Trump’s vested interest in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race

Even against a criminal charge, former President Donald Trump’s presence is still being felt in Tuesday’s critical vote by the Wisconsin Supreme Court for a 10-year seat.

After a one-vote majority in court confirmed President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the Badger State in 2020, Trump and his supporters helped win this year’s race between Democrat-backed Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee judge County, and Republican-backed Daniel Kelly, a conservative former Supreme Court Justice, to make one of the costliest statewide elections in US history, with potentially significant repercussions for the state and the country.

While a conservative judge — Brian Hagedorn — ruled against Trump in Wisconsin in 2020, the race to succeed resigning conservative justice Patience Roggensack will earn one side a majority in the state’s highest court with the power to rule on the legality of district lines in the legislature to decide legislation extending voter rights and pending proposals to amend the state’s 1849 ban on abortion, which came into force after the repeal of Roe v. Wade was reintroduced last summer. Conservatives have controlled the state Supreme Court since 2008.

More critical, however, is the potential for the court to weigh a similar challenge from a losing candidate in the 2024 presidential election, potentially leaving the outcome of one of the most competitive states in the country dependent on a single vote in the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Earlier this year, an attorney who disqualified 221,000 state voters on Trump’s behalf during the 2020 election — Jim Troupis — was reappointed by a 4-3 vote to a second term on a committee that advises judges on court conduct, even as a He faces a multimillion-dollar lawsuit for allegedly spreading misinformation about the election, a vote some saw as a precursor to how the court might rule on a future challenge to the state’s election results.

Trump’s allies, it seems, are well aware of this.

As six-figure donations from figures like Liberal mega-donor George Soros and Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in the final weeks of the race helped Protasiewicz hold a more than $10 million fundraising advantage over Kelly and others like Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein — two of the country’s biggest conservatives — obtained political donors and some of the top funders of the Jan. 6, 2021 rallies in the US Capitol — have donated millions of dollars to support Kelly’s bid.

In addition to the $20,000 maximum donations to Kelly’s campaign, Richard Uihlein has also funded a political action committee, Fair Courts America, which has so far raised at least $5.2 million for television, radio, and digital ads in support of Kelly spent, which accounts for about one-sixth of total ad spend in the race.

Kelly has close ties to the former president’s efforts to overturn the outcome of Wisconsin’s 2020 election. Testifying before the Congressional Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Jan. 6 Jan. Hitt, former Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt told investigators that Kelly — along with Troupis — was advising GOP officials in the state on a plan to recruit a group of Wisconsin Republicans to sign false papers claiming to be voters in the 2020 presidential election in order to give Trump victory in the state, which he lost by more than 20,000 votes.

news week emailed Kelly’s campaign for comment.