NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE O n Tuesday, while all eyes were locked on Donald Trump, the day’s most consequential story had little to do with the former president or his monomaniacal pursuers in Manhattan. Instead, it was the verdict voters in Wisconsin rendered in the race for state supreme court justice.

In the Badger State, Democrat-aligned Janet Protasiewicz emerged victorious over her Republican-backed rival, Daniel Kelly. And it wasn’t particularly close. As of this writing, Protasiewicz enjoys a ten-point margin of victory. After several years in which Democrat-linked justices clawed seat after seat away from the Republicans who dominated the bench in the 2010s, Protasiewicz’s victory secured the restoration of a left-wing majority on the court.

Wisconsin Democrats don’t expect Protasiewicz or her fellow liberal justices to waste time pursuing progressive policy goals. The court is expected to weigh in on an issue that dominated the campaign for this seat: an 1849 law banning abortion in most cases, which emerged from suspended animation following the 2022 Dobbs decision. Republican lawmakers in the state who hoped only to amend that law to include exceptions for rape and incest fear the issue will be mooted if a majority of the state’s justices back a Democratic challenge to that 173-year-old law already before the court.

Likewise, Democrats believe the liberal-dominated court will be amenable to the party’s efforts to review the map of the state’s legislative districts. “Let’s be clear here: the maps are rigged,” Protasiewicz said at a candidate’s forum in January. “Absolutely, positively rigged. They do not reflect the people in the state.” Democrats claim that the current map, which is little changed from the reapportionment ascendant Republicans cobbled together after their victories in the 2010 election cycle, doesn’t reflect the state’s present demographics. Their arguments are now sure to get a friendly hearing.

On everything from expanding Medicaid to legalized marijuana, Wisconsin Democrats’ pent-up ambitions are about to be set loose. There are no bright sides to Protasiewicz’s victory for conservatives. And yet, her election cannot be written off as simply the result of the right’s failure to mobilize its voters or the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s organizational strength. The same Wisconsinites who went to the polls to elect a left-leaning justice also overwhelmingly rejected progressive criminal-justice-reform initiatives.

Ballot Question One proposed an amendment to the constitution that would allow judges to consider whether a criminal defendant should be denied pre-trial release based on an assessment of whether he or she could cause “serious harm” to the community.

The current standard for pre-trial release in Wisconsin rests on the judge’s evaluation of a defendant’s capacity to inflict “serious bodily harm” on the citizenry. “Criminal defendants can be currently released before conviction on conditions like paying cash bail, signing a personal recognizance bond, staying drug and alcohol free or abiding by a no-contact order with an accuser,” a Milwaukee-based NPR affiliate reported. A bill passed by the Republican-controlled legislature sought to ditch the “serious bodily harm” standard in favor of the one that includes a more expansive definition of what constitutes “harm,” but Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers, declined to sign it. Question One passed with a massive 33-point margin in favor of amending the constitution to make it harder for the accused to be released ahead of trial.

Similarly, a second ballot question proposed another constitutional amendment that would tighten cash-bail requirements. Wisconsin’s constitution does not currently make cash bail a requirement for pre-trial release. It only compels bail if a judge believes the bail is necessary to ensure a defendant’s reappearance in court.

Question Two asked voters for an up-or-down verdict on a proposition allowing judges to consider other factors beyond a defendant’s risk of flight, such as the potential threat they pose to public safety, their criminal history, or the likelihood that they will engage in witness intimidation. On Question Two, voters backed amending the constitution by an even more considerable margin than they did on Question One. As of this writing, broader bail requirements passed with a 35-point margin of victory.

Voters rendered another unambiguous verdict on a third, non-binding ballot question involving work requirements for welfare recipients. Nearly 80 percent of Wisconsin voters voted “yes” on the proposition that “able-bodied, childless adults” should be “required to look for work in order to receive taxpayer-funded welfare benefits.” Democratic senate minority leader Melissa Agard “ridiculed” the initiative, according to local media, saying the measure was duplicative of laws already on the books and could only be designed to boost GOP turnout. In reality, the ballot measure proved that strictly enforced work requirements attached to the provision of supplemental assistance for eligible, working-age adults are almost universally popular.

In a state where neither party enjoys a prohibitive advantage in registered voters over the other, these three ballot measures would not have passed with these margins if the initiatives put to voters did not have bipartisan appeal. The same, however, could be said for Protasiewicz’s victory, which, albeit by smaller margins, would not have been as sizable if her campaign’s foremost proposition — protecting abortion rights against conservative preferences — fell strictly along partisan lines. As Dominic astutely observed, Democrats built Protasiewicz’s campaign around the issue of abortion. Wisconsin’s conservatives, by contrast, ran away from the issue, sensing, perhaps, that their party’s position was a losing one. That assumption became a self-fulfilling prophecy.