In the first major election in the country since a Manhattan grand jury indicted Donald Trump on 34 felony counts, progressive Judge Janet Protasiewicz cruised to an 11-point win Tuesday over her conservative rival Dan Kelly in Wisconsin’s supremely consequential battle for the ideological lean of the state’s high court.
Abortion dominated the debate, accounting for some 44% of the political ads run in the first half of the general election, according to data analysis conducted by Wisconsin Watch.
But democracy and redistricting accounted for roughly a third of the ads in that timeframe too. Specifically, Protasiewicz and her allies linked Kelly to Donald Trump’s fake elector scheme after it was revealed that Kelly had advised both the Republican National Committee and the Wisconsin Republican Party about fake GOP electors.
“In Wisconsin, extremist Dan Kelly was the right-wing lawyer behind the scenes of it all,” charged one Protasiewicz campaign television ad.
