The GOP’s tendency to nominate retread losers who go on to lose their next elections can have both major and minor consequences, but even the minor cases add up to form major problems.
Take Wisconsin, for example. In 2020, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly, a Republican, lost his reelection campaign by 10.5 percentage points. Kelly had never actually won a statewide election in Wisconsin, having been appointed to the seat by then-Gov. Scott Walker in 2016 to replace a retiring justice. With no previous victories and a double-digit loss in a swing state in a presidential election year, you would think that would be enough for Republicans to nominate someone else next time.
They did not. Either due to the familiarity or due to an incredibly weak conservative legal bench in Wisconsin, Republicans nominated Kelly again in 2023 to replace another retiring justice. Instead of losing by 10.5 points, he lost by 11 points. That almost identical losing margin gave Wisconsin Democrats a coveted 4-3 majority on the court. As columnist Daniel Bice put it, Kelly’s legacy is that “he is the first Republican to put two liberals on the state Supreme Court single-handedly.”
He didn’t do it single-handedly, though. Wisconsin Republicans could have chosen someone else — and didn’t. Now those chickens are coming home to roost.
Three weeks ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out election maps submitted by the GOP, ruling the maps violate the state constitution. The maps submitted by Democrats would, of course, give a boost to Democrats going into 2024. Right now, Wisconsin Republicans nearly hold a supermajority in both state legislative chambers, which would give them the ability to override the vetoes of the state’s Democratic governor.
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That includes vetoes on a ban on sex changes for children, multiple tax and regulation cuts, and various GOP election reforms. Kelly’s loss handed control of the state Supreme Court to the Democrats, who can now install election maps that will protect the Democratic governor’s vetoes by shrinking the GOP’s margins.
This is what happens when an unserious party doesn’t treat winning elections as the top priority. Just one retread loser can snowball into legal and legislative losses that change the course of an entire state. Now imagine a bunch of those retread losers running as nominees for, say, a Senate seat in Arizona or for the presidency of the United States.