Witnesses differ about what happened next, but Bradley accused Prosser of putting her “in a chokehold.” Prosser denied the allegations and no charges were issued. A group of justices engaged in a heated discussion of the next day’s decision that would overturn a ruling by a lower court that had blocked Walker’s law. How bad were the divisions? Two months after the election there was a confrontation between Prosser and one of the liberal justices, Ann Walsh Bradley, in Bradley’s chambers. and his liberal challenger, Joanne Kloppenberg, had been expected to be a sleepy affair but turned into a fiery proxy battle over Walker’s Act 10, and Prosser was only narrowly reelected after a statewide recount.
The April 2011 Supreme Court election between incumbent conservative Justice David Prosser Jr. The state Supreme Court not only found itself at the center of the increasingly bitter partisan divide, but the justices themselves were also sharply divided. That would prove decisive after Walker pushed through legislation limiting collective bargaining amid mass protests that triggered recall campaigns and a flurry of court challenges. His election also gave conservatives a 4-3 majority on the court two years before the election of Scott Walker. The race saw the first full-scale deployment of special-interest funded “independent” groups that poured millions of dollars into the race, which was dominated by accusations that Butler was “soft on crime.” Gableman ousted Butler with nearly 52 percent of the vote, winning 60 of the 72 counties in the state. In April 2008, after an unusually nasty campaign, conservative Michael Gableman defeated incumbent liberal justice Louis Butler, who had been appointed to the seat by Democratic Governor Jim Doyle. Liberals did indeed overreach and the backlash was intense. And, indeed, many of those complaints were valid. Lively contests between liberal and conservative candidates for the court stretch back to the 1990s, but it was only after progressives briefly took control of the majority in 2004, that the state’s business community and the GOP shifted their focus decisively to seizing and controlling a majority on the court.Ĭonservatives accused the liberal majority lead by Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson of being aggressively activist, ignoring precedent and endangering the state’s business climate by encouraging frivolous litigation. Campaigns that used to focus on issues such as crime and judicial philosophy, now are often dominated by social issues as the divisions become more overtly partisan and increasingly tribal. The hyperpoliticization of the races for the high court actually preceded the Walker years, but the evolution of the court’s politics has tracked the shift in the state’s politics. The state’s Republican-leaning chamber of commerce, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, dumped in $700,000 for television ads backing Kelly, and Americans for Prosperity invested roughly $400,000 in canvassing, mailings and digital ads on behalf of the conservative justice. “A Better Wisconsin Together,” an outside group tied to Democrats and liberal groups spent a further $1.87 million on Karnofsky’s behalf while the Republican State Leadership Committee spent nearly $900,000 backing Kelly. But after advancing in the primary election, Karnofsky herself accepted $1.3 million in cash and in-kind contributions from the state’s Democratic Party. Spending on the current campaign between Kelly and progressive challenger Jill Karnofsky topped $8 million and, following the pattern of recent elections, the contest was both intensely ideological and personally bitter.ĭuring the campaign, Karnofsky, who is running as an advocate of “social justice,” accused Kelly of “running his Supreme Court campaign out of the Wisconsin GOP headquarters,” and noted that he was touting the support of President Donald Trump. While the election of judges is technically nonpartisan, over the past two decades all pretenses have been dropped, as the races have become high-stakes proxy battles between Democrats and Republicans. We won’t know who won until votes are tallied and released on Monday. That was fitting, since the battle over the court is the reason that the GOP defied pleas to postpone the vote: Republicans calculated that holding the election in the midst of the pandemic gave incumbent conservative justice Dan Kelly a better chance of holding his seat. And, of course, it was that same court which overturned Evers’ order to postpone the election, thus forcing Tuesday’s shambolic vote, in which voters stood in line for hours, 6 feet apart, in rain and sleet.
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