Here & Now

Race for Attorney General: A Breakdown

Frederica Freyberg:
Justice and the courts are front and center this election season in a statewide race. While the match-ups for governor and U.S. Senate are receiving a lot of attention, another important race on the ballot in November is for the Office of Attorney General. In the most recent Marquette poll, the Republican incumbent, Brad Schimel, was leading his Democratic challenger, Josh Kaul, 48-41%. “Here & Now” reporter Zac Schultz sat down with both candidates.

Josh Kaul:
Thanks for coming out.

Zac Schultz:
Josh Kaul is spending a lot of time introducing himself to Wisconsin voters.

Josh Kaul:
I’m Josh Kaul. I’m the Democratic nominee for attorney general.

Zac Schultz:
Kaul has a long way to go, as recent polling shows 87% of voters have not heard enough about him to form an opinion.

Josh Kaul:
I grew up in Oshkosh and Fond du Lac in a family that was deeply involved in public service.

Zac Schultz:
While grew up in Wisconsin, he moved away for college and law school.

Josh Kaul:
I was a federal prosecutor in Baltimore. And I prosecuted drug traffickers, gang members and murderers.

Zac Schultz:
He moved back four years ago to raise a family and started working on voting rights cases.

Josh Kaul:
The case I’m proudest of is one we tried here in Wisconsin, where we challenged more than a dozen different restrictions on voting that were enacted in Scott Walker’s first term in office.

Zac Schultz:
That 2016 victory in federal court wiped out restrictions on early voting and in the process Kaul won his first victory against the Wisconsin Department of Justice and his opponent, Attorney General Brad Schimel.

Brad Schimel:
The changes to our voting laws lawsuit isn’t done.

Zac Schultz:
Brad Schimel isn’t conceding the loss, as the state appealed the verdict to a federal appeals court. He’s also conceding nothing this fall when it comes to his race for re-election.

Brad Schimel:
My opponent has not had a very rigorous campaign.

Zac Schultz:
Schimel was elected attorney general in 2014 after serving as the Waukesha County District Attorney.

Brad Schimel:
Thank you for all we do. We do have to tell — Wisconsin’s on the right track.

Zac Schultz:
But even as the incumbent, Schimel isn’t well-known. In that same poll, 56% couldn’t form an opinion of Schimel. The attorney general generally usually has a lower profile in state government, but it’s a powerful office.

Brad Schimel:
We end up involved in the periphery in virtually everything that’s going on in the state because we’re the state’s lawyers.

Zac Schultz:
Working with Governor Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature, Schimel has drawn attention for suing the federal government to overturn Obama era regulations like the Clean Power Plan and the Affordable Care Act. Schimel says the ACA is unconstitutional.

Brad Schimel:
It is going to fail eventually. I think it’s better to get the lawsuit going and get it done now before there’s more damage done.

Zac Schultz:
Schimel says the goal was to help Wisconsin residents, even if that means wiping out protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

Brad Schimel:
We want people with pre-existing coverage to not be left out in the cold. But that is better set by the state.

Josh Kaul:
If I am elected as AG, I’m going to seek to withdraw Wisconsin from this lawsuit that is seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act.

Zac Schultz:
Kaul says Schimel is too partisan as attorney general.

Josh Kaul:
I think that the way that Brad Schimel has used that office is not the approach that I would take certainly. I think he has used it as a partisan office.

Brad Schimel:
We’ve worked hard, in spite of the accusations that are made that I’ve made this this partisan bastion, we’re not. We’re defending the law the way it’s written and we’re putting public safety over politics.

Zac Schultz:
Kaul admits if he was attorney general, he would seek permission to get involved in federal lawsuits that Democratic AGs are filing against the Trump Administration. But he describes that as priorities, not politics.

Josh Kaul:
I think that it’s reasonable to expect that AGs from different parties will have some different priorities.

Zac Schultz:
Schimel says what looks like partisanship is just his obligation to defend Wisconsin’s laws in court. Laws that for the last eight years were made by Republicans.

Brad Schimel:
I will solemnly assure anyone that if the leadership and the legislature and the governor’s mansion changes and we start having different laws passed after January of this year, I will defend those laws.

Zac Schultz:
But partisanship isn’t Kaul’s only criticism.

Josh Kaul:
Brad Schimel has just mishandled Wisconsin’s backlog of untested rape kits. In his first year in office, we received millions of dollars to test those kits. But after he had been AG for two years, only nine of the more than 4,000 kits that needed to be tested had been tested.

Brad Schimel:
He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Zac Schultz:
Schimel recently announced all the backlogged rape kits had been tested. He says it took four years because hiring and training more staffers at the State Crime Lab would have taken too long.

Brad Schimel:
That would have been an utter failure to go that route.

Zac Schultz:
So he sent them to private labs, which also had a capacity issue.

Brad Schimel:
Nationwide, we dumped over 100,000 kits into the system and those labs were backlogged.

Zac Schultz:
Kaul thinks the timing is suspicious.

Josh Kaul:
We need an AG who’s going to make sure that he’s on top of the Crime Lab at all times, not just right before an election.

Zac Schultz:
With a month to go in the race, both men are still unknown to most voters and they both hope the public will start tuning in.

Josh Kaul:
We’re going to keep talking about the issues that are at stake in this race and look forward to seeing the race develop in that perspective.

Brad Schimel:
There are going to be an unbearable number of political attack ads in all of these races. And I hope that people will dig deeper.

Frederica Freyberg:
That was Zac Schultz reporting. A week from tonight candidates Brad Schimel and Josh Kaul will be here for a one-hour live debate, their first debate of the campaign. Wisconsin Public Radio’s Shawn Johnson and I will co-moderate the debate. The program will be carried live on Wisconsin Public Television and Wisconsin Public Radio. That’s Friday night, October 12, from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m.