What’s the Matter With Wisconsin?

The recent Wisconsin State Supreme Court election on April 4, 2023, was a crucial one. With the liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz’s win, she gets to determine which ideology would control the state’s courts and the future of its abortion and election laws. In the election, she outspent her conservative rival by millions of dollars, defining him early on as an anti-abortion extremist aligned with Trump’s MAGA movement.

Wisconsin is a swing state that went for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. It boasts of a Democratic governor and a Republican legislative supermajority, with a US senator from each party. The state’s House delegation is 6-2 Republican, thanks in part to Protasiewicz’s potential action against current congressional maps.

Protasiewicz won by a significant margin of 11 points, successfully framing the election as a referendum on Wisconsin’s no-exceptions abortion ban. The ban was put into effect last summer when the US Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. Governor Tony Evers challenged the ban in court, and Protasiewicz is ready to strike it down.

The election reinforced two trends. One is that voters will mobilize to protect access to abortion if they believe it’s on the ballot. The centrality of abortion explains the difference in outcome between this week’s results and the Senate race of November 2022.

The other trend is that the GOP is failing to win in suburban areas. Kelly, the conservative candidate, was unable to mobilize the Republican vote in Wisconsin’s “WOW” counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington. While he did win these historically Republican Milwaukee suburbs, he did so by smaller margins than Johnson did in 2022, and this drop-off cost him the election.

The lesson for Republicans is that they need to win over white voters with college degrees and suburban America along with their non-college rural base to win Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin in 2024 and the White House. To do so, they need to replace Trump as party leader, nominate a pro-life candidate who can speak about abortion in a non-threatening way, and learn from every election cycle since 2016. Time is running out for the GOP, and they must act quickly.