Last week, on Tuesday, Ann Walsh Bradley, the senior justice on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, waited nervously with two colleagues in a room in a Milwaukee hotel. There was a vacancy on the court, which has seven seats, and the state had just held an election, between Janet Protasiewicz, a local circuit judge, and Daniel Kelly, a conservative former justice, to fill it. Bradley and her two colleagues are liberals; conservatives have controlled the court since 2008.
Protasiewicz outperformed expectations in solidly Democratic areas, such as Dane County, the second-most populous in the state, where she won eighty-two per cent of the vote. She made significant inroads in suburban counties that have been Republican strongholds for generations, and reclaimed most of the Driftless Area, a swath of twenty-two counties in western Wisconsin, with a tradition of economic populism, that had been trending rightward.
After Trump’s victory, “divide and conquer” seemed like a painfully ironic epitaph for a state with a pioneering progressive legacy: it had created the country’s first workers’-compensation law, implemented the first state income tax, and was the first to recognize collective-bargaining rights for public employees.
The election, however, was not a total defeat for the right, which won ballot referendums that gave judges more power over bail and supported work requirements for welfare recipients. More important, Dan Knodl, a Republican, narrowly won a special election to fill a vacancy in the State Senate, giving the G.O.P. a veto-proof super-majority.
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