The new 4-3 liberal majority on the court is expected to strike down a state-level abortion ban that took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the federal right to an abortion in June. That law, which dates to 1849, makes performing an abortion a felony punishable by as much as six years in prison.
But Protasiewicz, who has promised to recuse herself from cases involving the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, insisted that Kelly was the candidate with the worrisome partisan bias. She noted, in particular, the paid work he had done representing the Republican Party of Wisconsin at a time when it was exploring ways to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The party’s former chairman testified to Congress that he even consulted Kelly about a plan to appoint an alternative slate of electors that would have voted to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. Kelly said he was only asked if he knew about the plan and replied that he didn’t. But in an effort to turn out his base in the closing stretch of the campaign, Kelly appeared at events with Scott Presler, a diehard Donald Trump supporter who attended the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, that spilled into the U.S. Capitol riot shortly after.
In a pitch to Wisconsin’s right-wing base voters, Kelly also claimed that a liberal majority on the state Supreme Court risked endangering more than a decade’s worth of conservative reforms from permissive gun rights laws to reductions in union rights and strict voter ID laws.
“I’m not saying that Republicans are perfect, either,” Jeff Grossman told HuffPost after the couple cast their ballots for Kelly in late March.“But I fear that the state of Wisconsin gets to look like the state of Illinois where the voters don’t have a right anymore. They don’t have a say.”
In the end though, liberal and moderate voters’ concerns about abortion rights and the fair administration of elections took precedence, driving turnout in an off-season, off-year race, and helping Democrats maintain the gains they have made in recent years with formerly Republican voters in the Milwaukee suburbs.
A fiscal conservative, the Mequon voter had previously supported former Republican Gov. Scott Walker because she liked his “anti-union stuff.” But since Trump’s election in 2016, she told HuffPost, she’s been “all in on the Democrats.” Some of her neighbors’ opposition to wearing masks and getting the COVID-19 vaccines pushed her further still from the GOP.
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