{"id":2018,"date":"2023-04-10T04:53:43","date_gmt":"2023-04-10T04:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=2018"},"modified":"2023-04-10T05:01:22","modified_gmt":"2023-04-10T05:01:22","slug":"dan-kellys-election-post-mortem-11-things-that-went-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/?p=2018","title":{"rendered":"Dan Kelly\u2019s Election Post Mortem: 11 Things That Went Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.wisconsinrightnow.com\/dan-kellys-election-post-mortem-11-things-that-went-wrong\/<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s no way to sugarcoat it. Former Justice Dan Kelly took an absolute shellacking in the state Supreme Court race.<\/p>\n

Kelly\u2019s defeat will have enormous consequences for the people of Wisconsin. Liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz is expected to help a new liberal majority unravel a generation of conservative reforms.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to be demoralized by the massive margin. However, when you put the campaign debris under the microscope, it becomes clear that the loss was, at least partly, the result of multiple bad decisions by the candidate.<\/p>\n

There is one big exception to that, and it\u2019s a really big one: Abortion. It\u2019s possible that no conservative candidate could have withstood the tsunami of women and younger voters who came out to the polls because they have been indoctrinated into believing that abortion is a \u201cright.\u201d A decade of liberal indoctrination in public schools, universities, and the news media, has started to bear fruit for the left.<\/p>\n

The continued erosion of Republican support in the populous WOW counties that surround Milwaukee (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) is severely problematic. Some of this erosion is due to Trump, some of it is due to migration, some of it is due to county party weaknesses, and a lot of it was due to abortion. Simply put, Republicans had a problem with women and the young.<\/p>\n

Dan Kelly has now cost conservatives TWO court seats. Think about that for a minute.<\/p>\n

Here are 11 things that went wrong with the Dan Kelly campaign:<\/p>\n

1. Abortion Obviously<\/h2>\n

Republicans never found a coherent message on abortion. They could have exposed Protasiewicz\u2019s extremism on the topic, but it\u2019s possible that wouldn\u2019t have mattered, either.<\/p>\n

Instead, they dodged it. Democrats succeeded in making abortion the overriding narrative of the campaign. Protasiewicz threw judicial ethics out the window and made it clear to pro-abortion voters that she was their choice. This wasn\u2019t ethical, but it was effective.<\/p>\n

In contrast, Kelly tried to stay above the fray and not take a position on abortion during the campaign, but voters figured out he was pro-life anyway, in part due to his endorsements.<\/p>\n

Abortion mattered more in this race than in the governor\u2019s and attorney general\u2019s races because the law is likely to come before the court.<\/p>\n

2. Kelly Refused Republican Party cash<\/h2>\n

We\u2019re told that Kelly refused to take large cash transfers from the state Republican Party. Apparently, he did not want to seem like a partisan or a politician.<\/p>\n

He did take thousands of dollars in in-kind donations from the party (reimbursements for services), and he ran around the state appearing at GOP Lincoln Days and other events. But Protasiewicz took millions<\/em> from the state Democratic Party, and Kelly refused to follow suit.<\/p>\n

This is called the \u201cWalker loophole,\u201d in the words of<\/a> our talk radio friend, Dan O\u2019Donnell, whereby state parties can now funnel large amounts of money from outside donors to candidates.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the problem with Kelly\u2019s refusal to take such cash transfers. The money went through third-party groups instead. However, third-party groups pay more for advertisements than candidates do, so they got less bang for their buck. They are also more limited in the types of ads they can run in some cases, making it harder for some to run ads on Protasiewicz\u2019s alleged personal problems.<\/p>\n

Kelly handicapped himself. He turned the campaign into an esoteric exercise about constitutional powers rather than doing what was needed to win.<\/p>\n

3. Crime Wasn\u2019t Enough<\/h2>\n

Both the campaign and 3rd party groups focused on crime. We understand the rationale to a point. That\u2019s how conservatives were elected to state Supreme Court races in the past. The problem was that this time, abortion dominated younger voters\u2019 concerns.<\/p>\n

Justices don\u2019t sentence people. They decide on the constitutionality of laws and court decisions. However, they do preside over questions about criminal defendants\u2019 rights and police powers. It\u2019s not that we don\u2019t think crime was important \u2013 we wrote a lot of the stories<\/a> on Protasiewicz\u2019s weak sentences \u2013 it\u2019s that crime delivered only the first punch, and conservatives needed a second one.<\/p>\n

We think that could have been on the economy; Protasiewicz said Scott Walker\u2019s Act 10 was unconstitutional. However, Act 10 has saved taxpayers billions of dollars. As James Carville once famously said, \u201cIt\u2019s the economy stupid.\u201d Ads could have focused on people\u2019s pocketbooks and reminded them how much their taxes will skyrocket due to a Protasiewicz victory. People are suffering from inflation, but Republican candidates keep ignoring their historic strength on fiscal issues.<\/p>\n

Tim Michels didn\u2019t advance a coherent economic message either.<\/p>\n

Overall, campaigns\/3rd parties also failed to send the message of real-world consequences \u2013 gun rights, school choice, taxes, and election reform, to name a few.<\/p>\n

4. Failure to Get Protasiewicz\u2019s Alleged Personal Issues to a Wider Audience<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s not every day that a candidate is accused of using racial slurs<\/a> and committing elder abuse<\/a>. Two named people accused Protasiewicz of these things, and they were willing to put their names to it.<\/p>\n

However, Kelly failed to mention the accusations in the only debate, he didn\u2019t run ads on them, and the liberal media largely censored the stories. Some third-party groups have to keep their ads focused on policy issues for tax status purposes, which made it tougher for them to run ads on the topic than the candidate.<\/p>\n

Kelly said on our podcast<\/a>, Wisconsin Right Now \u2013 Uncensored,\u00a0that he considered the accusations, which Protasiewicz\u2019s campaign denied, \u201ccredible.\u201d So it wasn\u2019t that. We were told he didn\u2019t want to seem like a politician and wanted to keep the discussion on judicial and constitutional questions.<\/p>\n

The liberal media were twisting into pretzels to avoid covering the accusations. Kelly\u2019s best chance to force them to cover the issue fairly was during the only debate between the candidates. The New York Times, Washington Post, and the state\u2019s media were present. If they wouldn\u2019t ask her the questions, he could have. But he didn\u2019t even bring it up.<\/p>\n

The bottom line: Kelly wouldn\u2019t take the gloves off. While we respect him for his principles, he should have considered that before entering the most divisive, politically charged,\u00a0 and expensive court race in Wisconsin history.<\/p>\n

Kelly\u2019s campaign, and surrogate, Shelley Grogan, aggressively attacked Jennifer Dorow during the primary, but then Kelly and Grogan failed to attack Janet Protasiewicz as aggressively. Why?<\/p>\n

Kelly was tougher on Protasiewicz in his quasi-concession speech than he was during the campaign. Again, why?<\/p>\n

5. Kelly Had a Losing Track Record & Was Wrong for the Times<\/h2>\n

One could argue the race was lost in the primary. Kelly just wasn\u2019t the right candidate for these times; Republicans need to woo back women upset about Trump and abortion, so they elected a guy Trump gave a shout-out to from a 2020 stage, and whose writings on incendiary social positions were easy to find. They elected a guy who reminds people of Trump.<\/p>\n

They could have elected the WOW county female judge who was such a media star that people were putting her face on coffee mugs and who hadn\u2019t weighed in on abortion publicly.<\/p>\n

But no, some people didn\u2019t want to do that. Kelly\u2019s side mostly argued voters should pick him because he was the most reliably conservative; however, this was a terrible general election narrative due to Roe v. Wade.<\/p>\n

There was a smear campaign against Jennifer Dorow. We saw the last-minute smear email; it went to county parties and churches throughout the state. It wasn\u2019t from the Kelly campaign, but he didn\u2019t do much, if anything, to repudiate it. It\u2019s possible that Dorow would not have survived the abortion issue either, since her campaign mistakenly decided to accept pro-life endorsements, which would have been used to define her. It\u2019s not the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Kelly demonstrated once before that he could not win a race. He lost in 2020 by a massive margin. He didn\u2019t explain what he would do differently to win this race. So why did Republicans select him?<\/p>\n

Kelly, although a brilliant intellect, was very esoteric and had a difficult time connecting with voters. He\u2019s not a natural politician. Kelly should have better told his story and background to connect with voters, as he did here with us<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kelly actually performed worse in 2023 than he did in 2020. In 2020, he got 44.7% of the vote. In 2023, he got 44.5%.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Dan \"Dan<\/p>\n

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6. Disappeared After the Primary<\/h2>\n

The Kelly campaign went dark after the primary for too long, just like Tim Michels did. Kelly spent money defeating Dorow and then was left with an empty tank on the front end of the general election. During those weeks, Kelly took a repeated pummeling from Protasiewicz on the air.<\/p>\n

Politics 101: Whoever defines their opponent first, wins.<\/p>\n

7. Exceptional Media Bias<\/h2>\n

The Wisconsin media are biased. They aggressively cover every utterance by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, but almost all ignored the racial slur and elder abuse accusations<\/a>. They ignored the court case in which Protasiewicz, as a prosecutor, worked to strip twins<\/a> from a black grandmother who had no history of abuse or neglect.<\/p>\n

The media ran cover for Protasiewicz. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did get the two people to repeat the elder abuse allegations to them, essentially confirming the core of Wisconsin Right Now\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

But they refused to print the fact that a second source, Jon Ehr,<\/a> also said he heard Protasiewicz use racial slurs, creating a false narrative that the allegations were only coming from a former stepson.<\/p>\n

They essentially baited Protasiewicz into saying she might consider suing<\/a> and then refused to tell readers her campaign walked that back within hours. This smacks of an attempt to frighten other media into not running the story \u2013 after all, she was thinking of suing! (until she wasn\u2019t.)<\/p>\n

The Wisconsin Law Journal turned the allegations into a deceptive hit piece on Wisconsin Right Now that contained factual errors and bizarrely relied on an unsourced, undated screenshot being tossed around Twitter by pro-Protasiewicz trolls.<\/p>\n

The rest of the media, for the first time in history, decided that racial slurs and domestic abuse allegations aren\u2019t worth reporting. They have apparently forgotten what reporters did to Dorow\u2019s teenage son, African-American judge Everett Mitchell, Brett Kavanaugh, a host of folks caught up in \u201cme too\u201d controversies and more.<\/p>\n

The media also dishonestly linked Kelly to support for the so-called \u201cfake electors,\u201d even though there was no evidence he had anything to do with them.<\/p>\n

8. The State Party\u2019s Lack of an Effective Fundraising & Turnout Operation<\/h2>\n

We think new state GOP chair Brian Schimming did everything he could. But he inherited a party with a turnout operation and fundraising system that were in shambles. That will take time to fix, and he ran out of it.<\/p>\n

We heard stories about door walkers giving up on party lists because they were so inaccurate.<\/p>\n

Democrats have mastered the fundraising and turn-out game, as the election results proved.<\/p>\n

9. Trump<\/h2>\n

Love him or hate him, it\u2019s time to face reality. The former president is toxic in some corners and has helped erode support in the WOW counties for the GOP.<\/p>\n

At first, we thought Trump\u2019s indictment might fuel some of his supporters to come out and vote for Kelly, but now we think it demoralized them. Trump is hoisted on his own petard; he\u2019s tried to convince a swath of the electorate that it\u2019s all rigged and their votes don\u2019t matter. So why should they turn out then?<\/p>\n

Some suburban women have soured on Trump badly. Kelly was not the candidate to get them back.<\/p>\n

10. County Parties in Disarray<\/h2>\n

Various county parties were in disarray at various points in the campaign. Waukesha County\u2019s focused on kicking respected, long-time, effective Republicans off its board. Dane County and Milwaukee County were in chaos.<\/p>\n

11. Democrats Perfected Their Partisan Strategy, Throwing Out the Judicial Ethics Code<\/h2>\n

Democrats learned from Lisa Neubauer\u2019s loss to Brian Hagedorn. They believed they did not signal to the liberal partisans where she stood politically. In contrast, the GOP base was riled up to turn out for Hagedorn by the perception he was facing anti-Christian bias. This time, Janet Protasiewicz ran a Supreme Court race as if it were a U.S. Senate campaign. To hell with the judicial ethics code, but it helped gin up the big national money.<\/p>\n

If a Republican had run like this, the media would have written endless stories decrying partisan politics being injected into the race. Because it was a liberal, they gave her cover to do it, by writing endless stories implying that Kelly was just as bad. He wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post originally appeared at https:\/\/www.wisconsinrightnow.com\/dan-kellys-election-post-mortem-11-things-that-went-wrong\/ There\u2019s no way to sugarcoat it. Former Justice Dan…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":1519,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wi-right-now"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2018"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2022,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2018\/revisions\/2022"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wifamily.news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}