On Wisconsin fight

Wisconsin’s ruling Republicans leveraged a lethal virus to try to suppress Democratic votes last week.

It was an ironic and circular thing, beyond being altogether tacky even by the relaxed standard of modern American politics.

Wisconsin’s controlling Republi- can legislature refused to oblige the Democratic governor’s request for a special session to delay the state’s primary last Tuesday to permit a full mail election in June owing to the coronavirus.

Then the 4-to-3 Republican majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected the governor’s attempted executive order on the subject.

The Republican purpose was to protect that very 4-to-3 state Supreme Court advantage. That’s the circular part.

One of the four high-court justices, a Republican, was up for reelection on what otherwise was mainly a Democratic presidential primary ballot. Republicans feared Democratic voters would turn out from their presidential interest in heavier numbers than Republicans and defeat the Republican Supreme Court justice. So they didn’t want to oblige turnout with a stayhome mail system.

They effectively preferred to send voters in high-density areas out to breathe on each other, or, more to the point, pin voters at home and render them non-voters from fear of being breathed on.

Let me defend Wisconsin Republicans. They didn’t really want to make Democratic voters ill, much less mortally.

They wanted to make them voiceless and powerless. That was all.

By the way: The 5-to-4 ruling Republican majority of the U.S. Supreme Court got involved at the last minute, denying a Democratic compromise request to delay the election just one week to give time to everyone who wanted to get and send in an absentee ballot.

Justice is pristinely nonpartisan in this country, isn’t it? Blind is what justice is, don’t you think?

Now to the ironic part: Wisconsin officials got most of the votes counted Monday night and … get this … the Republican justice got beat anyway, by 55-45.

That means that, on Aug. 1, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will become 4-to-3 the Democrats’ way.

And why might that be of interest to the rest of us? It’s only because Wisconsin is a decisive battleground state that Donald Trump won in 2016 by a scant 22,000 votes.

Wisconsin’s ruling Republicans are well-known for voter-list purges as big elections near. Now, all legal challenges over that will rise eventually to a liberal-leaning rather than conservative-leaning state Supreme Court.

That means voter suppression likely will be frowned upon rather than celebrated.

And since purged voters tend to be transient poor ones more likely to vote Democratic if they vote at all, that one newly occupied Wisconsin Supreme Court seat could bear on whether Trump backs his way into a preposterous second-place presidency again this November.

Beyond that, there was talk in Wisconsin that Republicans were cooking up dandy legislative and congressional gerrymandering next year based on the new Census data. That single state Supreme Court outcome could change entirely the nature of judicial review of such action.

What happened last Tuesday was that, even though the virus spread in Wisconsin was greatest by far in and around Milwaukee, Democratic voters there turned out more heavily — masked and at 6-feet intervals in long lines at reduced polling sites — than Republicans in areas of lessdense population and lesser coronavirus risk.

As of Tuesday, Wisconsin had more than 3,400 confirmed coronavirus infections statewide and more than 1,700 of those were in Milwaukee County. Half the statewide deaths were in Milwaukee County, and 80 percent of those were African Americans.

You can see the overlap in the set of coronavirus cases in Wisconsin and the set of likely Democratic voters in the state.

It was deplorable—to use a popular word—that a state’s ruling partisans would purposely leverage a virus against voters of the other side. But it was kind of a brave and beautiful thing that folks ventured out and voted anyway. May they all survive and thrive.

Meantime, some political observers are seeing even broader and stronger Democratic indicators in the Wisconsin presidential primary, won overwhelmingly by Joe Biden.

They point out that the turnout was greater for Democrats in the urban and suburban areas than for Republicans in the balance of the state.

That indeed might be a measure of Democratic motivation, usually the pivotal factor in a battleground state. But it also might mean that the entire exercise last week was a one-off, owing to the virus factor and the lopsided Democratic interest, and that Trump voters will be heard from in rural Wisconsin when it matters in November.

If both sides are energized and heard from, and if one side can’t purge many or any on the other … well, it’s a little early for that kind of speculation.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.