BartBlog

Author’s note:
Yeah, yeah, yeah…Wisconsin politics probably bores people to death by now, but this election is a major turning point for labor against huge corporations. This has nothing to do with spending or balancing a budget. It has everything to do with defeating corporate money in politics. It is a small victory for every middle class worker in this country:

Excerpt:
Challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg has declared victory in a hotly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Kloppenburg won by a narrow margin of 204 votes, but the election results are almost certain to be challenged with a recount by incumbent David Prosser.

Voter turnout for the election was exceptionally high for an April election, with 1,479,976 votes cast statewide. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, voter turnout in Madison is estimated at 70 percent. 182,140 votes were recorded in Dane county and 227,577 were recorded in Milwaukee county. Kloppenburg won by margins of 46.7 percent and 13.1 percent respectively in those counties.

As a challenger, Kloppenburg faced enormous odds against her winning the election. Apparently that changed sometime after Feb. 15.

Firstly, only one sitting Supreme Court justice has been unseated by a challenger in Wisconsin in 41 years. That happened in 2008 when Michael Gableman defeated then-Justice Louis Butler in 2008, thereby shifting the court to its current 4-3 conservative majority.

Secondly, Prosser was seen as a clear favorite. He got 55 percent of the vote in the four-way Feb. 15 primary to Kloppenburg’s 25 percent.

Thirdly, unprecedented amounts of money were spent by supporters on both sides of this election with Prosser supporters significantly outspending Kloppenburg’s. The candidates themselves were limited to each spending $100,000 in the primary and $300,000 in the general election under the state’s new Impartial Justice Act – a public-financing program that Walker proposes to cut.

The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, however, estimates that interest groups spent more than $3.5 million on TV ads, breaking the $3.38 million record set in the 2008 Gableman-Butler contest, with four conservative groups backing Prosser spending a total of 37% more than one liberal group backing Kloppenburg.

Regardless of victory speeches and statements from both sides, it is clear that this hotly contested election is not over. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Prosser told his supporters early this morning at the Seven Seas Restaurant in Hartland that, “there is little doubt there is going to be a recount in this race.”

Read more, get links here: Madison Independent Examiner – Kloppenburg victory