The Democratic playbook in 2023 looks familiar: A 2022 ‘midterms redux’

Democrats received a promising jolt Tuesday after a double-digit victory by the liberal candidate in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court race, demonstrating that their focus last year on Republican extremism and abortion rights has political staying power.

That message got channeled more broadly into allegations of conservative extremism, usually shorthanded as “MAGA Republicans,” in last year’s midterm elections, but it boiled down specifically into a focus on abortion following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. That decision sent the issue back to state legislatures and state courts.

Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz ran a Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign that sounded quite similar to those run by Democrats in the fall against Republican gubernatorial and Senate nominees embraced by former president Donald Trump in Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.

She ran ads linking her opponent to his work helping Trump attempt to overturn his 2020 loss to President Biden, showing local business leaders bemoaning conservative Daniel Kelly’s “election lies and crazy conspiracies.”

That the Wisconsin race served as an unofficial statewide referendum on abortion rights — the victor would tip the balance of the state’s high court to a four-judge bloc of either liberals or conservatives — raised the stakes just enough to turn a tight race into a comfortable win of 11 percentage points.

“First, it means that Wisconsin voters have made their voice heard. They’ve chosen to reject partisan extremism in their state. And second, it means that democracy will always prevail,” Protasiewicz said at her victory party Tuesday night, pledging to protect “our rights and freedoms” on the state’s high court.

About 100 miles south, Democrat Brandon Johnson won a come-from-behind race for Chicago mayor by tying the law-and-order moderate Democrat, Paul Vallas, to a GOP donor who supported Trump and to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose speech in late February to Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, a major Vallas backer, served as a wedge in the traditionally Democratic city.

“We don’t need a Republican running Chicago,” Johnson said during the runoff campaign.

These off-year elections are never a perfect predictor of the political mood by the time presidential and congressional votes get cast 18 months from now, but if enough of them point in the same direction, they serve as accurate snapshots of the current standing.

And some Republicans are worried. Michael Duncan, a GOP consultant with close ties to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), tapped out a six-tweet thread Wednesday explaining how Wisconsin played out like the statewide races that Republicans whiffed on in 2022 with poor nominees who focused on more extreme messages linked to Trump.

Duncan said Republicans had “ceded” abortion in the campaign and did not define Protasiewicz’s views on the issue as out of step with many moderates, a bloc in which there is often strong support for some limitations on abortion rights.

Conservatives in Wisconsin actually won, by wide margins, several initiatives on Tuesday’s ballot related to crime and work requirements for welfare recipients, yet Kelly could not capitalize on that support.

“This is ’22 midterms redux, the voters agreed with us on the issues and then rejected our candidate,” Duncan wrote.

Democrats believe that the issue of abortion rights has transformed the overall political resonance of the battle over state and federal judiciaries.

Chris Kang and Brian Fallon founded Demand Justice, a liberal advocacy group focused on federal courts, five years ago after Trump’s 2016 victory was fueled by evangelical voters who cited the then-vacant seat on the Supreme Court as a reason for backing the thrice-married New Yorker with little religious background.

In that campaign, voters who considered the Supreme Court at least an “important” issue favored Trump by two percentage points, and among those who viewed it as the “most important” issue, he won 56 percent to 41 percent over Hillary Clinton.

By the 2020 election, with three Trump-appointed justices on the court, those numbers flipped: Biden defeated Trump by six percentage points, according to exit polls, among voters who considered the court at least an important issue.

Demand Justice’s internal polling, after the leak of the Dobbs draft ruling last spring, showed a sharp increase in voters paying a “great deal” of attention to the Supreme Court and a growing edge for Democrats on the issue, according to Democratic polling firm Hart Research.

The official release of the Dobbs opinion overturning Roe on June 24 further galvanized Democrats and helped them win special House elections in New York and Alaska where Republicans had initially been favored.

Republicans hoped that liberal energy had eased by November, and some predicted a “red wave,” only to see Democrats build their Senate majority by gaining a seat and narrowly lose the House in a manner that has left the GOP struggling to govern.

Those candidates most aligned with Trump lost — some got crushed — in statewide races in which extremism and abortion rights became central issues. Those issues overcame Biden’s sluggish approval ratings, a barometer that this far into his presidency has not accurately predicted how Democrats will fare at the polls.

Steven Schale, a top adviser to Unite the Country, a pro-Biden super PAC, said there’s no evidence of abortion rights fading away from the political scene given his group’s recent surveys and focus group sessions.

“Anyone who thinks abortion isn’t still extremely salient just needs to watch some focus groups,” Schale said Wednesday.

There’s a small sample size of races so far, but the results all give Democrats some reassurances that their 2022 message still works this year.

Democrats flipped a Virginia Senate seat in Virginia Beach in early January, with their nominee focusing on shoring up abortion rights and the GOP candidate trying to avoid the issue.

On Feb. 21, Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-Va.) won a special congressional election with 74 percent of the vote, almost 10 percentage points higher than Donald McEachin (D) had won with in November, before he died later that month.

Three vacant state legislative seats in western Pennsylvania went to Democrats in February special elections, by the expected large margins in the liberal-leaning districts, which gave their party its first majority in the state House in more than a decade.

The Wisconsin race just served as the largest example of how this energy continues to favor Democrats, coming in one of the most critical battleground states for the presidential election next year. In addition, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) faces a reelection campaign that will be central to Democratic attempts to retain the Senate majority.

Liberals poured money into helping Protasiewicz, who outspent Kelly by more than 5-to-1 on the airwaves, according to some estimates.

Hitting the same tune as so many Democrats last year, she turned the election into a referendum on GOP extremism and abortion rights. Kelly had no good rebuttal.

“We lost on money and message, it’s that simple,” Duncan wrote.