After 15 long years of conservative dominance, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court once again has a liberal majority—a majority that’s poised to revisit the state’s abortion ban, its restrictive voting laws, its gerrymandered election maps, and much, much more. And the Daily Kos community played a key role in making this happen, because you never took your eye off the ball.
Unlike many other folks, you understand the importance of playing the long game. You get that change doesn’t happen with a single election—that it’s the work of a lifetime. You also understand the importance of state supreme courts, which too many progressives pay too little attention to. But not you.
Like many of you, I began tuning in to races for Wisconsin’s highest court early in 2011, following the Republican takeover of the state the previous fall. Scott Walker’s full-frontal assault on labor unions thrust that spring’s election for the Supreme Court into the spotlight, since the justices were likely to one day rule on the GOP’s Act 10, the bill had eliminated the right of most public-sector workers to engage in collective bargaining.
As massive protests inundated the state capitol, what could have been a sleepy race turned hot. Conservatives had seized a majority on the bench three years earlier, after running a viciously racist campaign that ousted the court’s first-ever Black member, Louis Butler. Progressives, burning to reverse that state of affairs, rallied around a little-known prosecutor named JoAnne Kloppenburg. Conservatives were just as determined to deliver another 10-year term to incumbent David Prosser, who had proclaimed that his views "closely mirror[ed]" Walker's. Huge sums of money flooded in on both sides.
Spring elections in Wisconsin, officially nonpartisan and often plagued by low turnout, had so often favored the right, but this contest turned out to be very, very close—painfully so. The day after the election, Kloppenburg appeared to have pulled off an extraordinary upset, leading Prosser by 200 votes out of 1.5 million cast.
But in a gutting turn of events the next day, Prosser surged ahead after an incompetent clerk in Waukesha County revealed that she’d failed to report an entire town’s worth of results. A recount that wasn’t completed until late May certified him as the winner by 7,000 votes—less than half of 1 percent of the vote. Three years later, the Supreme Court upheld Act 10.
Yet Wisconsinites did not give up, and Kloppenburg didn’t either. A conservative had cruised to reelection in 2013, but then liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley did the same in 2015. In 2016, Kloppenburg ran again against a different conservative. The environment, though, was less favorable than it had been five years earlier, and she lost by a wider 5-point margin. That cemented a 5-2 conservative majority, and so gloomy did things look that progressives did not even field a candidate the following year, allowing another right-wing justice to win unopposed.
But as the worm turned against Donald Trump, good news finally arrived in 2018, when progressive Rebecca Dallet flipped a conservative-held open seat in thunderous fashion, thrashing her opponent by 12 points. For a state accustomed to nail-biters, this was an epic blowout, and it reduced the conservative advantage on the Supreme Court to just one.
The next year’s election began with high hopes, and for the first time, Daily Kos was able to endorse the progressive standard-bearer, Lisa Neubauer, in the battle for a seat held by a retiring liberal justice. (Ideological lines had grown so sharp in Wisconsin Supreme Court races that campaigns began to shed their reticence about accepting help from partisan groups.)
The showdown, however, brought back memories of that agonizing 2011 defeat, as Neubauer fell just 6,000 votes short. Yet while the left could have grown despondent after watching conservatives reclaim the 5-2 edge they’d lost just a year earlier, no one surrendered. Instead, everyone redoubled their efforts.
An opportunity presented itself the following year. Prosser had resigned halfway through his term, prompting Walker to fill his spot with arch-conservative Dan Kelly, who ran for a full term in 2020 against progressive Jill Karofsky. Daily Kos backed Karosfky as well, and for the first time, we had access to one of our most powerful weapons, ActBlue, which began allowing judicial candidates to use their platform.
Then, just weeks before the election, the coronavirus pandemic exploded.
Gov. Tony Evers, the Democrat who had unseated Walker two years earlier, sought to protect voters’ safety by postponing the election two months, but the conservatives on the state Supreme Court overturned his order. With most polling stations closed, voters who’d been unable to obtain absentee ballots were forced to endure exceptionally long lines, especially in urban areas. (There’s a famous photo you may recall.)
But if anything, their resolve was stiffened, and this time, the outcome looked not like 2019 or 2011 but instead 2018, as Karofsky demolished Kelly by 10 points. Many, many individuals and organizations played a role in this victory, but the Daily Kos community dug deep, donating $100,000 in small, grassroots contributions to the Karofsky campaign. That sort of people power is something the right was simply unable to match.
With Karofsky joining the court, the conservative majority was yet again whittled down to 4-3, but after four contested races in five years, progressives would have to wait three more years for the chance to finally avenge their loss in 2008.
Much had changed since then. Public awareness of Republican efforts to suppress the vote, including restrictive voting laws and gerrymandered election maps, had become much more widespread, for one. But the most important factor was the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision the year before to overturn Roe v. Wade. That had a major, direct impact on the state of Wisconsin, which had an abortion ban on the books that dated all the way back to 1849.
Because of that primordial law, Wisconsin became the lone state that had voted for Joe Biden to completely ban abortions. And the candidate that progressives had united behind, Judge Janet Protasiewicz, did not hesitate to share her views. “I can’t tell you how I’ll rule in any case,” Protasiewicz said the night of her first-place finish in the primary. But, she made clear, “I value a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive healthcare decisions with her doctor, family, and faith.”
She was just as outspoken about the state’s Republican-drawn district maps, which the conservatives on the court she was seeking to join had just greenlit, slamming them as "rigged." "They do not reflect people in this state," she said. "I don't think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair."
With a conservative justice retiring, the thuggish Kelly mounted a comeback. He ran a campaign focused on fearmongering about crime, in the spirit of the Willie Horton-esque message that conservatives had used a decade-and-a-half earlier to smear Butler. But this time, it did not work. And this time, Daily Kos readers went even further, donating $133,000 to Protasiewicz and contributing countless volunteer hours.
But was it going to end in disappointment? Would it be another squeaker, like Biden’s win in 2020? Or could liberals dare hope that “Judge Janet,” as her fans call her, would emulate two of her would-be colleagues, Karofsky and Dallet?
The answer, it turned out, lay behind door no. 3. Protasiewicz obliterated Kelly, racking up a giant 11-point margin. And with that, progressives were at long last set to reclaim the majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, though they'd still have to wait just a bit longer, as Protasiewicz would not be sworn in until Tuesday. Now she—and, it should be noted, three other women—have the opportunity to right the many, many wrongs inflicted by Republicans and their allies on the bench over the last 15 years.
I emphasize that timeline because it would have been easy to abandon hope at any point along the way—to cede the high court to the right and fight elsewhere. Yet despite that long horizon, we remained committed to the cause, and it has finally borne fruit. It’s a powerful lesson for the future, for other courts or state legislatures or houses of Congress or any other office, great or small, that we want to win back. If we remain focused on our long-term strategy and resist becoming complacent or discouraged, we can accomplish tremendous things.
You, the Daily Kos community, have shown your dedication to exactly that philosophy. Today, celebrate what you have done. Tomorrow, the work begins anew.
