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Even fighting a criminal charge, former President Donald Trump's presence is still being felt in Tuesday's critical Wisconsin Supreme Court vote for one 10-year seat.
After a single-vote majority on the court upheld President Joe Biden's 2020 victory over Trump in the Badger State, Trump and his followers have helped make this year's race between Democrat-backed Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, and Republican-supported Daniel Kelly, a conservative former state Supreme Court justice, one of the most expensive statewide elections in U.S. history, with potentially significant implications for the state and the country.
While one conservative judge—Brian Hagedorn—ruled against Trump in Wisconsin in 2020, the race to replace retiring conservative Justice Patience Roggensack will hand one side a majority in the state's highest court, with the power to decide the legality of district lines in the legislature, legislation to expand voter rights, and pending proposals to alter the state's 1849-era abortion ban, which was reinstated after Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer. Conservatives have controlled the state's Supreme Court since 2008.
More critical, however, is the potential for the court to weigh in on a similar challenge by a losing candidate in the 2024 presidential election, potentially leaving the outcome of one of the nation's most competitive states riding on a single vote in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Earlier this year, an attorney who worked to disqualify 221,000 voters in the state on Trump's behalf during the 2020 election—Jim Troupis—was reappointed by a 4-3 vote to a second term on a committee that advises judges on judicial conduct, even as he faces a multimillion-dollar lawsuit for allegedly spreading misinformation about the election, a vote some saw as a precursor to how the court could rule on a future challenge to the state's election results.
Trump's allies, it appears, are well aware of that.
As six-figure donations from figures like liberal megadonor George Soros and Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker in the race's closing weeks helped Protasiewicz surge to a more than $10 million fundraising advantage over Kelly, others like Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein—two of the country's largest conservative political donors and some of the principal financiers of the January 6, 2021, rallies at the U.S. Capitol—have given millions of dollars to shore up Kelly's bid.
In addition to maximum donations of $20,000 to Kelly's campaign, Richard Uihlein has also financed a political action committee, Fair Courts America, that has spent at least $5.2 million so far on television, radio and digital ads backing Kelly, making up about one-sixth of the total ad spending in the race.
Kelly has close ties to the former president's efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election in Wisconsin. In testimony to the Congressional Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 riot last winter, former Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt told investigators that Kelly—along with Troupis—advised GOP officials in the state on a plan to enlist a group of Wisconsin Republicans to sign false paperwork claiming to be electors in the 2020 presidential election in efforts to hand Trump victory in the state, which he lost by more than 20,000 votes.
Newsweek has reached out to Kelly's campaign via email for comment.
About the writer
Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more