Reid J. Epstein at NYT:
Democrats scored a significant victory in Wisconsin on Monday night when a liberal challenger upset a Trump-backed incumbent to win a State Supreme Court seat, a down-ballot race that illustrated strong turnout and vote-by-mail efforts in a presidential battleground state.
The victory, by upward of 120,000 votes as of Monday night, came as a shock to Republicans and Democrats alike in Wisconsin, where contests for president, governor and the state’s high court in the last four years have all been decided by about 30,000 votes or less. It followed weeks of Democratic anger over Republicans’ insistence on holding elections amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Wisconsin’s map on Monday night looked like a dream general election result for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee — stronger than typical for Democrats in the suburbs and a respectable showing among the state’s blue-collar white voters in rural counties. But officials from both parties cautioned against overinterpreting the Supreme Court results, given the bizarre circumstances surrounding the high court race.
The challenger for the court seat, Jill Karofsky, ousted the conservative incumbent, Justice Daniel Kelly, in a contest with broad potential implications for voting rights in Wisconsin’s November general election. Justice Kelly became just the second incumbent State Supreme Court justice to be ousted at the polls since 1967. President Trump had boasted that his endorsement of Justice Kelly had unnerved Democrats in the state.Bernie endorsed Biden:
Transcript:
Joe Biden: (03:25)
We all have to know the clock is ticking. We don’t have a moment to waste in combating the climate crisis. It’s existential threat to us. In short, we need to build a fair, more inclusive and more resilient America. And with that in mind, I’d like to welcome to this conversational a leader who shares those values and has been an outspoken advocate for that vision for a long time. My friend, Senator Bernie Sanders. Bernie, welcome.
Bernie Sanders: (03:55)
Joe, thank you very much for your remarks and thank you for welcoming me to your livestream here. As you’ve indicated, we are living in an unbelievably unprecedented moment. You and I were chatting a few months ago, not in a million years would we have believed that we would be talking to each other in our respective homes, that we could not do rallies, that we could not get out of the house. We would not have believed that we’d be looking not only at a pandemic, which as you indicated has taken over 20,000 lives in our country. Half a million people infected but has cost us 16 million jobs and that’s probably a conservative number. The real number is probably higher than that. So, we are in a terrible moment, an unprecedented moment. And I know we share the understanding that we’ve got to go forward right now and out of this in an unprecedented way to address the terrible pain that so many of our fellow Americans are feeling.
So today I am asking all Americans, I’m asking every Democrat, I’m asking every independent, I’m asking a lot of Republicans to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy, which I endorse to make certain that we defeat somebody who I believe, and I’m just speaking just for myself now, is the most dangerous president in the modern history of this country.
Trump carried Arizona in 2016. Predictive Insights reports that Biden is leading there:
As Arizona residents endure a stay-at-home order and thousands of people suffer from coronavirus, President Donald Trump continues to fall in a head-to-head matchup with former Vice President Joe Biden.
Biden has expanded his lead over Trump in the April edition of OHPI’s Arizona Public Opinion Pulse (AZPOP), now leading the president 52 to 43 with 5 percent of voters undecided.
