Gallagher says Wisconsin Supreme Court race ‘massive loss,’ calls for ‘soul-searching’
Ryan King
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Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) didn’t downplay the devastating GOP loss in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race Tuesday and urged the party to undergo brief soul-searching.
“It’s a massive loss, I’m not going to try and sugarcoat it,” Gallagher told Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. “We need to recognize that … you figure out how we do better going forward, I mean, we’re talking about a liberal state Supreme Court that can now overturn all the things that Wisconsin conservatives have fought so hard for.”
LIBERAL WIN IN WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT RACE COULD FLIP US HOUSE AND STATE LEGISLATURE
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Milwaukee Judge Janet Protasiewicz scored a victory Tuesday against conservative contender Daniel Kelly by margins much larger than what many analysts anticipated. Her triumph marks the first time state liberals have taken command of the high court since 2008.
As a consequence of Protasiewicz’s victory, the high court could soon hand Republicans a flurry of defeats on matters including redistricting, abortion, unions, and more. Gallagher, a rising star in the House GOP who leads the China Committee, attributed some of the blame to poor strategy.
“We’re getting outraised by the Democratic Party,” he said. “We obviously missed an opportunity to do common-sense election integrity reform because we lost the governor’s race in the last election. And honestly, we need to figure out how to get our people to vote through early voting, through absentee voting.”
A chorus of Republicans has long bashed early voting measures, fretting that they could make elections vulnerable to malfeasance and fraud. In the wake of the less-than-stellar midterm elections, many Republicans, including former President Donald Trump and Gallagher, argued the party must embrace early voting tactics.
“I know that makes a lot of conservatives mad, but that’s what the Democrats are doing right now. And until such a day, as we reform our election system in Wisconsin, we have to get more votes than the Democrats do. So this is a time for short-soul searching because we also need to take action,” he added.
Wisconsin is a key battleground state that went for Trump in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020.
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Some have argued that Kelly was a weak candidate, while others have suggested that abortion spelled doom for the GOP.
“Who knows if the other candidate in the primary would have won, I mean, the most obvious things I see are the money and the ground game, and we need to do better on both accounts,” he added.