Why the left’s showing in Wisconsin Supreme Court race is a big deal (WAPO) [View All]

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Why the left’s showing in Wisconsin Supreme Court race is a big deal
By Greg Sargent
In the nationally-watched Wisconsin state Supreme Court race, liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg has edged ahead of conservative sitting justice David Prosser by just over 200 votes.

We still don’t know who is going to win, and we may not know for some time to come. But even if Kloppenburg loses, labor strategists argue, this will have constituted a victory for unions and Dems — proof of Scott Walker’s continuing toxicity, and of the staying power of the grassroots energy he unleashed. They’re right.

(snip)

First, the current results reflect a massive and astonishingly fast swing of support away from Prosser and in Kloppenburg’s favor. In a primary election in February (Wisconsin judicial elections are nonpartisan, and the top two primary victors face off in the general), Prosser beat Koppenburg by 30 points, 55-25. The current results show she doubled her vote share in just over six weeks, while Prosser has lost ground. This huge shift happened for one reason: Scott Walker.

Second, it’s extremely rare in Wisconsin to oust sitting Supreme Court justices. In 2008, Louis Butler was unseated, but as University of Wisconsin professor Charles Franklin points out to me, he had originally been appointed and not elected. The last time this happened before that was 44 years ago, and it only happened three times before that since the court was created in 1852.

(more at link)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/why-the-lefts-showing-in-wisconsin-supreme-court-race-is-a-big-deal/2011/03/03/AF9GUvpC_blog.html

I stayed up so late waiting for returns, that I'm too tired right now to say anything but this:

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"w00t!"