Democrats have done well in special elections since Donald Trump’s inauguration, but until this week we hadn’t had any statewide contests to really assess how the administration’s radical reshaping of U.S. government was landing with the public.

Well, yesterday, we got one of those: a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin to which both sides ascribed colossal importance. More than $100 million was spent on the contest; Elon Musk poured in more than $25 million in support of Republican Brad Schimel and rallied for him in the state.

Well, Republicans might want to start clanging the alarm bells. In a massive-turnout election, Democrat Susan Crawford won by 10 points. Happy Wednesday.

On, Wisconsin!

by William Kristol

Watching the Wisconsin Supreme Court election returns come in last night, I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who found himself humming—even occasionally singing!—the great University of Wisconsin fight song, “On, Wisconsin!”

Composed in 1909 by William T. Purdy, “On, Wisconsin!” was considered by John Philip Sousa “the finest of college marching songs.” (He may have said this about multiple college fight songs, including Michigan’s “Hail to the Victors,” which—sorry, Badgers—is of course the superior tune.)

In any case, what more could one say last night than:

On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! Plunge right through that line!

Run the ball clear down the field, a touchdown sure this time.
On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin! Fight on for her fame,
Fight! Fellows! Fight! Fight, fight, we’ll win this game.

The Wisconsin Democrats fought, and they won.

All of us owe them a debt for what was perhaps the most heartening election night since . . . the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April of 2023, which the Democratic-backed candidate also won by a similar healthy margin.

Of course, reminiscing about that happy outcome can’t help but trigger another thought—that a year and a half later, in November 2024, Donald Trump won Wisconsin and the presidency. It’s a reminder that, as the wise Aristotle observed, one swallow does not a summer make.

But could this Wisconsin victory be a harbinger of a better summer ahead? Perhaps.

Partly because of Musk’s intervention, yesterday’s election was to a considerable degree a referendum on the Trump administration. And the results suggest that Democrats shouldn’t be intimidated by Trump. Indeed, they suggest Democrats can run against what his administration and Musk’s DOGE are doing.

Yesterday’s high turnout also suggests that voters can grasp that courts matter, and that the rule of law matters. It was a judicial election, so the issue of economics wasn’t central to the debate. But it turns out families talk about more at the kitchen table than the price of groceries. They talk about what kind of state, and what kind of nation, they want to live in. Democrats shouldn’t shy away from raising issues of basic justice and fairness and individual rights.

One of the leading issues in this year’s race, as it was in the state Supreme Court contest two years ago, was reproductive rights. Democrats in Wisconsin hammered away at the theme that the Republican-backed candidate this year, Brad Schimel, would ban abortion. Protecting reproductive rights remains popular in Wisconsin, and presumably beyond.

Finally, Wisconsin Democrats argued that decisions by their Supreme Court could affect citizens’ access to health care. It turns out that voters don’t like Republican efforts to restrict health care.

With votes in Congress looming on Republican cuts to Medicaid, and with yesterday’s bloodbath at the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Democrats should be able to keep the issue of health care front and center.

Beyond the particular issues, what was most striking to an outside observer about the Wisconsin race was the spirit in which it was contested. The Wisconsin Democrats were defending their narrow Supreme Court majority—but the spirit of their campaign wasn’t defensive. Nor did they over-think or over-analyze their task. They went on offense, and, as their fight song urges, they “plunged right through the line.” A good example for their fellow Democrats in Washington, and across the nation.

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

by Andrew Egger

You can drive yourself crazy, listening to these admin people lie and spin. Every day they shamelessly open new vistas into kaleidoscopic alternate realities; staying moored here in the real world, among the things that have actually happened, is harder after a while than you’d think.

So it’s nice when we get palate-cleansing days like yesterday—when the lies are so obvious, so transparent and crude on their face, that it’s effortless to conclude: Yeah, these folks are just utterly full of shit.

Yesterday morning, JD Vance described Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the migrant wrongly deported to a Salvadorean supermax prison this month—as “a convicted MS-13 gang member.” This was flatly false; Abrego Garcia has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime.

But asked about it at her press briefing later, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled down.

“The vice president said he was a convicted member of MS-13,” a reporter asked her. “What evidence is there to back that up?”

“There’s a lot of evidence,” Leavitt replied. “And the Department of Homeland Security and ICE have that evidence, and I saw it this morning.”

Again: That this is a lie is a matter of public record. DHS and ICE are not sitting on secret records showing Abrego Garcia is a convict. If they were, they would release them. Instead, the public record is what his lawyers wrote in a filing this week, an assertion the government did not dispute in its response: “Abrego Garcia has never been arrested or charged with any crime in the U.S. or El Salvador.”

A few minutes later, a reporter asked Leavitt: “You said you’d seen evidence that this man was a convicted gang member. In what court was he convicted, and for what?”

“This individual was an MS-13 ringleader,” Leavitt said. “He is a leader in the brutal MS-13 gang, and he is involved in human trafficking, and now MS-13 is a designated foreign terrorist organization.” She threw in some stuff about “the insane failing Atlantic magazine” for flavor.

The administration has been rolling out this “human trafficking” line a lot since the Abrego Garcia story broke. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin repeatedly posted yesterday that “we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking.”

Unlike “convicted,” this could in theory be true.¹

But the government has been in court talking about Abrego Garcia a lot this week, and in that forum—where, unlike on social media and from the White House podium, you’re actually legally obliged to tell the truth—they haven’t alleged anything of the sort. And DHS has released no evidence whatsoever in support of that claim. I asked McLaughlin yesterday whether the agency had any plans to release that supposed evidence. She responded with a word-for-word repeat of her original tweet: “The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang—we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking.”

This is becoming a pattern. Besides Abrego Garcia, the most controversial of the deportees to El Salvador has been Andry Hernandez, the gay makeup artist who was seemingly deported due to his “Mom” and “Dad” tattoos, which DHS flagged as linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Not so,