There are two primaries in Florida tomorrow, one to fill Matt Gaetz’s seat (FL-01) in the panhandle, a backward district with an R+19 PVI, and one to fill Michael Waltz’s seat in the ultra-gerrymandered 6th district that carefully skirts Gainesville, Ocala and Saint Augustine to produce an R+14 PVI. Both seats are very safely Republican— MAGA Republican. There are 10 Republican candidates running in Florida-01 but Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, who has Trump’s endorsement, will win. He will face Democrat Gay Valimont, who lost to Gaetz last year 66-34%, In the 6th district, crackpot reactionary state Sen and bigot Randy Fine, a lunatic fringe Zionist, is Trump’s candidate. He’ll easily beat his two primary opponents. The Democratic primary pits progressive Joshua Weil against conservative George Selmont. General election in both districts will be April Fools Day.
Pretty much no one is following these races outside of the districts because the results are baked into the cake, both in the primaries and the generals. There is, however, a crucial race that is being followed very closely— in Wisconsin. It’s the Supreme Court race that will control that body— and is also on April Fools Day! Liberal Ann Bradley is retiring, after 30 years on the bench, and Republicans see it as an opportunity to snatch back the 4-3 majority— and outlaw women’s choice once and for all. The Democrat-align candidate is Susan Crawford, a Dane County Circuit Court judge, and the right-wing freak is Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge.
Trump beat Kamala 1,697,626 (49.71%) to 1,668,220 (48.85%) The 2023 judicial race had a very different outcome. The Democratic candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, thumped Republican Daniel Kelly by 10 points.
Needless to say, this race is weighing heavily on state Sen. Chris Larson. This morning he told us that “The last time Wisconsin held a Supreme Court election, it turned into the most expensive judicial race in history. Because we won, something began to happen in our state that hadn’t happened in 15 years: the law was applied fairly and not based on always shifting power towards the wealthy and away from the middle class, the dirt poor, and everyone in between. Lots of folks were just used to Republicans ignoring the public comments and pleas from the crowds of people getting screwed over regularly: teachers, carpenters, plumbers, retirees, and folks who appreciate the outdoors. But because they lost, the gig was up. Even the Republicans knew it. Just last year, when the most gerrymandered maps in the country were finally up for a sober review in front of fair judges, Republican politicians in the legislature did the unthinkable: they voted to pass new maps that were drawn by a Democratic governor that would give them significantly less seats.”
He asked “Why? Because they knew that if they ever win the court back, they can use their politicians in robes to throw it all out and give them their tilted power once again. Their first opportunity to start down that path is on April 1st. If they can put their Republican on the court, they can block all progress and again shift the power to their suffering private jet owners while everyone who flies commercial (or can’t afford to fly at all) will be put on permanent layover. Wisconsin is a model of how to fight back and win against lawless Republicans. That’s why we’re throwing everything we’ve got into winning April 1st.”
Yesterday, Reid Epstein reported on the parameters and importance of the race, noting that tens of millions of dollars have already flooded into the state. “The race,” he wrote, “is likely to be even more partisan, negative and expensive than the 2023 election, whose $56 million price tag shattered national spending records for a judicial contest. The election will be the first test of Democratic and Republican enthusiasm in the new Trump era, and it will unfold in the state where the new president won his narrowest margin of victory. With few marquee contests in 2025— and no other statewide races until November— Wisconsin’s court race stands out as potentially the biggest, highest-stakes election in the year after Trump’s return to power.”
Democratic allies of the liberal candidate, Judge Susan Crawford of Dane County, say that electing her will preserve abortion rights in the state and lead to new congressional maps that will help Democrats flip two Republican-held House seats.
Republican supporters of the conservative candidate, Judge Brad Schimel of Waukesha County, a former Wisconsin attorney general, warn that maintaining the court’s 4-to-3 liberal majority will bring about the end of a host of laws enacted a decade ago by former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican.
“We’re going to see a campaign where decorum is dead,” said Brian Reisinger, a former aide to Wisconsin Republicans including Walker and Senator Ron Johnson. “This is going to be a bare-knuckle fight in a state that has a history of bruising Supreme Court races. It’s about to get turbocharged.”
…Since 2023, when liberal justices in Wisconsin seized the majority for the first time in 15 years, they have prompted the Republican-controlled Legislature to redraw State Assembly and State Senate maps and have undone a prohibition on ballot drop boxes.
This year, the court is expected to decide cases involving abortion rights and a 2011 law signed by Walker that ended collective bargaining rights for most public employees— a measure that has been the bane of Democrats and their labor-union allies.
And then there are the state’s congressional maps. Since 2023, they have resulted in Republicans holding six of eight House seats, even as other statewide elections have been decided by a percentage point or less.
“Chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026,” read the subject line of an email invitation to a briefing last week for Democratic donors with Judge Crawford and Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chairman.
Among those who organized the event were aides to Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Democratic donor and a robust supporter of Wisconsin Democrats. Former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, also plans to travel to Wisconsin to campaign for Judge Crawford.
Republicans, who last year watched Democrats shrink the G.O.P.’s state legislative majorities under new maps, agree that the stakes are high. [The GOP lost 10 Assembly seats and 4 Senate seats.]
Edith Jorge-Tuñón, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which helps candidates for state legislatures, wrote in a memo to donors this month that if Judge Schimel won in April, last year’s Wisconsin legislative redistricting “could be reversed by a new conservative majority.”
Representative Tom Tiffany, who represents northern Wisconsin, was among several Republicans who said the Supreme Court election was more important than the state’s 2026 governor’s race.
“There’s a virtual guarantee that they will overturn the congressional maps if Crawford wins this race,” Tiffany said. “It’s no longer an academic exercise that this is what could happen. This is what is happening.”
Republicans have pointed to a weak candidate and a divisive primary in their 2023 Supreme Court defeat, when a conservative former justice, Dan Kelly, lost by 11 percentage points to Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge.
A larger factor was Justice Protasiewicz’s decision to accept an endorsement and funding from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which funneled $10 million to her campaign, while Kelly declined direct funding from the Republican Party of Wisconsin. He relied instead on outside groups and super PACs, which spent less and paid far more for television advertising than he could have as a candidate.
Brian Schimming, the Wisconsin Republican chairman, said he had maintained most of the party infrastructure that won the state for Mr. Trump to help Judge Schimel. But more important, Mr. Schimming said, is how he hopes to funnel money from conservative donors through the state Republican Party, which can accept unlimited contributions and send the cash to endorsed candidates.
“This race is not Dan Kelly the sequel,” Mr. Schimming said. “The party is very, very committed to making sure that we are competitive in April.”
Television advertising, which began this month with ads from both candidates, is likely to focus on base-motivating issues like abortion right for Democrats and crime and transgender issues for Republicans.
In interviews last year, Judge Schimel said that “we’re going to nationalize” the race and that he expected outside conservative groups to spend $10 million to $15 million on his behalf. Last week, he attended Trump’s inauguration. On Thursday, Elon Musk posted on his social media site that it was “very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” nodding to baseless claims about drop boxes and voter fraud.
The race, like many others in Wisconsin, is likely to be dominated by abortion rights.
As attorney general, Judge Schimel helped map out a strategy to restrict abortion rights. And last summer, in the early stages of his campaign for the court, he told supporters he backed the state’s 1849 law banning abortion, which became valid when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The old law was put on hold in December 2023 and is likely to come before the state high court later this year.
“They’ve got several issues in front of them,” he told a crowd in Adams County, according to audio of the meeting shared with the New York Times. “One is the 1849 ban on abortions, which, by the way— what is flawed about that law?”
At another stop, in Chilton, Wis., Judge Schimel declared: “There is not a constitutional right to abortion in our State Constitution. That will be a sham if they find that.”
…Both candidates are expected to describe the other as a partisan extremist in a torrent of attack ads, turning the election into yet another test of which side is more energized to vote.
“I don’t know how much of voting these days is determined by issues” said Representative Mark Pocan, a Democrat who represents Madison, the state’s capital, “as opposed to Team Red or Team Blue getting out their vote.”
Last night, Randy Bryce, a union leader and likely congressional candidate in 2026, told us that “When Scott Walker ‘dropped the bomb’ on unions in Wisconsin we learned very fast that any ‘law’ passed was going to end up in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court to be challenged. The Court had a majority of conservatives. With that the Republicans could basically make up any ‘law’ and it would be found to be Constitutional. Last year with a majority Supreme Court that actually cared about working people, parts of Act 10 (the law that attacked Public Unions and teachers) were found to be unconstitutional.”
He noted that “Hundreds of thousands of us marching around the Capitol didn’t change the law but one seat on the State Supreme Court did. This year we have a VERY important election that will determine who gets the majority of the seats. It’s taking a while to get Wisconsin back to our progressive roots but we’re getting there. This is the next step to continue the journey.”
It is shocking how fast Citizens United has percolated from presidential races to state and even local ones. Every race of any consequence is now nationalized. As a follow-on effect, it disincentivizes small donors, because what's $25 or $50 in a sea of tens of millions?
Thank you, SCOTUS. To update the Sinclair Lewis quote on the DWT landing page,
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag, carrying the cross,
and just calling balls and strikes."