State Supreme Race Shows Need for Campaign Finance Reform

The staggering amount of record-breaking money in the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race shows the crying need for fundamental campaign finance reform.

When the last dimes are counted (and that won’t happen till July when the candidates have to report the last couple of weeks of their fundraising), this race cost in the neighborhood of $50 million.

For perspective, the old record for Wisconsin Supreme Court was $10 million, set in 2020. And the old national record for a state supreme court race was $15 million, set in Illinois back in 2004.

So this race more than tripled the previous national record and beat the old Wisconsin record by a factor of five!

Much of this money paid for really ugly ads, with each side competing to describe the other as more lenient toward rapists.

It was not an edifying experience to open any of your screens in the last two months, so filled with mud as they were.

And all the big money that poured in here showed how ludicrous our current campaign finance law is in Wisconsin and how tilted it is the super-rich.

In 2015, Scott Walker and the Republican-dominated legislature completely rewrote our campaign finance law. They doubled the amount of money that a rich person could give to their favorite candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court from the already ridiculously high $10,000 to the dizzying $20,000. Then they put no limit whatsoever on what a rich person could give to a political party in Wisconsin. (The previous limit was $10,000 there, too.) To complete the absurdity, they then allowed the political parties to transfer unlimited amounts to the candidates. And they put no limits on what a person could give to the outside groups that told you who to vote for or against.

This turned the race into a contest to see who could hustle the most money from billionaires and multi-multi-millionaires, which drowned out the voices of almost all Wisconsin citizens.

For a while there, it boiled down to how fast Ben Wikler, head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, could speed dial his billionaire friends around the country versus how fast Richard Uihlein, the far-right billionaire from Lake Forest, IL, could electronically transfer funds into his mis-named Fair Courts America PAC.

Uihlein himself gave $4,075,000 to his Fair Courts America PAC this year, and he funded two other PACs that spent $2.4 million for Kelly. So that’s just one individual who spent almost $5 million to influence the outcome of this election.

The purpose of having limits on what a single individual can contribute directly to a candidate is to prevent corruption and to preclude that person from having an undue influence on who gets elected. But that purpose is violated when there are no limits on donations to so-called independent expenditure groups.

And that purpose is certainly violated when a donor can give the maximum $20,000 donation to the candidate, and then turn around and give 10 times, or 25 times, or 50 times that amount to a political party that dishes that money back to the candidate.

This happened during this race, on both sides.

Let me give you just two examples, one from each.

Jay Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, gave the Protaseiwicz campaign the maximum $20,000 donation. And then he gave $1 million to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

Elizabeth Uihlein, the wife of Richard Uihlein, gave $20,000 to Kelly’s campaign, and then gave $500,000 to the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

This is undue influence, if ever I saw it. (And as far as Pritzker goes, if a Republican governor from a neighboring state was throwing more than a million dollars into Wisconsin to tell us how to vote, you can bet that Democrats and progressive would be up in arms!)

Then there’s the issue of all the money that’s coming from outside of Wisconsin, and what that does to the core principle of self-rule in a democracy.

Pritzker and the Uihleins are from Illinois.

A lot of other mega-donors to both candidates and parties are from outside Wisconsin.

For instance, Reid Garrett Hoffman, of Mountain View, Calif., co-founder of LinkedIn, gave the Democratic Party of Wisconsin $2,000,000.

And David G. Herro, of Miami Beach, Fla., manager at Oakmark International Fund, gave the Republican Party of Wisconsin $150,000.

What business is it of theirs who gets to sit on the Wisconsin Supreme Court?

For too long, the average citizen of Wisconsin has been essentially reduced to a spectator during these campaigns, and sometimes a blindfolded spectator because of the dark money from bogus issue advocacy groups. And certainly a mud-soaked spectator!

We deserve better than that. We’re supposed to have an equal voice in our democracy, and we just don’t.

Part of the problem is the U.S. Supreme Court, which — most notoriously with its Citizens United decision in 2010 but also with others like Buckley v. Valeo (1976), Wisconsin Right to Live vs. FEC (2007), and McCutcheon(2014) – has limited the ability of our legislators to curb the outsized influence of big and dark money. We need to overturn these decisions by amending the U.S. Constitution by proclaiming once and for all that corporations aren’t persons and money isn’t speech.

But another part of the problem is Wisconsin’s own campaign finance law.

Fortunately, Sen. Chris Larson has a comprehensive package of campaign finance reform legislation that he’s going to introduce this session, just as he has the past two sessions, that would undo the damage of the 2015 law, put some reasonable limits on contributions and expenditures, and shed more sunlight on all the money in our races.

It’ll be interesting to see if any Republicans will sign on this time around.

Matthew Rothschild, Executive Director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.