To understand the significance of the victory that liberals just pulled off in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, a win largely driven by abortion rights, consider what is set to happen some 1,100 miles from Madison: In coming weeks, Republicans in Florida’s state capital of Tallahassee are expected to ban abortions after a mere six weeks.
Liberal Janet Protasiewicz was elected to Wisconsin’s high court Tuesday night by 55 percent to 45 percent over rival Daniel Kelly. That stunning margin in a razor-close swing state — delivering liberals control of the court as it prepares to consider a state abortion ban — suggests abortion rights will continue to be a winning issue when on the ballot.
But this becomes more significant with 2024 GOP hopefuls such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lurching in the opposite direction. DeSantis is expected to sign that six-week abortion ban, and many other Republican state governments are moving to further restrict abortion rights — even as this has again proved a huge political loser.
The Wisconsin results suggest a trend that developed in the 2022 midterm elections will continue. Candidates who stood up for abortion rights — and emphasized that protecting democracy is critical to safeguarding those rights — defeated anti-choice, election-denying MAGA candidates everywhere.
That’s the message Protasiewicz and Wisconsin Democrats employed against Kelly, who lent support to Donald Trump’s lies about his 2020 reelection loss. Democrats argued that a liberal court majority would likely overturn the state’s abortion ban.
But Democrats also spent heavily on spots that cast a conservative court as a threat to democracy. Democrats argued that a right-wing court could subvert the state’s 2024 presidential outcome, and noted that a liberal court might overturn the state’s extremely gerrymandered legislative districts. This combination helped drive the size of the Wisconsin victory, the state Democratic Party believes, as well as record turnout for a state Supreme Court race totaling 1.8 million votes.
“Her emphasis probably did put abortion first,” Charles Franklin, the director of Wisconsin’s Marquette Law School Poll, told me of Protasiewicz. “But it also specifically talked about democracy in the broader sense of the term.”
This lopsided victory in a state Trump lost in 2020 by less than one point, Democrats say, reflected a large gender gap, high youth vote turnout and inroads by Democrats among non-college-educated White voters.
Democratic sources tell me that internal party modeling showed that in early and absentee voting up to Election Day, women outpaced men by 12 points, and the percentage of voters aged 18 to 29 was far higher than in previous Supreme Court races. While analysis of the Election Day turnout is still needed, it appears those factors held through Tuesday’s voting.
“Spring elections historically in Wisconsin have tended to be older and Whiter and more conservative,” Franklin told me. By contrast, he said, this election’s turnout was relatively high in college areas and in Milwaukee, “the most diverse county and city in the state.”
One big question is what happened with non-college-educated White voters, particularly those in rural and small-town areas, a heavily Republican demographic. Wisconsin has a higher percentage of those voters than the other “blue wall” states Trump won in 2016 — Pennsylvania and Michigan — making the state a good test of whether Democrats can recapture them.
One might surmise that a pro-choice message motivated educated suburbanites to swamp non-college-educated White turnout, without Protasiewicz improving among that latter demographic. But Franklin noted that she did surprisingly well in “rural and working-class areas” in southwestern counties that Trump carried twice, and made “inroads in rural counties up the Mississippi River.” He concluded: “That’s really notable.”
In Wisconsin, the state legislature is heavily gerrymandered, which helped Republicans keep tight control of it even though Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won a statewide majority in 2022. That control, in turn, is keeping the state abortion ban in place. The result: Messaging about protecting democracy is unusually potent in the state, since it is directly linked to preserving abortion rights.
All this has important forward-looking implications. Because of its heavy working-class White population, Wisconsin will be strongly contested by the GOP in 2024, especially if the nominee is in the MAGA mold, such as DeSantis or even Trump himself. Relative to the other blue-wall states, Wisconsin is the most likely starting point for Republicans to assemble an electoral college majority.
What’s more, the GOP nominee will have most likely endorsed a national abortion ban (or at least draconian abortion restrictions in their own state) to make the party’s primary voters happy. And if that nominee is a MAGA candidate such as Trump or DeSantis, he’ll also be hostile to democracy and voting rights.
If messaging about defending abortion rights and democracy commanded a sizable majority in this highly polarized, blue collar-heavy swing state, it may well continue constituting Kryptonite to MAGA — all the way through 2024.
