The Wisconsin Supreme Court Victory Is a Major Opportunity for Rebuilding Working-Class Politics
For more than a decade, Wisconsin Republicans have taken a battering ram to labor and democracy itself. The resounding victory in the Supreme Court election this week finally opens up space for reviving a working-class politics that can benefit the majority.
Thousands of demonstrators protest outside the Wisconsin State Capitol on March 12, 2011 in opposition to Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill, which essentially eliminated collective bargaining rights for state workers. (Scott Olson /Getty Images)
The state seal of Wisconsin bears a simple one-word motto: “FORWARD.” For a majority of the state’s voters, Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election — a decisive victory for the liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, over conservative Daniel Kelly — might have been the first moment in years when that word carried anything close to the symbolic weight it held when it was coined over 170 years ago.
As a rule, Wisconsin judicial elections — “nonpartisan” contests held in the spring, often awash in vague platitudes about respect for the rule of law rather than concrete campaign promises –– rarely attract the kind of attention and voter turnout seen in races up the ballot. The same could not be said for Tuesday’s election.
By all accounts, the contest between Protasiewicz and Kelly proved to be the most expensive judicial election in US history, attracting a level of voter turnout that shattered state records for off-cycle elections. The investments in ads — including the Kelly campaign’s shot-for-shot remake of the infamously racist “Willie Horton” commercial from the 1988 presidential election — as well as significant statewide field operations gave the race the flavor of a pitched battle for the governorship, if not the presidency.
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