Wisconsin Supreme Court race goes national

Biden, NRA group, others insert support, funding into contest

For months, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Rebecca Dallet and Sauk County Circuit Judge Michael Screnock were engaged in just another sleepy race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Hardly anyone was paying much attention, outside of the candidates or the hardcore voters who show up for every election.

Not anymore.

The race has gone national, with big-time endorsements from the likes of former Vice President Joe Biden backing Dallet to the National Rifle Association’s

political action committee supporting Screnock.

The national help has mostly been for Dallet, who has gotten the endorsements of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. Eric Holder, the former attorney general under President Barack Obama, campaigned for Dallet in Madison and Milwaukee and a group he heads spent $165,000 on digital ads to help her.

While national figures often get involved in Wisconsin’s races for governor and U.S. Senate, it’s highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for them to weigh in on court races.

The political world will be watching very carefully Tuesday when votes come in.

The race may officially be nonpartisan but the results will reverberate widely as pundits try to assess the political landscape heading into November’s midterm elections.

Can Dallet, a judge who is trying to appeal to liberals and Democrats, win in a state Donald Trump won in 2016?

Or, will Screnock, appealing for support among conservatives and Republicans, keep Wisconsin trending red?

Democrats are looking for any sign that there are really legs to their recent run of special election wins in Alabama and Pennsylvania, as well as a state Senate seat in the the western part of Wisconsin.

“A statewide election in a battleground state was going to have national attention no matter what,” said Melissa Baldauff, a Democratic strategist.

In the fall, the GOP is trying to deliver a third term for Gov. Scott Walker and topple Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, while nationally looking to hold on to its majorities in Congress. Brian Nemoir, a Republican strategist who has worked on several court campaigns, is not surprised that national groups have joined the fray.

“When you have states as aggressive laboratories of policy innovation, the courts play an exponentially important role,” he said. “And Wisconsin, certainly in these last six years, has been an incubator of policy innovation.”

Mark Graul, another GOP veteran of court races, warns not to draw broader conclusions about Tuesday’s results.

“These campaigns are so short,” he said. “They’re just up on TV now for a couple of weeks. Even with these outside groups spending, it’s just a fraction of what will happen by November.”

The winner of Tuesday’s election will replace Justice Michael Gableman, who is part of the court’s 5-2 conservative majority. A win by Screnock would preserve the court’s makeup; a victory by Dallet would narrow conservative control of the court to 4-3.

Each campaign blames the other for nationalizing the race.

The Dallet campaign points to the NRA endorsement Screnock received, while the Screnock campaign charges Dallet took the race national when she featured criticism of Trump in her first campaign ad and went on a fundraising trip to San Francisco in March.

In an interview, Screnock said that Dallet had started off her campaign by saying she wanted to keep politics out of the race but took actions that had the opposite effect, such as accepting the Biden endorsement.

“I’m still struggling to understand what a former vice president has to do with a state Supreme Court race considering he’s not from Wisconsin,” Screnock said. “I have absolutely focused my campaign on Wisconsin. … I’m not interested in things that are going on in other states or around the nation.”

Screnock said it would be up to the voters to decide whether Dallet’s approach was appropriate but said comments such as those she made in San Francisco — where she told the crowd “your values are our Wisconsin values that we’ve lost along the way” — had added to the scrutiny from out of state.

For his part, Screnock has appeared at numerous Republican Party events while his campaign has received more than $300,000 in help from the state GOP — far more than conservatives who have run for the high court in the past.

Dallet said she was “honored” to be endorsed by Biden.

“This race is about the people of Wisconsin trying to get back to having a fair, independent court again,” she said. “But because of what’s happened here in our state the rest of the nation is watching. People care about fair and independent courts, they care about special interest money coming in to try to buy seats on our Supreme Court.”

Both candidates have received support from third-party groups. Those groups have spent about $2.2 million on the race, with that amount split roughly equally on behalf of the candidates, according to a tally by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. That’s a preliminary count and the final figure will be higher — possibly markedly higher.

“That’s troubling, especially with the lack of disclosure and coordination rules in Wisconsin,” said Douglas Keith, counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

Keith said it’s not the first time a state supreme court has been nationalized. In 2016, Obama endorsed Democrat Mike Morgan in a North Carolina Supreme Court race. Morgan won, swinging the court’s ideological balance.

“The more our supreme court judges are elected in races like any other contest, it’s hard for the public to view judges and courts as somehow different than the political branches,” he added. “The courts’ role in states is to put the law above politics and to be independent from the two political branches and to serve as a check on them.”