This is Dominic Pino filling in for Noah Rothman filling in for Jim Geraghty.
On the menu today: The front-runner for the GOP nomination was indicted; conservatives lost the election and the majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court; and in a contest between “meh” and “terrible,” Chicago voters elected “terrible.”
Big Mess
What a disaster.
On the Trump indictment, you’ll struggle to find better analysis than Noah’s efforts in the Jolts from Monday and Tuesday. We knew it would be a weak case, but it’s even weaker than anticipated, and it seems calibrated to do little more than fulfill a progressive fantasy. As Noah wrote, “If it feels to you like Donald Trump’s legal predicaments are blotting out the sun, it feels that way to the GOP’s down-ballot candidates, too.”
Right on cue, a conservative candidate in a swing state lost a big election, in part because of the Left’s success in tying him to Trump in the minds of voters. Daniel Kelly was the conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The seven-member court had a 4–3 conservative majority. Now it will have a 4–3 progressive majority.
Janet Protasiewicz, the left-wing candidate, won comfortably, about 55–45, and it wasn’t just to prove that voters will elect someone with a hard-to-pronounce last name. Protasiewicz is a hard-left Milwaukee County judge who drew unanimous support from pro-choice activist groups, who made abortion the center of the campaign. This bit from Politico is worth noting:
Abortion was mentioned in roughly a third of television ads coming from Protasiewicz’s campaign and other allied groups, according to data from the ad tracking service AdImpact. It was virtually non-existent in ads from the other side, appearing in just 1 percent of ads.
Conservatives who run away from the abortion issue are destined to lose on it. The pro-choice movement in this country is extremely well-funded and will blanket the airwaves with ads attacking pro-life candidates. That’s part of the game now that the Supreme Court, justly, has returned the issue of abortion to state politics, to be hashed out in elections rather than dictated by nine justices in Washington, D.C. Conservatives fought for and won the overturning of Roe v. Wade after decades of activism. To hardly even contest the issue of abortion now that it’s back where it belongs in our constitutional order is political malpractice.
The $42 million in combined spending was by far the most ever spent on a state-supreme-court race, nearly tripling the previous record from Illinois in 2004. Protasiewicz had a comfortable advantage in this area as well, spending $23.3 million compared to Kelly’s $17.6 million. Kelly tried to distance himself from Trump, but progressives’ efforts to tar him for having provided legal advice to Republicans litigating Trump’s loss in 2020 stuck with voters.
As Luther Abel wrote over a month before the election, the Wisconsin GOP has a loser problem. After nominating a weak, no-name, Trump-backed candidate for governor instead of Rebecca Kleefisch (Scott Walker’s lieutenant governor, who was endorsed by nearly every conservative politician in the state), it lost the 2022 election to Governor Tony Evers in what should have been a strong year for Republicans. Kelly was previously appointed to the supreme court by Walker to finish the term of a departed justice. When he first came up for election in 2020, he lost by eleven points.
Conservatives had an alternative in the primary in Jennifer Dorow, the Waukesha County judge who presided over the trial of the man who killed six people with his vehicle in the city of Waukesha’s Christmas parade in 2021. But they went with Kelly, who again lost convincingly. “Put down the Old Fashioneds and go win an election,” Luther wrote. Couldn’t have said it better, and it’s a shame they didn’t listen.
And in Chicago . . .
Let’s head down I-94 to the belly of the beast, the city of smelly onions, where every day is not the Fourth of July because that song was about New York. Chicago voters had the choice — if you can call a general election between two Democrats a choice — between Paul Vallas and Brandon Johnson for mayor.
Paul Vallas has been the superintendent/CEO for public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Bridgeport. He lost to Rod “I’ve Got This Thing and It’s F***ing Golden” Blagojevich in the 2002 Democratic gubernatorial primary and was Pat “At Least I’m Not A Convict” Quinn’s running mate when he lost to Republican Bruce Rauner in the 2014 gubernatorial election. Vallas got 5 percent of the vote in the 2019 mayoral primary (when the Chicago GOP endorsed him as the “lesser of 13 evils”), but advanced to the runoff this time around.
Johnson is a puppet of organized labor, especially the Chicago Teachers Union, the teachers union that makes other teachers unions blush. “Puppet” is perhaps an understatement: Johnson has been an employee of the Chicago Teachers Union while serving as a Cook County commissioner, and he helped organize teacher strikes in 2012, 2019, and 2022. Ninety percent of Johnson’s campaign funding came from unions, and 50 percent of that came from teachers unions.
On March 1, the Chicago Tribune editorial board asked, “Is the Chicago Teachers Union the new machine?” Turns out the answer is yes. Chicago voters elected Johnson over Vallas by about 52–48. “Make no mistake about it: Chicago is a union town,” Johnson said in his victory speech. Hard to argue with that. The CTU got its man elected, and now he will get to engage in the legalized corruption that public-sector unions are allowed (in addition to whatever other illegal corruption he might consider, given that this is Chicago politics we’re talking about).
Johnson has promised $800 million in tax increases and amended a 2020 statement about defunding the police as an “actual, real political goal” to instead support a “holistic approach to public safety.” (Vallas had promised a public-safety approach to public safety.) Even after the CTU’s ugly, weeklong strike last year, a spike in crime that saw the Magnificent Mile downtown shopping district protected from looters by lifting the bridges across the Chicago River, and Chicago’s population continuing to decline under the weight of an enormous tax burden, Chicago voters chose more CTU, less police, and more taxes.
The silver lining is that nobody outside Chicago will have to live under Johnson, and the people who live there now can move.
ADDENDUM: Philip K. Howard has a new book out called Not Accountable, making a constitutional argument against the sort of legalized corruption the Chicago Teachers Union just used to get Brandon Johnson elected mayor. You can read his piece on it from the March 20 issue of National Review here.