Schimel Looks Desperate

Here’s some good news for Democrats. Republican Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel has been looking increasingly desperate in the last week.

First, he joined Donald Trump, Jr., on a hard-right talk show in which the Little Don endorsed him, joining Elon Musk in that regard. During the show Schimel said that he would carry out Trump’s wishes should any cases come before the Court that might interfere with his agenda. “Do you think the job is done?” Schimel told the crowd. “We have to stay vigilant and we have to stay on this.” Pretty clear to me what he was saying.

The next day he went on another hard-right talk show and raised an old trope of Republicans: votes get dumped late at night in Milwaukee, mysteriously and suspiciously throwing elections to Democrats. Trump himself raised this when he lost in 2020 and Eric Hovde did it again when Tammy Baldwin beat him last year.

Schimel knows that it’s total B.S. Votes come in late in Milwaukee because the state requires absentee ballots to be counted after the polls open there on election day. That happens because Republicans want it to happen so they can cast a shadow over any election they lose. In fact, last year a bipartisan bill to allow Milwaukee to start counting votes earlier was blocked by Senate Republicans. So, they block legislation to fix the very thing they then complain about. To make it all even more disgusting, you don’t think there’s more than a little bit of dog whistle racism going into all this, Milwaukee being mostly Black?

Here’s Schimel’s strategy. He knows Democrats are fired up. They see this election as their first chance to say a loud NO! to Trump and Musk. So, he needs to turn out the same guys sitting in their parents’ basements playing video games who voted for the first (and probably only) time for Trump in November. That’s why he’s going on all these hard-right shows and saying things he knows to be untrue.

Schimel’s pitch is that, to thwart the shady things going on late at night in Milwaukee, his voters need to vote early — ironically, something Republicans used to say was fraught with fraud before they realized Democrats were killing them with the early vote. Now, all of a sudden, voting early is the way to beat fraud. Go figure.

Schimel just keeps underscoring how unfit he is to serve on any court, including the circuit court seat he holds now, much less the state’s highest court. But his recent moves also show how desperate he is. He’s losing and he knows it. He also deserves to lose, but I’m not sure he understands that at all.

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