The Wisconsin election, set for Tuesday, will fill a vacancy on the seven-member state court left by a Democrat justice. So the election will determine if the court keeps its 4-3 advantage for Democrats, or swings to 4-3 for Republicans, in the swing state.
On the ballot, Brad Schimel is backed by Republicans and conservatives while Susan Crawford is favored by Democrats and liberals.
The pivotal election is basically a get-out-the vote contest for both sides after Donald Trump narrowly won the swing state last November. He defeated Kamala Harris 49%-48%, a difference of approximately 29,400 votes.
AFR morning host Jenna Ellis tells AFN the election is “incredibly important” because there is more than the balance of the court at stake.
“It's not just the balance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court for their own issues, and issues like election integrity and voter ID, on some of those things that are definitely incredibly important,” she advises.
Another key issue for the state court is Wisconsin’s congressional district lines. Ellis and many others, including Elon Musk, are pointing out a left-leaning state court will gerrymander the district boundaries to eliminate two Republican-held seats in Congress.
“And so that could mean the difference between two Republican seats versus two Democrats, when you already have a very slim Republican majority,” Ellis explains.
At a campaign stop over the weekend, Musk made a similar warning. A state court seat in Wisconsin, he said, can be used to flip the balance of power in Congress.
“Then,” he explained, “they'll try to stop all the government reforms we're doing, and we're getting done for you, the American people."
Musk, who publicly supports Schimel, has given away two $1 million checks to Wisconsin voters in a get-out-the-vote effort. Wisconsin’s attorney general, Josh Kaul, sued to stop that giveaway but the state court, in a unanimous decision, refused to hear the appeal after two lower courts ruled against Kaul.
J. Christian Adams, founder and chief counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, tells AFN a PILF team will monitor the proceedings Tuesday after the group has flagged questionable election problems in the past.
“We're going to be on the ground, eyes in the precincts, watching the election using what we call DOJ-style monitoring,” he advises. “We will be there in force on April 1st because it's a very, very important Supreme Court election."
