A "five-alarm warning to Republicans about 2024." That's what the Wall Street Journal editorial board said of the results of last week's Wisconsin supreme court race, which saw liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz defeat conservative judge Dan Kelly by ten points.
After the race, which cemented a liberal majority on the state supreme court for the first time in 15 years, the editorial board warned that the GOP's "legislative majorities will soon be imperiled, and you can move Wisconsin out of the swing-state column for the Presidency in 2024" if Republicans can't keep hold of a longtime GOP stronghold in the Milwaukee suburbs, where a Republican candidate for the state Senate "barely won."
Former Republican governor Scott Walker, during an appearance on Fox News, agreed it's a "five-alarm warning," while Ben Wikler, the chair of the state Democratic Party, said the race was "a release valve for twelve years of Democratic rage in Wisconsin about Republicans rigging our state and smashing our democracy."
But not everyone is so sure.
Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the state GOP, told me the latest punditry falls into an old pattern of reading too much into the state's supreme court races.
"The last time that the court was liberal" was 2008, he said. "We flipped it to conservative in April of 2008. A lot of folks said, 'Well, that means Wisconsin's going to go red.' Well, [Republican presidential candidate John] McCain lost the state by 14 points."
In April 2020, Kelly lost his state supreme court race by ten points, and then Biden won the state by a narrow margin in the fall. Walker survived a recall election in June 2012, but in November, Obama won the state by more than six points.
"I don't think this election is indicative of 2024 at all, but I do think there are lessons that we need to learn, and learn them nationally, going into 2024," he said, adding that it is "absurd" to suggest Wisconsin won't be a swing state in 2024.
But a "five-alarm" warning about the abortion issue in 2024 "is understandable," he said.
Wisconsin-based Republican political strategist Mark Graul similarly said he expects Wisconsin will remain up for grabs in 2024, just as it always has.
"I think if people step back and look more closely at the Supreme Court race, they realize the margin was due to a bad candidate on our side and a humongous resource advantage on their side," he told me. "And that's not reflective of the close nature of the state of Wisconsin."
Heather Smith, who worked on campaigns for years before joining the Wisconsin-based John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, said that "more sophisticated people and virtually any woman that you spoke with knew that [Kelly] had an electability problem."
"He was about the worst matchup that you could possibly have put forth in an election where their obvious candidate was going to be a middle-aged lady who prosecuted crime for a while and was obviously pro-choice," she said. "Putting her up against a guy who was pompously dismissive of the issue and at the extreme edge of where Republicans are on the issue of abortion . . . I think that's a really bad matchup to begin with."
Kelly had previously been appointed to the state supreme court by Walker, but later lost a bid to keep the seat by ten points in 2020. Democrats helped handpick Kelly in the Republican primary for the 2023 race, spending $1 million to defeat Wisconsin Circuit Court Judge Jennifer Dorow.
Graul said his biggest takeaway is that the party must run better candidates who will appeal to a broader class of voters, particularly suburban voters and female voters.
Asked how that lesson might play out in 2024, Graul acknowledged that former president Trump "does not fit that bill."
"I think there's fatigue with him. I think we've seen in Wisconsin, really the erosion of suburban voters to be traced to his rise, frankly," he said.
Kelly, for his part, also failed to participate in the political battle the Left waged. Protasiewicz was willing to shirk norms by getting extremely political in a judicial race. Kelly, on the other hand, was "really dismissive of the idea that he should need to talk about issues other than the Constitution," Smith said.
Wisconsin-based GOP strategist Brandon Scholz said the Left viewed the race as a political one, not a judicial one. "Dan Kelly . . . sat there and mumbled about protecting the Constitution. Nobody really understood what the Hell he was talking about."
"From an election standpoint, it was a complete disaster," he said.
Abortion, meanwhile, was a major issue in the race, but far from the only issue.
Still, Smith warned there is a reckoning coming on the issue of abortion for the GOP and suggested a small, but vocal group of ardent pro-lifers are "pulling us at odds with the general population."
"I think when you have a huge middle where, I mean, most people are not for the full ban and most people are not for abortion in the ninth month, right? But there's a huge middle and gray area," she said. "And I think that it's important to seem reasonable on the issue. And Janet seemed reasonable on the issue. And Dan didn't seem reasonable on the issue."
But Heritage Action executive director Jessica Anderson suggested the path forward for Republicans is to lean into protecting life.
"If you listen to what the Left and the mainstream media say, is that the losses in the 2020 and the 2022 midterms were because voters want full access to abortion. I don't think that's true at all," she told me, pointing to losses by Stacey Abrams, Beto O'Rourke, and Tim Ryan.
"The American public recognizes that there needs to be reasonable exceptions and that they want to see conservatives, they want to see Republicans talk specifically about what they're going to do to protect life," she said. She pointed to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who is widely considered a likely 2024 contender and who won reelection in a landslide in November after a 15-week abortion ban passed in the Sunshine State.
"When you talk straight on about the need to protect life, you're right over the target of where voters are at," she said.
After the race, RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the party has a messaging issue on abortion.
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