Dallet elected to high court
Screnock defeat shrinks conservative majority on bench
MADISON - Rebecca Dallet trounced Michael Screnock on Tuesday for a seat on the state Supreme Court, shrinking the court’s conservative majority and giving Democrats a jolt of energy heading into the fall election.
It marked the first time in 23 years that a liberal candidate who wasn’t an incumbent won a seat on the high court.
“I attribute it to Wisconsin voters standing up to special interests,” said Dallet, a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge. “I think they’re ready to have fair and independent courts.
“I’m the candidate with the most experience, really standing up for the rights of Wisconsinites every day and I think people saw that and spoke out today and I’m quite excited by it, by the results.”
Dallet won big in Dane and Milwaukee counties. Screnock, a Sauk County judge who campaigned with the backing of the state Republican Party, did well in Waukesha County and other GOP strongholds but did not get enough votes
elsewhere to offset Dallet’s massive success in metropolitan areas.
The election swung conservative control of the court from a comfortable 5-2 to a narrow 4-3. Dallet — to be seated in August for a 10-year term — will replace conservative Justice Michael Gableman, who did not seek re-election.
With Democrats around the country fired up about this fall’s midterm elections, Dallet was able to bring an unusual level of national attention to the Supreme Court race. She secured the endorsements of former Vice President Joe Biden, former Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.
For his part, Screnock said he was focusing his race entirely on Wisconsin and didn’t understand why a figure like Biden would be weighing in on the race.
The race drew outside spending that was expected to exceed $2 million.
The last time a liberal won an open seat was in 1995 when Justice Ann Walsh Bradley was first elected. (Liberals have done a better job at hanging onto seats once they join the court; both Bradley and liberal Justice Shirley Abrahamson have repeatedly won their reelection bids.)
Dallet’s win will mean six of the justices will be women. Only one other state — Washington — has that many women on its high court, but in percentage terms, Wisconsin will have the highest representation by women because Wisconsin’s court has a total of seven seats while Washington’s has nine, according to the University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics.
Now, Wisconsin is tied with Oregon for the highest percentage of women on its court. Both states have five women, or 71%, on their seven-member courts.
Screnock campaigned as a traditional conservative jurist, saying he would interpret the law as written and decrying judicial activism. Dallet stressed her work as a prosecutor, contended judicial ethics rules needed to be strengthened to fix a “broken” court and said she was running because people’s rights were “under attack.”
Past Supreme Court elections typically have been low-turnout events, with less than 20% of eligible voters showing up at the polls, according to data from the state Elections Commission. This year, rain and snow hit Wisconsin, but it did not appear to deter voters, at least not in the southern part of the state.
Democrats have been banking on an energized base to help them win an open seat on a court that conservatives have reliably claimed in recent years. Republicans have said they believed they could rely on their time-tested methods of making sure they got conservatives to the polls to win the seat.
Dallet, 48, worked for 11 years as a prosecutor. After a brief stint as Milwaukee County’s chief court commissioner, she was elected as a judge in 2008 and re-elected in 2014.
Screnock, 48, spent the first part of his career in municipal government, attending law school later in life. As an attorney at Michael Best & Friedrich, he represented farms and businesses in environmental cases and did legal work for Republican Gov. Scott Walker and GOP lawmakers. Walker appointed him to the bench in 2015 and he was elected to a full term a year later.
To see full election results, go to jsonline.com/results.