During the fateful presidential campaign of 2000, a “left-wing vote swap” movement took hold. That year, in addition to the Democratic candidate Al Gore and the Republican George W Bush, Ralph Nader, a historic environmentalist, anti-capitalist and pacifist militant, took the field with the Greens. and it soon became clear that he might steal valuable votes from Gore in states where there would be a neck-and-neck with Bush as, say, Florida looming on the razor’s edge.
Thus, on the very first social media then nascent, voters in California or New York offered Florida progressives to give a “moral” vote to Nader in their states, where they would remain symbolic, in exchange for the commitment to a “strategic” vote for Gore on the front line of Florida. Some accepted – but not enough. Nader would end up garnering 2.74 percent of the national vote, including 97,421 in Florida where Bush edged out Gore by just 537 votes to become the 43rd president of the United States.
It is a case that illustrates very well the weight of the vote in the handful of “battleground states” – the states contested as in a battlefield – where, in the American intermediated majority system, the fate of the elections (and of the world – ask Iraq) is really at stake.
That historical precedent serves to explain why voters across America have been bombarded in recent weeks with emails regarding an election in Wisconsin, not even for a political office but for that of a supreme court justice in that remote northern Midwestern state. with less than six million inhabitants, known for its cheese and the Green Bay football team.
Wisconsin is one swing state for decades, a state that has alternated democratic victories with republican majorities. Here in the early twentieth century the trade union movement had an important history; Milwaukee has had three socialist mayors, the last installed in 1948, when the state was however represented in Congress by one of the most ruthlessly reactionary senators ever, the visceral anti-communist Joseph McCarthy.
In the last presidential elections in Wisconsin, Biden prevailed over Trump by just over 20,000 ballots (0.64% of the vote). There was, of course, a Republican appeal rejected and the state remained in the “blue” column, one of 25 in the Biden coalition.
Twenty-five are also the states in which the direct election of the togates of the highest courts is in force, and this is the election that has suddenly become one of the most followed in America.
For one of the seven seats of the court (the elections are staggered) the democratic magistrate Janet Protasiewicz and the conservative Dan Kelly face each other, each of whom would represent the decisive vote. And the forthcoming court rulings will be crucial, for example for the future of abortion in the state which currently has a Democratic governor but a super Republican majority in parliament.
After the repeal of Roe v. Wade (the sentence which in 1973 legalized abortion in the USA, ndr) by the national supreme court, Wisconsin automatically reinstated the 1849 law, which provides for the prohibition absolute to abort. The court will now have to judge the complaints filed to restore this right.
It is a situation that is reproduced in dozens of other states where populist new right administrations are targeting multiple rights that seemed acquired for decades: from the right to vote to those of minorities and LGBTQ people, but also on health systems and public education (and historical revisionism).
It is a picture that magnifies the “political” importance of the judicial system and of the federal courts, a branch of government where the last instances are increasingly resolved. It is not for nothing that the conservative project of recent years has specifically targeted appointments to the courts with a view to rejecting any and inevitable appeals.
With 26 states in the Union controlled by Republicans, the importance of the courts – and their political composition – is therefore increasingly decisive as a political tool. And the direct election of judges, criticized by many, ultimately represents a system that reflects this in a sense more honestly.
As evidenced by the attention that was focused on the election in Wisconsin (a total record amount of 37 million dollars was spent on the two professional candidates, collected in national campaigns of the two parties), the repercussions might also be fundamental national level.
The jurisdiction of the court extends to the “gerrymandering” (the determination of electoral districts which in the single-member system can in turn influence the composition of the electoral college and therefore pave the way for the next president). If in the next presidential elections of 2024 a scenario on the woolen thread like three years ago were to repeat itself, new appeals would be ensured and any definitive sentences on the matter might once once more fall within the competence of the state supreme court – and of the “political” majority that sits there.
In Wisconsin, and in many other state and federal courts, the country’s democratic future is increasingly at stake.
