Supreme Court shellacking ought to wake up conservatives continuing to look for excuses
On Tuesday night, a candidate who campaigned on the restoration and protection of basic freedoms that are increasing imperiled by our national government, ran against a decent-seeming woman who spoke to none of those concerns.
They call it copium.
It’s a political coinage defined roughly as doing whatever you have to do to cope with certain realities that you simply aren’t prepared to accept. A sudden shift in the political winds that you had convinced yourself were forever at your back.
To look at the social media pages of some of the conservative groups and Republican Party organizations a few hours after Chris Taylor pummeled conservative judge Maria Lazar in the latest State Supreme Court election on Tuesday evening was to witness the ways in which copium manifests and to what ends.
There was the-world-is-ending cope, in which folks declaim that the addition of a clearly sane and reasonable and intelligent, if liberal, Justice on the Supreme Court will rain hellfire on Wisconsin. This cope for the most part accepts reality but takes comfort in a cocoon of righteousness. At least I knew better and tried to save humanity.
There is the other-side-is-cheating cope, which has provided a safe haven for conservatives in the state ever since the liberals started winning virtually every state-wide election since 2018. This one is a particularly odious strain, in that it produces paranoia on a grand – and frankly, embarrassing – scale. It envisions tens of thousands of magic ballots sitting in a vault in Milwaukee somewhere, ready to be added to the vote tally early the next morning.
Like I say, embarrassing.
There is the we-only-have-to-turn-out-our-voters-and-we’ll-win cope, which, okay, may be true in some of the narrower losses Republicans have suffered over the past eight years. But, let’s face it, the four liberal justices who have won since 2018 – Rebecca Dallet, Janet Protasiewicz, Susan Crawford and, now, Taylor – have all won by double digits, which adds up to hundreds of thousands of votes.
That’s not a turnout issue. That’s fundamental proof that their values are well out of alignment with those of the voters. It's also a loss of their own voters, weary of scare tactics and platforms empty of ideas. So cope on, but prepare to continue losing.
There is the George Soros cope, which, say no more.
On Tuesday night, a candidate who campaigned on the restoration and protection of basic freedoms – freedom to vote unimpeded, freedom to make one’s own reproductive decisions, freedom from environmental harm from corporations, freedom to bargain for better wages and benefits, freedom to love who you choose to love – which are increasingly imperiled by our national government, ran against a decent-seeming woman who spoke to none of those concerns.
The margin was nearly 20 percent and 300,000 votes for the candidate who vowed to be a stalwart against the eradication of our rights over a woman who is smart and decent and accomplished, but who appeared not to recognize the realities everyday Wisconsinites face nor the real-world consequences of what is happening across the country. That margin was 10 points higher than Crawford's win a year ago and a 21-point swing toward progressive candidates since the 2024 election 16 months ago.
That the election took place on an evening when the President of the United States had vowed destruction of an entire civilization, when the entire world wondered if the apocalypse was nigh, did not help Maria Lazar one bit. She is not the first victim of what appears to be a national backlash against the ongoing and ever-escalating assault on our lives and the things we have held dear and taken for granted.
She is merely the latest. And surely not the last.
