Hijacking Campaign 2023 | Independent Expenditures | Issue Ads | Candidates | Campaign 2023
Posted: February 28, 2023
Updated: March 26, 2024
Spring: Oath • Spending
Special: Oath • Spending
This committee was newly formed in fall 2018 by the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, now called Wisconsin Conservation Voters, a statewide environmental advocacy group, to make independent expenditures on behalf of candidates the organization supports in legislative and statewide elections. From its inception in 2018 through the fall 2022 election, this committee spent over $5.6 million supporting candidates for the legislature and state-wide offices such as governor and the state supreme court. Since 2010, Wisconsin Conservation Voters as an organization has used four different committees to make independent expenditures amounting to almost $7.7 million in state elections, placing the group among the highest spending outside electioneering groups in Wisconsin state elections.
Supreme Court (Spring)
Four candidates – two conservatives and two liberals – competed in the Feb. 21 primary to earn a place on the Aril 4 ballot to replace retiring conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack. The winner of the election would determine the ideological balance of the court, then 4-3 by conservatives.
Former Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly, a conservative 2016 appointee of former GOP Gov. Scott Walker who was voted off the court in 2020, faced Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal, in the April 4 election.
Protasiewicz won the election and changed the high court to a 4--3 liberal majority when she took her seat the following August.
Six days after the Feb. 21 primary, Wisconsin Conservation Voters reported its first independent expenditures in the spring election, spending about $229,000 for campaign literature and "payroll company management expenses" to back Protasiewicz.
In the following weeks, the committee would spend an additional $802,000 to support Protasiewicz.
Special
Concurrent with the 2023 high court election ws a special election to fill a vacancy in the suburban Milwaukee's 8th State Senate District following the December 2022 retirement of long-time Republican incumbent Alberta Darling. Rep. Dan Knodl of Germantown survived a three way Republican primary and defeated Democratic newcomer and attorney Jodi Habush Sinykin in the April 4 election. There was no Democratic primary.
The same time Wisconsin Conservation Voters first reported spending in the court race, it also reported its first independent expenditures in the 8th Senate, about $47,400 for campaign literature and "payroll company management expenses" in support of Habush Sinykin.
It later spent about another $52,500 for mailers in the election.
Last active election: 2022
This organization is registered with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission as an independent expenditure committee following the January 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC.