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Court candidates spend big in race
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by Kevin Bargnes
Friday, April 11, 2008
Advertising spending in this month’s Supreme Court election topped spending in February’s presidential primary by a 3-to-2 ratio, according to a report released this week.
The report shows campaigns and third-party groups combined to spend more than $3.6 million in the Supreme Court race, while the presidential candidates spent $2.1 million in all, according to the Wisconsin Advertising Project.
Final numbers have yet to come out, but Mike McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, believes overall spending for the Supreme Court election between Michael Gableman and incumbent Justice Louis Butler will top $6 million, with $3.5 million coming from private interest groups.
On April 1, Gableman defeated Butler 51 percent to 49 percent.
This will likely be the most spent on any Supreme Court election, McCabe said.
As for the state’s presidential primaries, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., spent by far the most money in the presidential primary at $1.5 million, while Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., spent over $300,000; presumptive Republican nominee John McCain of Arizona spent $180,000; and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee spent $150,000.
Obama and McCain went on to win the primaries by wide margins.
McCabe criticized the mudslinging and substantial funding from private interest groups that plagued the process.
“There could be no good outcome from this race. It just does enormous harm to the integrity of the court,” he said. “The system is as broken as it can possibly be.”
The numbers were part of a larger report — released by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law — looking at the courts throughout the United States.
Roughly 89 percent of the funding for television ads came from private interest groups. Gableman groups spent 59 percent compared to 41 percent for Butler groups. Of the $3.6 million, only $400,000 was spent by the candidates themselves.
A huge focus of the campaign was on negative advertisements such as the infamous Gableman ad that accused Butler of using a “loophole” to free a man convicted of child molestation.
McCabe said that this and similar ads were a result of the special interest groups wanting to focus on one irrelevant issue.
Interest groups “have been able to choose what issues get discussed and how they get discussed,” McCabe said. “The issue they’ve primarily chosen is crime, and that’s not an issue that has anything to do with the Supreme Court.”
Ken Goldstein, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin and director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project, said Butler needed to turn the ad around on Gableman.
“The big problem was that the Butler folks and the Butler supporters never responded,” Goldstein said. “When an ad that comes out that is that widely criticized all over in the media, the failure of the Butler folks to turn that was the major problem in the campaign.”
Proposals were thrown around all last session to provide for public financing of Supreme Court sessions. Legislators, including Rep. Fred Kessler, D-Milwaukee, have pushed to get justices appointed by the governor, much like the president does for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Senate Special Session Bill 1, a campaign finance reform proposal, may still be debated and brought to a vote between now and when regular session starts up again in January 2009.
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