Democrats Score Upset Victory in Wisconsin Despite Voter Suppression Efforts

Reid J. Epstein, reporting for The New York Times:

Democrats scored an enormous political and moral victory in Wisconsin on Monday night when a liberal challenger upset a Trump-backed incumbent to win a State Supreme Court seat, a down-ballot race that took on unusual significance by demonstrating strong turnout and vote-by-mail efforts in a major presidential battleground state.

The victory, by upward of 90,000 votes as of Monday night, came as a shock to Republicans and Democrats alike in Wisconsin, where contests for president, governor and the state’s high court in the last four years have all been decided by about 30,000 votes or less. It followed weeks of Democratic anger over Republicans’ insistence on holding elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.

No one is going to count any unhatched chickens this election, that’s for sure, but to say this augurs well for Democrats this fall is an understatement. These Republican bastards forced hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites to risk exposure to the coronavirus (and in Milwaukee and other urban areas, face the certainty of preposterously long lines) to vote, in the cynical hope that suppressing the vote would help them, and they still got wiped out.

★ Monday, 13 April 2020