Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Election Day

We begin today with Geoffrey Skelley and Amanda Thomson-DeVeaux of FiveThirtyEight and their preview of the important state Supreme Court contest in Wisconsin between conservative former state Supreme Court Justice Dan Kelly and liberal Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz.

Money is pouring into the highly consequential race, as the fate of abortion access in Wisconsin, GOP-friendly congressional and state legislative maps and potentially even the administration of the 2024 election all hinge on the outcome. Last summer, a 19th-century abortion ban took effect in Wisconsin after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and although Democratic state Attorney General Josh Kaul said the law is unenforceable, abortion providers stopped offering abortions throughout the state. A lawsuit challenging the ban has been winding its way through the courts and could reach the Wisconsin Supreme Court sometime this year. Neither candidate has said how they’d rule in the case, but their stances on abortion rights aren’t hard to guess at — Protasiewicz has the endorsements of leading abortion-rights groups, while Kelly has worked for some of the state’s top anti-abortion advocacy organizations.

Meanwhile, another legal battle could emerge over Wisconsin’s congressional and state legislative maps. Currently, Republicans dominate the state legislature, just a few votes shy of a legislative supermajority that would allow them to override Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’s veto. Republicans also hold six of the state’s eight congressional seats. But that political power is built on maps that were drawn to favor conservative candidates — and a state Supreme Court controlled by liberals might be open to new litigation challenging those maps. 

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Looking at the tea leaves, Protasiewicz likely has at least a slight edge, but we don’t have much polling to go on. The lone survey to cross our transom came from OnMessage Inc., a GOP pollster, which gave Protasiewicz just a 2-percentage point lead on March 21, well within the poll’s margin of error. However, the poll’s sponsor was the Kelly-supporting Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce association, and partisan polls historically have overstated their preferred candidate’s standing by a few points.