America scores a double victory against Donald Trump
When Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned yesterday, it didn’t come as a surprise. We’ve known since last week that he would be arrested. We’ve known for months that he’d soon be indicted in Manhattan. And we’ve known all along that it would happen eventually. Well, at least you knew that last part was coming if you paid attention to the known facts and not the noise.
But as big as Trump’s arrest was in its own right, I honestly think that yesterday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election victory will end up having a bigger impact on the 2024 election. Trump is washed up. He’s peaked at 55% in Republican primary polling, wasn’t able to pick up any of the supporters that DeSantis lost, and wasn’t helped one bit by his indictment. And even if he hadn’t been indicted in Manhattan on these lower level felony charges, he’ll face more serious charges from Fulton County and the DOJ.
Simply put, Trump was never going to make it to 2024 – at least not as a viable candidate. But the Republican Party is going to nominate someone for President in 2024, and it’ll probably be someone who in their own way is roughly as awful as Trump. There’s a good chance Wisconsin will be one of the deciding swing states in 2024, as it has been in the past few elections. And there’s a good chance the results in Wisconsin will be very close. This means the Wisconsin Supreme Court could end up making the decisions on whether to count or throw out the deciding votes.
If it’s close, the Wisconsin Supreme Court could literally decide which presidential candidate wins the state in 2024. And the swing vote on the Wisconsin Supreme Court just went to a legitimate jurist who will rule fairly in any such matters, as opposed to the right wing candidate who might have tried to hand the state to the Republican presidential candidate.
That’s how important yesterday’s election victory was. And that’s before getting to the impact this will likely have on redistricting in Wisconsin. The Democrats may have just picked up three House seats in 2024, simply because the Wisconsin Supreme Court will now force state legislators to draw more fair and representative maps.
The real kicker is when you look at the winning margin in yesterday’s election. Ben Wikler, the Chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, quipped just before the results started coming in that any victory by more than one point in his state is considered a landslide. He’s right; Wisconsin is a 50-50 kind of state when it comes to elections. Yet the Democratic Party-backed candidate in yesterday’s election ended up winning by about ten points. Ten points. In Wisconsin!
This shows that the combination of motivations that drove people to the polls to vote Democrat in 2020 and again in 2022, is still alive and kicking in 2023. Yesterday’s turnout and overwhelming win in Wisconsin means that the Democrats have a real shot at winning everything in 2024. The Presidency. The House, in spite of red state gerrymandering. The Senate, in spite of the challenging map. State legislatures. All of it. If the people who are inclined to vote Democrat are so dialed in that they’re turning out in droves for something as arcane as a state Supreme Court election in the spring of an odd numbered year, everything is possible in 2024. It’ll take hard work as always. But it’s all there for the taking.
So as crucial as it was yesterday that Donald Trump arrested and arraigned and lampooned and turned into a pathetic punchline, that was largely about making the past right and putting the past to bed. The victory yesterday in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race just set the table for the Democrats to sweep in 2024 if their supporters want it badly enough. Yesterday was the beginning of the end of Donald Trump. It was also an early sign of how bright the future can be without him.
