9:55 p.m.: And AP calls it for Protasiewicz. Put a fork in Dan Kelly he’s done. Dems will control Wisconsin Supreme Court, a development with big ramifications in and out of the state.
9:53 p.m.: I’m not good enough with numbers to “call” anything. But I think you can consider the Wisconsin court race done with Protasiewicz winning with a relatively comfortable margin. Mid-single digits.
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No one is calling the race here. But liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz seems to be running ahead of her necessary margins basically everywhere in the state. Conservative Kelly just doesn’t seem to have the numbers. There’s some reluctance to call the race I think in part because off-year elections can be so unpredictable. But I don’t think anyone looking at the details thinks there’s much chance Kelly wins. The election is nominally non-partisan. Thus the two candidates are not formally running as Democrats and Republicans, though in practice it’s a thoroughly partisanized contest.
Going into the primary, one GOP observer told me he thought only one of the GOP candidates had a shot in the general election. That wasn’t Kelly. Basically unelectable, this person said. It gives you a sense of lessons learned from the 2022 midterm.
