Here & Now

Zac Schultz on the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election

Frederica Freyberg:

Following Tuesday’s primary election, two candidates for the Wisconsin Supreme Court head into campaigning for the general election set for April 4. Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz won 46.5% of the vote and former justice Daniel Kelly garnered 24.2%. They each spoke at their election night parties focusing on the primary topic in this race and likely to come before the court: abortion.

Janet Protasiewicz:

I can’t tell you how I’ll rule in any case but throughout this race, I have been absolutely clear about what my values are. And that’s because I believe the voters of this state deserve to know what a candidate’s values are. I value a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decisions.

Daniel Kelly:

This is going to be an election like no other. Tonight we join the battle in the fight to preserve our constitutional form of government against a novel and grave threat. Janet Protasiewicz’s promise to set aside our law and our constitution whether they conflict with her personal values cannot be allowed to stand.

Frederica Freyberg:

The high stakes race only gets more attention from here. We turn to senior political reporter Zac Schultz who joins us from the state Capitol with more. Hi Zac.

Zac Schultz:

Hello Fred.

Frederica Freyberg:

Was this the primary election outcome that was expected?

Zac Schultz:

I don’t think you can be really too surprised. Certainly not on the liberal side. Janet Protasiewicz had the most money. She had the first commercial on the air. She had really consolidated a lot of democratic support around her campaign pretty early on. The other liberal Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell tried hard to get some of that support and he had a few people but he never had the money to get his name out there. Seeing Janet Protasiewicz advance is not surprising. Maybe the margins for some people might have been surprising. On the Republican side, we knew all along this was going to be a very close margin. And it kind of goes against your conventional thinking but the outcome here may fit even though Jennifer Dorow may have been the favorite ahead of time and that’s because we saw both Daniel Kelly’s campaign, outside interest groups and some liberals all attack Jennifer Dorow to try and knock her down and take her out of the race all for different reasons but getting the same result of advancing Daniel Kelly. On his part because obviously he wanted to win, on the liberals’ part because they thought Daniel Kelly would be a much more favorable match-up for Janet Protasiewicz in the general election. So even though she might have been favored ahead of time, this outcome is not terribly surprising and the margin was so narrow that you could see it did come down to the end.

Frederica Freyberg:

Tuesday’s election saw record turnout for a Supreme Court primary. What did turnout look like across the state?

Zac Schultz:

It varied across the regions. In some parts of the southern more populous areas of the state, there was really high turnout. As you got to the northwest corner, there was lower turnout and some of that fits with the conventional thinking of how these campaigns work. We’re talking February 21st, the middle of winter. Generally there’s not a lot of attention paid and this was really driven by advertising. How much did people even know that one, there was an election, and two, that it was this important. It’s harder to penetrate northern and northwest Wisconsin with advertising dollars in the same way you can blanket southeast Wisconsin and southern Wisconsin and Dane County. So it’s not terribly surprising, plus in Madison, you had a contested mayoral primary. In northern Milwaukee, you had a contested primary on the republican side for a special election in the 8th senate district. All those things kind of conspired to drive turnout in more populous regions.

Frederica Freyberg:

Did anything stand out about partisan voting patterns?

Zac Schultz:

Yeah, absolutely. I’m not the first person to point out there’s definitely a split across the state in republican voting trends. We’ve seen this happen time and time again over the past 10 to 15 years where southeastern Wisconsin, especially where southeast Wisconsin talk radio dominates, has a different opinion of who they favor in a primary versus outside, northern rural Wisconsin. And it used to be southeastern Wisconsin was enough to dominate. That’s how Scott Walker won his primary way back when to become the governor. That’s how Rebecca Kleefisch became lieutenant governor but over time that has shifted and it’s actually been playing out more and more that the rest of the state, outstate and rural Wisconsin for Republicans actually can outnumber southeastern Wisconsin. We saw this again. Jennifer Dorow’s area of support was all in the Milwaukee suburbs and that area where talk radio really had endorsed her but Daniel Kelly just was close enough there and he really beat her pretty handily in the rest of the state and that was enough for him to win by just a couple percentage points.

Frederica Freyberg:

Former justice Kelly lost his lost election for Supreme Court. Does that mean he’s vulnerable here?

Zac Schultz:

Democrats certainly think so. That’s what they wanted to see. But in reality, we’ve seen lots of candidates historically across Wisconsin run after losing an election and try again. The message that may or may not win the second time is not that we’ve rejected them before, that they’ve lost an election. It’s that people know what their vulnerabilities are because they polled against him in the past. In this case, Daniel Kelly will point back to 2020 saying there was a presidential primary on the same ballot and he lost because Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden had a contested primary and on the other side, Donald Trump wasn’t contested and he says that’s the majority of the margin. Really this is a completely different race. We shouldn’t look to that as the road map so what may happen here because we don’t have the same circumstances.

Frederica Freyberg:

Do you feel like there’s any lingering effects from the kind of infighting in the republican primary Jennifer Dorow and Daniel Kelly?

Zac Schultz:

That remains to be seen and that’s something Republicans are certainly watching and Democrats would like to take advantage of if they can in any way, shape or form. We saw a similar thing play out along the same lines last summer when Tim Michels won the gubernatorial primary, one of the Republicans beating Rebecca Kleefisch, attacking Kleefisch heavily and investing in ads beating her and Kleefisch and her supporters weren’t happy about that and there really wasn’t that unifying moment that came afterwards. This time around, we saw Daniel Kelly saying he would not support Jennifer Dorow if she was the one to advance. He refused to endorse her before this. Jennifer Dorow said she would endorse Kelly and she has since then saying the Republicans need to unify around him but there may still be Dorow supporters who are a little miffed about the idea that Kelly wouldn’t support their person going forward. So whether that fracture maintains and exists or if Republican Party certainly wants to maintain the idea that the April 4 primary is more important than any fractures that may have existed before but that’s something to be aware of as we’re going forward in this campaign.

Frederica Freyberg:

Super quickly, spending in this race is expected to be stratospheric. Do you know what the projections are and who’s giving?

Zac Schultz:

We’re looking at least $20 to $40 million. It’s going to be closer to past gubernatorial elections than anything we’ve seen with the Supreme Court. A lot of outstate, a lot of special interest money.

Frederica Freyberg:

Zac Schultz, thank you very much.

Zac Schultz:

Thanks Fred.