After retiring from the Supreme Court in 2006, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor devoted her remaining active years to rescuing the process of choosing judges from the grip of partisan politics. Despite having run successfully for judicial office herself, she believed that judicial selection should be divorced from raising money and glad-handing voters.

Judges to the top courts are now elected in roughly half the states. Judicial elections have long been deplored by good-government organizations, many of which eagerly embraced Justice O’Connor’s efforts. In 2014, Justice O’Connor and a Denver-based organization, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, published what they called the O’Connor Judicial Selection Plan, under which a broad-based screening and nominating commission would send a list of names to the governor, who would have to choose one of them. The successful candidate would later undergo a performance evaluation and face a yes-or-no retention election, without an opponent.

It’s easy to imagine what Justice O’Connor, who died in 2023 at 93, would have thought about Tuesday’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election, with its $100 million price tag and stratospheric political stakes.

I fully recognize that what I’m about to say is good-government apostasy. Nevertheless, I’d like to suggest that Justice O’Connor may have been wrong.

With its liberal outcome, the Wisconsin election was widely understood as a negative referendum on the Trump administration and specifically as a rejection of Elon Musk’s check-writing intervention in the state’s affairs. It certainly was those things, but it was something else as well. The victory of the liberal candidate, Judge Susan Crawford, means that the Wisconsin Supreme Court will retain its 4-to-3 liberal majority. And that almost surely means that Wisconsin’s days as one of the most gerrymandered of states are numbered.

Although Wisconsin’s voters divide roughly 50-50 (Donald Trump’s victory there last November by 29,000 votes was his closest winning margin in any state), Republicans control six of the eight congressional districts and hold both houses of the State Legislature. Before Republicans took control in 2011, Democrats held five of the eight seats.