"Trounced" by @BloggersRUs

"Trounced"

by Tom Sullivan

Events planned around the country today honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on the 50th anniversary of his assassination in Memphis.

At the Wisconsin Governor's Mansion in Maple Bluff this morning, Scott Walker has other things on his mind. Wisconsin held its spring election on Tuesday and the results did not bode well for Wisconsin Republicans.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Rebecca Dallet trounced Michael Screnock on Tuesday for a seat on the state Supreme Court, shrinking the court's conservative majority and giving Democrats a jolt of energy heading into the fall election.

It marked the first time in 23 years that a liberal candidate who wasn't an incumbent won a seat on the high court.
Dallet won a 10-year term on the court, besting opponent Michael Screnock by twelve points (56-44). The D vs. R proxy fight is a huge loss for Walker.

Carolyn Fiddler write at Daily Kos:
Tuesday’s Supreme Court election was officially nonpartisan, but the ideological battle lines were clearly drawn. Former Vice President Joe Biden recorded a robocall for Dallet, and the National Democratic Redistricting Committee spent at least $165,000 on the race. Screnock, meanwhile, had the backing of Gov. Scott Walker and the National Rifle Association, and a notoriously anti-union business lobby had dumped in almost $1 million on ads as of last Friday.

Dallet’s victory moves the ideological makeup of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from five-to-two in favor of conservatives to four-to-three and secures her a 10-year term on the bench. Progressives are now well-positioned to end the conservative court majority in the next few years—and with that, a way to finally place a brake on extreme Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression tactics.
Last night's results mean six of the seven justices on the court are now women, Fiddler adds.

Dallet told reporters, "I think people are tired of what's been going on in our state in terms of the money coming in to buy these elections and people spoke out tonight."

Walker, who has turned the state into a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, reacted in a tweet, “Tonight’s results show we are at risk of a #BlueWave in WI. The Far Left is driven by anger & hatred—we must counter it with optimism & organization. Let’s share our positive story with voters & win in November.”

In another, Walker wrote, "Big government special interests flooded Wisconsin with distorted facts & misinformation. Next, they'll target me and work to undo our bold reforms."
Dark money guy haz sad.
Poor dark money guy.
- @CharlesPPierce
Those "bold reforms" included erecting barriers to voting including photo ID laws that kept 17,000 or more registered Wisconsin voters from voting in 2016 and may have handed the presidential election to Donald Trump. "Black voters were about 50 percent likelier than whites to lack these IDs," Ari Berman wrote at Mother Jones, "because they were less likely to drive or to be able to afford the documents required to get a current ID, and more likely to have moved from out of state." Two-thirds of the state's African American population lives in Milwaukee where voting rates "plunged," accounting for half the state's falloff in 2016 turnout. Fifty years after King's death the fight for black voting rights continues.

Since Dallet won her Supreme Court seat in a nonpartisan contest, likely Wisconsin Republicans now will want to switch the race to a partisan one.

Judge Michael Morgan won a North Carolina Supreme Court seat in 2016, defeating Republican incumbent Robert H. Edmunds Jr. and tipping the court majority in Democrats' favor.

Candidates from the governor's party (Republican Pat McCrory in 2018) are listed first in NC general election races, but ballot placement for nonpartisan judicial races rotates alphabetically. Republican voters may have assumed Morgan was a Republican since his name appeared first on the ballot. Morgan is African American.

The Republican-controlled legislature responded by switching the contest to a partisan one over the veto of newly elected Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat.

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