Another day, another election loss for Democrats in court.
The Wisconsin Democratic Party’s gubernatorial primary was already a slow-motion disaster before Wednesday. Now a judge has finished it off with a ruling that is as legally correct as it is politically devastating — and the damage is entirely self-inflicted.
Here’s the sequence of events that produced this catastrophe. Wisconsin Democrats had a primary field that kept changing underneath them. Candidates dropped out after absentee ballots had already been sent in. David Crowley — the party’s backup plan after Lt. Governor Sara Rodriguez’s campaign imploded — jumped back into the race after he had already left it. By the time the dust settled, more than 117,000 Wisconsin Democrats had already returned their mail-in ballots, many for candidates who were no longer in the race in the same form they’d entered it.
So the Wisconsin Democratic Party did what any party in full panic mode does: they went to the Wisconsin Elections Commission and demanded a do-over. Let voters rescind their already-returned ballots and cast new ones. When the WEC said no — citing the unambiguous state law that prohibits exactly this — the WisDems filed a lawsuit.
Dane County Circuit Judge David Conway dismissed it Wednesday. He cited the same unambiguous law the WEC had already applied: “The unambiguous language of the statute does not allow a voter to spoil an absentee ballot after it is returned.”
If you don’t know Wisconsin, here’s the detail that makes this ruling impossible to dismiss as partisan: Dane County is home to Madison. It is as deeply blue as any county in California or New York. When a Dane County judge says the law is clear and rules against the Wisconsin Democratic Party, the party didn’t lose a close call. They lost an unambiguous one.
NOTUS: Democrats Can’t Recast Ballots Ahead of Wisconsin Gubernatorial Primary, Judge Rules
The state party filed a lawsuit earlier this month after multiple candidates dropped out of the governor’s race and one candidate re-entered.https://t.co/jkCIqLJe7E
— Politics & Poll Tracker ? (@PollTracker2024) July 30, 2026
WisDems Chair Devin Remiker called it an effort to “suppress” mail-in voting. It is nothing of the sort. It is the enforcement of a law that exists for good reason — the integrity of the absentee ballot process depends on ballots being final once they’re submitted. A system that allows ballots to be recalled and recast whenever a primary field changes isn’t a ballot. It’s a preference survey.
The real story here is that the Wisconsin Democratic Party has managed to nominate Francesca Hong — the progressive who went viral during a primary debate for rambling about defunding the police — despite desperately wanting to nominate almost anyone else. Their Plan A imploded. Their Plan B required convincing a retired candidate to re-enter. Their Plan C — letting voters take back their ballots after the fact — just got thrown out of court by a Madison judge.
Hong is now the nominee for governor of Wisconsin. Republicans couldn’t have engineered a better outcome if they’d tried.
The law worked as intended. Democrats are stuck with the candidate their own primary voters chose.
Some consequences are genuinely deserved.
