the odds were stacked against Kelly in 2020 because there was a contested Democratic presidential primary held the same day as the state supreme court election. The more ominous electoral sign for Kelly and his supporters was that in the four-way primary earlier this week, progressive candidates garnered a combined 54 percent of the vote, while Kelly and the other judicial conservative in the race combined for 46 percent of the vote.

Kelly is another Tim Michels — charmless. While I’ll not call the race now, he’s going to need all the help he can muster to make a competitive run against Protasiewicz and the ascendant Wisconsin Left. Should he fail, as the Dem donors were betting when they favored him over Dorow, conservative Wisconsin legislators may find themselves out of jobs when the supreme court considers redistricting — oh, and reinterprets Wisconsin’s life-giving abortion restrictions into nothingness.

Whatever the Wisconsin Dems are paying their chairman Ben Wikler isn’t enough. He’s been racking up wins ever since he took over in 2019 — even carrying deadweight Mandela Barnes to within striking distance of Ron Johnson last November.

Wisconsin Republicans needs to stop imagining they’re in the heady days of 2014 and sober up long enough to realize that the gains from a decade ago are about to disappear.

Put down the Old Fashioneds and go win an election.