America's Talking - Crawford Wins Highly Contested Wisconsin Supreme Court Race

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

(The Center Square) – Susan Crawford won the highly contested Wisconsin Supreme Court race Tuesday night as both CNN and The Associated Press called the race. Crawford held 55.9% of the vote compared to 44.1% for Brad Schimel as of 9:25 p.m. central time on Tuesday on an Election Day where seven locations in Milwaukee ran out of ballots, causing voting delays. Schimel conceded the race shortly after 9:30 p.m. central time. Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxx Full story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/wisconsin/article_55d9c57d-e77c-4692-b5cc-c77a7589d8bb.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America and Focus. I'm John Sto. There were significant elections on Tuesday night. I'm here with regional editor Steve Wilson to discuss what happened in both Florida and Wisconsin. Steve, first of all, can you tell us about what happened in the Florida special elections? Well, there was a lot of out-of-state money poured into two special races that replaced a pair of representatives that sought positions in the Trump administration. And one of the one of the of the positions, obviously, Matt Gates was nominated for AG. That didn't work out, but Mike Waltz is now the National Security Advisor for the Trump administration. So you had the remaining terms for those two reps. And of course, that wouldn't be a big deal if the House wasn't

as close a majority as it is. They were at 218, which is the minimum to control the house. and these two victories pushed them two over, so you got a little bit of wiggle room there. And in Wisconsin, Steve, kind of not typically, the state Supreme Court race ended up getting a lot of national attention. There were a lot of reasons for that. Part of it is some of the items that are going to come up in front of the court coming up.

And it got a lot of attention. everyone from Barack Obama to Elon Musk put a bunch of money into it. Donald Trump was tweeting about it. It garnered a ton of national attention, which isn't normal for a race like that. It had a lot more money spent on it than a race normally did. And somewhat surprisingly, on the night of the election, it didn't end up being as close as we thought or as close as the polls had shown. Susan Crawford, who was the Democrat back candidate, ended up. up winning pretty handily and they were able to declare it well before all the final ballots came in because in Wisconsin, the final ballots generally come in in Milwaukee County and Dane County. And both of those are Democrat areas. And they do kind of a central count there. And then at about

1 a.m., they get this last huge batch of ballots. Sometimes it can change the result. But this time, it wasn't going to. I think it's a case of who gets their voters out. Obviously, In Wisconsin, they got their voters out. And in Florida, even though turnout was way down, you had not even 200,000 people voting in each one of those congressional districts, whereas in the presidential elections, you had more than 400,000. So you had a smaller electorate. But I think in these special elections, they're hard to do because you've got, you don't have as much runway to raise money. You don't have as much runway to get your name out as a candidate because, as we've seen so many times, name recognition is key. And candidates are key.

One of the things that was interesting in Florida is Jimmy Petronis, the chief financial officer, pretty popular guy, Panama City businessman, perfect fit for the first district. Former state senator and state rep Randy Fine, not as much. He hardly even raised any money. and Trump and some notable national Republicans had to come in and save him. And what's interesting, too, is he and Governor DeSantis have a lot of baggage between the two of them. They don't like each other. And something that happened in Wisconsin was that, you know, it wasn't a special election like you're talking about in Florida, but there was much higher turnout than the normal local elections and the normal spring election cycle.

some places in Milwaukee even ran out of ballots. They had to quick rush couriers over to seven different precincts to get more ballots. And they kept telling people, hey, if you're in line before 8 o'clock, make sure you stay in line because you can vote. The ballots will arrive. But there were a lot of people who turned out for this election compared to normal. And what we will probably find out later is that the breakdown was interesting on who was able to to get people out to cast their ballots. A lot of people that were, there was also a head of the education department, the K-12 education department in Wisconsin. And a lot of people said, well, a lot of

the unions ended up getting a ton of people out for this election, the election that usually gets about half as many people as the presidential elections. So that skews the results, both in the judge race and in the Department of Public Instruction. race. I think two in Florida, I think there's this whole national, they're trying to nationalize things. And that has its uses. But I feel like, and I know this is a big cliche, all races are local. And I think you can't really divine some sort of portend for the midterms out of these three races. I just don't. Because you look at, even though Randy Fine got outspent by Josh Wheel, by all almost 10 to 1, most of it from out of state, he's still beating by more than double digits,

not as good as before, but I've done a little bit of analysis, and I've found that first-time candidates running in a congressional race, even if it was just a regular race, they still don't do as well as the previous incumbent because you don't have that name recognition. And it's one of those things where with Randy Fine and Jimmy Petronus, once their name recognition gets in there, they start serving the district, people start to know them, they do town halls. Their numbers are going to ease up because they're in like the deepest of deep red districts. Same thing with Wisconsin, which is, let's just be frank, a mostly blue state. Right. And in the Wisconsin race, there was a Marquette poll maybe two months ago that showed that

none of the candidates had much name recognition. And one of the people that did was, Brad Schimel, who was in the judge race, and he was the former attorney general, and he wasn't reelected. So there was kind of maybe the electorate didn't love him, either heading into it. So he had some name recognition coming in, and maybe it wasn't all positive. And I think, too, that one of the things that's difficult about these kind of races, obviously with the Supreme Court race, that was just a regular, to replace a regular vacancy. And I have never, in my time covering politics, ever seen a state Supreme Court race draw that kind of money, that kind of national attention.

That is, that is, we're seeing a Black Swan event when it comes to state Supreme Court race. But these two house races, the thing that I find fascinating, I think Josh Wheel ran a really good campaign, good ads about, hey, the Republicans are threatening your social security and your Medicare and they kind of had to push back on that. But in the first district, they ran a woman, Gabe Vellamont, who was a gun control advocate. I spent a lot of time in the first district of Florida. I can tell you, everybody has a gun, everybody has a pickup truck.

That goes over about as good as a vegan hamburger. Steve, thanks a lot for your time. And you can read more about the elections at the Center Square. com.