Morry Gash/AP Photo
Janet Protasiewicz participates in a debate as a candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, March 21, 2023, in Madison, Wisconsin.
Progressives were expecting a split decision yesterday. We’d win Wisconsin and lose Chicago. Instead, we got a trifecta.
Not only was Wisconsin’s 11-point win for Judge Janet Protasiewicz, in the election for an open state Supreme Court seat, a massive defeat for the right with national implications. In Chicago, Brandon Johnson’s come-from-behind three-point win defeated a late surge of right-wing money and the right’s attempt to make the election about crime.
But a trifecta? The third part of the story is of course Donald Trump.
Trump’s indictment and related antics could not have been better timed—to energize progressives, widen disabling splits among Republicans, and dispirit all but the hardest-core MAGA voters. Yesterday was a preview of the recovery of American democracy, with the right discrediting itself and the democratic left reclaiming all that is decent in this country.
The Wisconsin win was built on what progressives do best: patient organizing. It was also a repudiation of more than a decade of far-right rule where the politicians segmented the voters to guarantee permanent dominance.
A 4-3 progressive majority on the state Supreme Court now opens the door to a reversal of Wisconsin’s grotesque partisan gerrymandering, which has given Republicans a lock on the legislature, as well as overturning the state’s abortion ban, and restoring rights to public-sector workers.
These gains in turn will further energize progressives and elect more Democrats in a virtuous circle. It is hard to imagine any Republican presidential candidate carrying Wisconsin in 2024, and that pattern is likely to hold in other key Midwestern states.
Like much of the Upper Midwest, the Badger State has a long history of tacking both ways. My onetime boss, Wisconsin’s great progressive senator William Proxmire, took the seat once held by Joe McCarthy.
Before Proxmire, Wisconsin was home to the progressive La Follettes, father and son, who served respectively as governor and senator; and to Victor Berger, the first Socialist to serve in the House. But it has also elected right-wing demagogues like former Gov. Scott Walker. Its current senators are Tammy Baldwin and Ron Johnson.
Wisconsin’s progressive revival today is also built on one of the nation’s most effective state Democratic parties, led by Ben Wikler, who has rebuilt the party structure, county by county, and town by town. The Supreme Court vote appears to have broken all records for turnout in a Wisconsin off-year, freestanding down-ballot election.
There’s one looming fight, however. Republicans barely held a vacant state Senate seat that now gives them a two-thirds supermajority. If the state assembly votes to impeach public officials—including the incoming Supreme Court justice—that two-thirds majority can remove them from office. The Republican victor, Dan Knodl, has already said he would consider removing Protasiewicz. Unfortunately, progressives cannot let their guard down, and will have to make this option completely toxic to Wisconsinites.
The Chicago story is all the more remarkable. A week ago, it looked as if concerns about crime would be decisive and that Paul Vallas, the law-and-order candidate backed by Chicago’s police union, would edge out the little-known Johnson. Pundits were predicting that the election would be racialized; that whites would turn out at a higher rate than Blacks; that Latinos would break for Vallas; and that Johnson’s association with the divisive Chicago Teachers Union would be a big negative.
But that’s not what happened. Johnson turned out to be an effective retail politician; the old Harold Washington coalition got mobilized; the white liberal wards on Chicago’s North Side and all five majority-Latino wards broke for Johnson.
One good day is not transformative. But it does look like the political momentum has shifted to progressives. We will need it.
