In a win for both Democrats and democracy, a Wisconsin circuit court judge has ordered Gov. Scott Walker to finally call special elections to fill two vacant state legislative seats. The seats became vacant in December 2017, when Walker appointed two Republicans to his administration. Walker wanted to delay filling the seats until those elections could be held concurrently with general elections this November.This plan would have left voters in these state Assembly and state Senate seats unrepresented for more than a year.
Judge Josann Reynolds ordered Walker to set the date of the special elections for Senate District 1 and Assembly District 42 “as promptly as possible, by no later than 12:00 p.m. (noon) on Thursday, March 29, 2018” (emphasis hers). Wisconsin statute dictates that special elections occur between 62 and 77 days after the governor orders them; if this order stands, the elections to fill these vacant seats will be held in late May or early June.
Judge Reynolds was appointed to the bench by Walker in 2014, but that didn’t stop GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos from attacking her as an “activist Dane County judge.” Vos’s remarks earned a swift and stinging rebuke from Circuit Judge William Hanrahan, the head judge of the state’s Fifth Judicial District. He called Vos’s accusations “inflammatory, uncalled for, and … patently offensive to the dedicated public servants, like Judge Reynolds, that work tirelessly to apply the law that you in the legislature create” (emphasis his). After reminding Vos that Reynolds is a Walker appointee, Hanrahan jabs at him for not knowing the facts or the legal issues of the case and slams him for taking “the low road.” Hanrahan brutally concludes that Vos “sullied [his] own reputation, diminishing any hopes of being taken seriously as a statesman.”
Walker’s refusal to hold these special elections predates an epic special election upset in Wisconsin’s SD-10 in January, but Democrats had already flipped 34 state legislative seats from red to blue at that point in the cycle—a stark fact someone as politically adept as Walker was certainly aware of. Walker’s little Twitter freakout in response to Democrat Patty Schachtner flipping this deeply and historically Republican Senate seat further supports a sense of dread that extends beyond just one special election upset. Calling this red-to-blue flip a “wake up call,” Walker gave voice to the extremely reasonable fear Republicans are feeling about Democrats’ down-ballot electoral success this cycle.
Okay, so we’re going to have special elections in early summer. Can Democrats flip these seats? Both seats (SD-01 and AD-42) voted for Trump, 56-39 and 55-40, respectively. But in 2012, Romney won 52-47 in SD-01, and Obama won AD-42 51-48. For frame of reference, that SD-10 seat Democrats flipped in November? Trump won 55-38 there.
So yeah, no wonder Walker wasn’t eager to fill these seats in special elections. Too bad for him.
