It was supposed to be the Republican party’s last stand, in a state where they had exercised near-absolute control for years, and they had every hope of putting up a good fight. Yet in the end, it wasn’t even close.
Millions of dollars had poured into Wisconsin ahead of an election for a seat on the state supreme court, a hotly contested race between a liberal judge and one backed by moneyed rightwing interests. The stakes were high: Wisconsin’s state legislature has been gerrymandered out of competitiveness for more than a decade, for one thing, meaning that the state, which has a roughly even split between Democratic and Republican voters, had nevertheless become a grim experiment in one-party rule, with Republicans commanding a majority of statehouse seats despite receiving far fewer votes proportionally. Federal elections in Wisconsin seemed worryingly vulnerable, too: when Trump sued over his 2020 loss there, making spurious claims of election fraud, the Republican-controlled state supreme court ruled against him by only one vote.
But most pressing was abortion. After the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, the state was thrown into chaos when a wildly sexist law from 1849, banning all abortions, went back into effect. The law is poised to be challenged at the state supreme court, and the rights of half of the Wisconsin population could depend on who controls that court.
One of the candidates in the judicial race, Janet Protasiewicz, was open about her beliefs: she frankly described herself as pro-choice. The other, Dan Kelly, brushed off questions about abortion. But he was backed by anti-choice groups, and had long been on the payroll of the Republican party, including in representing them in legal matters pertaining to their 2020 election denial.
While Protasiewicz relied on small-dollar donations, Kelly raised plenty of money – much of it from large, out-of-state megadonor funds like the Richard Uihlein-backed Fair Courts America. But Protasiewicz blew him out of the park: she won with a lead of 10 percentage points. Voters’ top concern? Abortion rights.
Protasiewicz’s blowout victory in Wisconsin came on the same day that another high-stakes political contest was playing out in New York: the arraignment of Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business records. True to form, Trump incited a chaotic, carnivalesque, and extremely tacky scene outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse as the charges were read against him. The media breathlessly followed every moment of the arraignment, with cable-news cameras even following his plane from Mar-a-Lago, his gaudy resort home in Palm Beach, up to New York.
The arraignment has renewed attention on Trump, elevating him from the sideshow status that he has occupied for much of the Biden presidency back into the center of national attention. It has also made it seem much more likely – if still not inevitable – that he may become the Republican nominee. The party’s elite wants to ditch him, and his rivals for the nomination want to defeat him, but Trump still reigns in the hearts of Republican voters. He’s the one they’re comparing every other candidate to – and why settle for imitations when you can have the real thing?
But Trump, still, represents a liability for the Republican party, even as he fulfills many of their voters’ most ardent desires and least honorable impulses. He’s a crooked buffoon, and he’s getting weirder and worse; outside of the Republican party itself, most voters don’t like him, don’t find him funny any more, don’t want to put up with his chaos, and don’t like what he’s done to their country.
The Republican party, then, is like the dog that caught the car: it had its deepest desires fulfilled, in the form of the withdrawal of abortion rights in Dobbs, and in the form of a candidate who embodies its grievances, in Trump. Republicans got what they wanted. Now, they risk being destroyed by it.
The Republican party today is messy, internally divided, filled with self-serving carnival-barkers like Trump and his descendants – George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz – more interested in garnering publicity for themselves than in securing electoral or policy victories for their party, and most of all, beholden to positions, most notably on abortion, that inflict untold suffering and are increasingly abhorrent to the average voter.
Republicans propose sadistic abortion bans that are unpopular with voters, then reject amendments that would allow doctors to save women’s lives without fear of prosecution – making a self-righteous display of their own femicidal barbarity. They enact bans on transgender girls in sports and harness the full power of the state against trans student athletes – who number, in many states, fewer than a dozen.
Although party elites periodically propose alternatives to Trump – Ron DeSantis this week, Glenn Youngkin the next – they as yet have no viable presidential candidates who seem able to mount a real challenge to the former president, a man whose legal liabilities are only going to worsen over the coming year, and whom voters already soundly rejected in 2020.
But the party’s problems go beyond Trump and the extremist anti-choice regime that his judicial nominees have ushered in. The party has yielded to extremists in its base, placing candidates for office that range from the out of touch to the intensely creepy. Mehmet Oz, who ran for Senate in Pennsylvania last year, has the effect of a snake-oil salesman; Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel lackey who ran in Arizona, comes off as sinister. George Santos, a congressman from New York, seems to have lied about absolutely everything, possibly including his own name.
These candidates are not accidents: they are who the Republican voters chose in their primaries, and who the Republican party has cultivated. This is the face that Republicans are putting forward to the country as they head into the 2024 cycle: cruel, creepy, and corrupt.
Like the voters themselves, Republican party insiders don’t seem to have much interest in changing course. In January, just weeks after anger over abortion bans and disgust at the extremism of Republican candidates drove the party to a historically weak showing in the 2022 midterms, the Republican National Committee re-elected Ronna McDaniel, a Trump loyalist, for a fourth term as chair. As voters become more and more alienated from the party, Republicans seem serenely confident in their own losing strategy – or, at least, unwilling to change it. Like the Wisconsin supreme court race, the RNC contest became heated, with multiple factions hurling recriminations. But just as the liberal Protasiewicz had a blowout victory in her election, McDaniel’s victory in the RNC chair election was a landslide, too.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
