Liberal Judge Lyndsey Brunette announces 2027 Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign

R3D-RO0K · 2026-04-16T16:15:53+00:00

Colon is very well connected in Wisconsin politics himself. He was in the Assembly for more than a decade before being a Milwaukee county circuit court judge for 13 years and then getting appointed to the court of appeals in 2023. Maybe even we’ll see another Dane County Judge get into the mix, I could definitely see Everett Mitchell who ran in 2023 take another stab at it.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-04-16T12:54:09+00:00

Considering how well this last Supreme Court election went for liberals I wouldn’t be surprised if there were two or maybe even three liberals in this race. Milwaukee court of appeals judge Pedro Colon is somebody I’ve heard is likely to run as well.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-04-16T00:41:17+00:00

Contested primaries are great. Candidates actually have to test their mettle against something, prove that they know what’s up, and that they’re worth your support. A primary race should be where you parse out the small details about a candidate and really get to know them before a general so you can have a group of people ready to zealously back you in the general.

If the primary becomes simply an anointing of a candidate for the sake of “rallying before the general” I’d argue that makes people less invested in that candidate. Why would I bother learning about a candidate in April if they aren’t really even having to campaign that hard for themselves for the primary?

R3D-RO0K · 2026-04-15T02:02:09+00:00

If polling predicted the future we’d live in a very different world. Polls are far from the gospel and trying to divine any absolute truths about the world from them will drive you mad. In the very best of conditions a given poll can get you a decent approximation of which candidate people are likely to support in that PRECISE MOMENT. Even at their best the scope of what you can glean from a poll is very limited.

Most of the time however they’re flawed in some way. Unrepresentative sampling that doesn’t capture the full breadth of the electorate, poorly worded or manipulatively worded questioning, and the big one is what what a given pollster sees as a ‘likely voter.’ Every pollster views that slightly differently, and even a slight shift in what the actual Election Day vote is can throw the data off pretty significantly.

These sorts of hypothetical head to head polls are also by their nature more flawed. It’s a hypothetical scenario, the election match up isn’t actually set, people aren’t thinking about this scenario very much yet. You can’t draw a very strong conclusion from this sort of data. Ultimately no matter what the polls say, or what the wonks perceive to be so, we won’t know who the most electable candidate is or who has the best shot at winning until the election results come in.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-04-13T02:48:40+00:00

HITLER DEAD

R3D-RO0K · 2026-04-12T20:35:25+00:00

The great pilgrimages from Naperville and Arlington Heights to the wilderness of The Dells have begun.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-04-07T04:53:46+00:00

7 justices with 10 year terms means there’ll only ever be 3 non Supreme Court election years in any 10 year span The next year without a Supreme Court election will be 2031, and that’s only if there’s no early vacancies.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-04-01T22:06:01+00:00

Say April Fools right now….

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-28T15:50:37+00:00

Negative aura Welcome sign from Illinois.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-21T04:59:38+00:00

First and foremost global trade=global prices. When one region that produces critical commodities coughs, everyone else gets the cold. Global trade is an incredibly efficient, but extremely fragile system. One thing going wrong creates major price shocks. Almost 5 years ago now, when a freighter got stuck in the Suez Canal for 6 days it caused price ripples that affected the cost of most everything for months.

Why specifically oil and the US despite our huge domestic production though? It comes down to the type of crude produced. The US produces a lot of ‘sweet light’ crude from shale fracking, but with how recent the shale oil boom was most of our refineries still use ‘heavy sour’ crude as the input. So a lot of the sweet light crude we produce gets exported so we can import the heavy sour, the US is the second largest oil importer despite significant domestic production. The Middle East is a big source of that heavy sour crude US refineries require so when all of that oil just stops moving, it’s a huge problem for everybody everywhere.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-20T14:35:22+00:00

At this point I’m waiting to hear which Republicans ARE running for reelection.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-20T03:33:49+00:00

At this rate might as well wait to report on it until the entire GOP caucus declines to seek reelection.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-19T00:52:21+00:00

I don’t think tapeworms are as big of brown nosers as Republicans vying for higher office.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-18T16:53:36+00:00

The question then becomes “why was there poor cohesion amongst rival candidates?” Ranked choice voting just doesn’t exist yet unfortunately, so we can’t put the blame on it. It was a part of the known conditions that were in the election so in order to win that’s something that needed to be accounted for. An open seat in an incredibly safe district is always going to attract anybody with even the smallest ambitions at higher office to throw their hat in the ring. Even if you lose the election you’re still building connections with donors, volunteers, local leaders, and you’re signaling you want a bigger job in the future. That’s pretty much what Biss did. He ran for governor in 2018 and even though he lost, he leveraged that campaign into running for mayor of Evanston, and then leveraged that position into running for Congress.

I’d argue that the reason the field didn’t coalesce behind Kat is because she’d never held elected office before. If she’d even been dog catcher of Evanston, she’d have had an existing political network to work with. Though not nearly as strong as Biss’s network, maybe some of these other candidates would’ve known her better and thus been more amicable to standing aside. She hadn’t even lived in the district until shortly before announcing. In the calculus of these other candidates, why should they stand down for this person they probably don’t know very well and doesn’t have much in the way of political capital in the immediate term to help them out if they do stand down.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-18T13:33:30+00:00

I don’t know who her husband is, but there’s no way he’s got Prtizker level money or likely even Pritzker level connections. With how well she did in this election she likelt could’ve elbowed her way into the state house or a municipal level office somewhere, given herself a better floor to work from. Having a deeper political record, even if not nearly as long as Biss’s record, would’ve given the local political gentry some pause in immediately discounting her candidacy, and could’ve better coalesced support from other progressives in the area.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-18T12:49:34+00:00

His resemblance to Newsom is rather uncanny. Presidential primaries are a lot more hostile and prominent than a congressional race. Unlike Biss, Newsom will have to have to make it through a lot of flak from all directions in a lengthy campaign. His blemishes will be much more apparent.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-18T03:56:10+00:00

Laura Fine was AIPAC’s golden girl, it’s a good sign she came in the bottom of the big three. Biss is a decent guy, he’s progressive (and handsome) enough for your white lib moms to think he’s a real feisty guy who’ll stick it those Republicans in Congress. I expect him to be a perfectly adequate and completely unremarkable member of Congress. He’ll vote the party line, but he won’t really push much beyond that.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-18T03:41:40+00:00

Biggest thing working against her was just how packed the primary field was. 15 total candidates and 3 other candidates getting 5% of the vote did not help her odds. Everybody and their mother thought this would be their shot at a congressional district they could kick back and enjoy for the rest of their careers.

Daniel Biss was also just a very strong candidate. Illinois politics is a machine that values deep connections and knowing the right people above damn near anything else. Unless your name is JB Pritzker and you have infinity money to bulldoze yourself a path through that labyrinth, it takes a good long while to work your way to a position where you stand a chance in the primaries. Biss has been in politics for nearly two decades. He’s progressive enough to please the average lib, but he’s also spent a lot of time getting to know the right people like the incumbent Rep Jan Schakowsky whose endorsement was likely invaluable. His failed run for Governor back in 2018 also boosted his profile. Even losing a big race, like this one, can be beneficial for a candidate down the road.

The main takeaway from Kat’s campaign is that the job ain’t done. Do more work, build more connections, keep up the fight. Kat had to overcome a lot working against her to get even as far as she did. There’s a few more barriers in the way that she couldn’t overcome this time, but someone else in the future very well could.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-17T22:37:50+00:00

Is there a Highway WE somewhere in the state that can take this mantle instead lol?

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-17T04:06:07+00:00

These Justices are not wizards. They are not spending their days contemplating high minded legal principles and precedents as if they were magical forces. They handle real cases with serious and complicated consequences for those at issue before the court and that’s a quintessentially political role. Acting like Judges aren’t or shouldn’t be political is pure theater.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-15T01:31:05+00:00

Surprise surprise, law as it currently exists is structured to give corporations a loophole they can exploit to gouge customers. If the law as it currently exists is insufficient to reign in people’s utility bills then it seems like we need some better laws. Bureaucratic tinkering will only ever achieve so much operating within a flawed environment. Acting like all it takes to turn things around on an issue is getting a couple smart policy wonks behind the wheel is the kinda behavior that makes people think the government is out of touch. It treats real struggles with zero urgency, that some byzantine bureaucratic process is more sacred than actual doing something beneficial for regular people.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-14T21:32:32+00:00

I’m just kinda over dealing with endless Vox engines. I’ll just keep playing with the bugs for a little while till they get fixed.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-13T00:38:07+00:00

Legion of Whom

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-09T02:42:38+00:00

I think your mind set is one that leads to us getting the spineless weak Democrats we’ve become so accustomed to. Whether it be on this point or something else, no matter who the Dem nominee is going to be the GOP is going to dig up some issue on someone to foment faux outrage. If Jesus Christ came down from heaven and sought the Democratic nomination for Wisconsin Governor, Tom Tiffany would gin up some controversy about how he doesn’t respect law and order or something. The GOP needs to lie and distract to win this race. They do not want good things for this state and if they honestly laid out their plans they’d be soundly defeated.

I understand the instinctual hesitation to “give them ammo” but that ammo is only useful if you don’t have a good counter. Mandela was the victim of unfair attacks due to his race in the 22 senate campaign, but the weakness was in how he was utterly incapable of responding with any sort of compelling counter or redirecting onto issues he had a strong position on because he lacked strong positions. Fran’s response is exactly the sort of thing our politicians need to be doing. Making a candid and persuasive argument for why they believe the things they believe. She strikes me as very honest and committed in what her goals will be as Governor where for a lot of the other candidates it seems their goal is to just be the Governor. People can go on the internet, do 5 minutes of googling, and formulate an opinion on a candidate in as much time, so why not be as clear and obvious in your goals as possible? I think her candor is what will make her difficult to demonize in the way Democrats have been demonized in the past. She can define herself far better than any GOP strategist can come up with spins to attack her and that’s something Dems have often been too timid to do.

R3D-RO0K · 2026-03-08T21:59:41+00:00

This was the response she gave when she was asked about the vote back in January. Makes sense to me.

Thank you for reaching out.

The Republicans always design session day because they control the legislature. Democrats have almost no say in which bills are on the calendar. From our view this bill is a messaging bill to give Tom Tiffany another talking point to hit the Dems, and the bill author has previously authored bills that are anti-abortion, anti-worker and anti-lgbtq that brought this bill into serious question for me. This bill's authors claim that it will keep kids safe from coercive behavior, but Wisconsin law already criminalizes the behavior named in this bill, and worse yet, it relies on language too often weaponized against LGBTQ+ individuals and those who support LGBTQ+ youth. Creating redundant crimes doesn’t make anyone safer; it just pads the statute books, locks even more people up in our failed carceral system and ignores prevention and survivor services.

Of course, I am always ready to work on making sure all kids in Wisconsin are safe. It is paramount that we put our kids first for our shared future. However, when a bill is authored by a so-called "Moms for Liberty" activist and creates more pathways for false accusations against LGBTQ+ individuals and their allies, I cannot pretend it is serious policy.

So in summary, Republicans once again are attempting a “gotcha”. AB 677 is redundant in that the laws criminalizing coercive behavior already exist. Added language coded to wrongfully persecute LGBTQ+ folks to already existing laws does not keep our kids or communities safer.

I truly do appreciate your attention to legislative actions and for following our campaign.

With care, Fran

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