Left: FILE – Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz attends her first hearing as a justice, Sept. 7, 2023, in Madison, Wis. Protasiwiecz’s campaign consultant inserted images of horses in ads as a vulgar joke about her opponent, her campaign manager told a liberal podcast last month. (AP Photo/Morry Gash, File). Right: Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Republican-backed Dan Kelly participates in a debate Tuesday, March 21, 2023, in Madison, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
A political strategist working for controversial liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Janet Protasiewicz included equine sounds and images in negative campaign ads to reference a joke that Protasiewicz’s opponent looked “like a horse-f—–,” according to the justice’s campaign manager.
Who is Janet Protasiewicz?
Protasiewicz was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April 2023, and by taking the bench the following August, she gave the court a 4-3 liberal majority for the first time since 2007. Prior to Protasiewicz’s time on the bench, the court’s then-conservative majority issued several rulings relating to the 2020 presidential election that the court’s liberal justices derided as “downright dangerous to our democracy.”
The judge’s campaign was heavily financed by campaign contributions from Democrats, and she became a target for conservatives, who threatened to impeach her if she refused to recuse herself from litigation over districting maps. Republicans, including Former Gov. Scott Walker, said that Protasiewicz was obligated to recuse from the case, because she once slammed the state’s gerrymandered districting maps as “absolutely positively rigged.”
Protasiewicz refused to recuse, and eventually, the impeachment threats lost steam after the Judicial Commission dismissed complaints against her and the Republican Assembly speaker said impeachment was inappropriate.
The campaign
Protasiewicz campaigned to replace retiring chief justice Patience Roggensack from spring 2022 until the April 2023 election. In the general election, Protasiewicz faced off against former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly, a Republican, who served on the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 2016 to 2020, then lost the election to Jill Karofsky, a Democrat.
While campaigning, Protasiewicz was a vocal proponent of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, and a just as vocal a critic of Wisconsin’s voting maps. Lawsuits over the state’s voting maps followed the 2020 election and in 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out maps that created an additional majority-Black district.
The campaign drew nationwide headlines as it became the most expensive judicial election in American history — at a price tag of a combined $42 million. Protasiewicz scored a clear victory with nearly 25% more votes than Kelly.
Those horses
In a recent episode of The Downballot podcast, Protasiewicz’s campaign manager Alejandro Verdin talked about some of the campaign ads used to help Protasiewicz secure her decisive win over Kelly. Verdin said that during a focus group in a previous campaign, a participant had been discussing Kelly.
“This guy looks like a horse-f—–,” Verdin quoted the participant.
Verdin explained that media consultant Ben Nuckels decided to “take things to another level” by hiding “visuals of horses in nearly every negative ad he produced against Dan Kelly.” Those ads include a video spot in which a small horse is standing in a background shot, and a radio ad that discussed “Dirty Dan” riding off into the sunset as audio of horse whinnies played in the background. Verdin said these references were jokes.
“It was quite hilarious,” Verdin, who once described Kelly a “radical right-wing extremist with views about the law far out of the mainstream,” said during the podcast.
Kelly, however, was not so amused.
“This is just sick,” Kelly said when asked about the use of horses in campaign ads. “Wisconsinites ought to be appalled by this kind of vulgarity and vileness.”
The intentional use of horse imagery in Wisconsin judicial campaigns, however publicized, likely will not go down in history as the most famous use of the fornicates-with-horses joke. Russian Empress Catherine the Great has, for centuries, been associated with the long-standing myth that she died while trying to have sex with a horse. Historians generally agree that the story is a likely consequence of the empress’ political enemies — though it has survived into modern times. Indeed, Hulu’s The Great used Catherine’s frustration over the widespread myth as a recurring plot point.
Nuckels did not immediately respond to request for comment.
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