Attacks couldn’t dent Bradley’s election prospects

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Call her Teflon Rebecca.

Despite waves of negative headlines, Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley held onto her seat in last week’s election, solidifying the conservative majority on the state’s highest court.

Bradley will now serve a 10-year term as a Supreme Court justice. Among her colleagues, the next up for election is Justice Annette Ziegler, whose term is up in July 2017. She is then followed by Justice Michael Gableman, whose term ends in July 2018, and Justice Shirley Abrahamson, whose term ends in July 2019.

When the liberal group One Wisconsin Now dug up columns that Bradley had written while she was an undergraduate at Marquette University, some predicted the writings would dissuade undecided voters — who estimates held made up 30 percent of the electorate — from casting ballots for the former corporate attorney.

The columns, written more than two decades ago, referred to homosexuals as “queers” and “degenerates,” and accused those had supported Bill Clinton for president of being “either totally stupid or entirely evil.”

Bradley repeatedly apologized for the columns, saying she was embarrassed by what she had written and that the words did not reflect her current views of the world.

Days later, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that Bradley had, while awaiting a divorce from her now ex-husband, had an extramarital affair with a former co-worker whom she later represented in a custody dispute. Andrew Bednall and Bradley had worked together at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek in the early 2000s, when Bednall was the law firm’s chief operating officer. His ex-wife attempted to have Bradley taken off the case by contending that the relationship between Bradley and Bednall gave rise to a conflict of interest.

Both headlines appeared to matter little to the 1.9 million voters who cast ballots in April 5’s Supreme Court election, according to unofficial election results. Bradley got more than 90,000 more votes than her opponent, Court of Appeals Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg.

Bradley received 52.3 percent of the vote, meaning that 1,017,083 ballots were cast in favor of her. Kloppenburg only got 47.6 percent of the total — about 925,836 votes, in other words.

Above all, Bradley’s success shows that judicial philosophy matters more to voters than negative headlines, said Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Voters clearly were more concerned about crime and a Supreme Court that is concerned only with interpreting the law as it’s written rather than some of these other personal situations that popped up,” Healy said.

The personal attacks may have even backfired and had the unintended result of encouraging voters to support Bradley, said Matt Rothschild, executive director of Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a group that tracks election spending. The radical views espoused by Bradley were of the type that were more likely to cause her harm among people who were already disposed to vote against her. Certain voters, meanwhile, were likely in sympathy with Bradley’s former views and became more likely to go out to the polls as a result.

Healy agreed that the personal attacks were probably counterproductive, although he cited different reasons.

“I think some voters saw the personal attacks against Justice Bradley as a dirty trick and, rather than having the intended effect of suppressing conservative turnout, it clearly motivated some conservative voters to go out and support Justice Bradley,” he said.

Another big boost for Bradley likely came from the “Never Trump” movement aimed at preventing Donald Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination. Pushed on by conservative radio hosts who had made it their personal mission to stop Trump’s ascendancy, Republicans came out in force on April 5. In the end, about 100,000 more Republicans than Democrats voted in the spring election, according to unofficial results.

For Rothschild, Bradley’s victory also shows how great of an influence outside spending continues to be for voters. Part of this, no doubt, has to do with the public’s being relatively unfamiliar with the Supreme Court candidates, even in the weeks leading up to April 5.

In a poll conducted by Marquette University before the election, 30 percent of the respondents said they were undecided and 60 percent were unfamiliar with both Kloppenburg and Bradley. By Rothchild’s and his colleagues’ count, outside groups spent four times as much running radio and TV ads favoring Bradley as they did on Kloppenburg.

Wisconsin Alliance for Reform, a Madison-based conservative group, spent about $2.6 million on two ads praising Bradley and three ads criticizing Kloppenburg for three criminal Court of Appeals cases she took part in.

“Tell Judge Kloppenburg courts should protect children, not criminals,” says the narrator in one of the ads.

Rothschild said he and others were expecting the Greater Wisconsin Committee — a group that tends to support liberal candidates — to fire back. The response eventually did come but “was late and ineffective,” Rothschild said.

The Greater Wisconsin Committee doled out a mere $710,000 on behalf of Kloppenburg, spending most of that amount on a television ad criticizing Bradley’s college writings.

Perhaps, said Rothschild, the outcome may have been different if a different tack had been taken.

“The low road seems to be what pays off in these negative ads,” he said. “They just kept hitting Kloppenburg with those ads. (Soft on crime) was the chorus line. It was simple, direct, devastating and untrue but effective.” Follow @erikastrebel