Control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and likely future of abortion access, Republican-drafted legislative maps, and years of GOP policies in the key swing state rest on the outcome of an election Tuesday that saw record campaign spending.

The winner of the close battle between Republican-backed Dan Kelly and Democrat-backed Janet Protasiewicz will determine the majority in the court heading into the 2024 presidential election. The court came within one vote of overturning the narrow President Biden’s victory in the state in 2020, and both sides expect another close race in 2024.

It’s the last election to focus on abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade in June. It is also an example of how officially nonpartisan court races have evolved into political battles while major legal battles play out at the state level.

All of this has fueled spending that will double, and likely triple or more, the previous high of $15.4 million spent on an Illinois state justice race in 2004. Democrats spent big on Protasiewicz and Republicans on Kelly.

Democrats are trying to reverse control of the court, which has had a majority of conservative judges for the past 15 years. That has allowed the court to uphold a range of Republican priorities, including banning absentee ballot boxes last year and upholding the 2011 law except ending collective bargaining for most public employees.

Wisconsin’s political direction will be largely determined by this race for the Supreme Court, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Everything from abortion to disputes over the 2024 presidential election will fall into the lap of this court. And the winner will be the final judge on these issues.

Protasiewicz, 60, has been trying to turn the race into an abortion referendum, following a Democratic-backed agenda, loudly proclaiming her personal values ​​in support of abortion rights.

The court is expected to rule on a lawsuit challenging the 174-year-old state law that bans nearly all abortions.

That law, which took effect a year after a state came into existence, was reinstated after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe, which ended abortions in Wisconsin. Democrats, including Gov. Tony Evers, who won re-election in November, has seized on the issue.

Abortion was a real motivator for Democrats and Independents,” Burden said. It has been strengthened in these elections because the court has a real role in determining policy.

Protasiewicz won the support of Planned Parenthood and similar groups as she focused on abortion without saying how she would rule on the pending case challenging the ban. But she promised Kelly would vote for it.

Kelly, 58, has not said whether he thinks the ban is legal. But he has spoken out against abortion in the past

including in a 2012 blog post saying that the Democratic Party and the National Women’s Organization are committed to normalizing the taking of human lives

. Kelly has also done legal work for Wisconsin Right to Life, one of three anti-abortion groups that have supported him.

Abortion isn’t the only hot political issue Protasiewicz is espousing. She also called rigged the Republican-drafted legislative maps upheld by the current court and said she would like to review them.

The state Supreme Court upheld maps drawn by the Republicans in 2022. Those cards, widely regarded as some of the most gerrymandered in the country, have helped Republicans increase their hold on state legislatures to near-supermajorities even as Democrats have won statewide elections, including Evers as governor in both 2018 and 2022 and Biden in 2020.

When asked in an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio if he thought the maps drawn by the GOP were fair, Kelly responded. I think that’s a political judgement.”

Kelly was appointed to the state Supreme Court by the then government. Scott Walker, a Republican, in 2016. He served four years before being defeated on the same ballot as the Democratic presidential primary in 2020. Kelly was endorsed by then-President Trump that year. Protasiewicz has portrayed Kelly as an extreme partisan and a real threat to democracy given his ties to Republicans, including advising them on the plan to get bogus GOP voters to vote for Trump after the 2020 election he had lost.

Four of the last six Wisconsin presidential races have been decided by less than one percentage point, including Trump’s 2016 win and Biden’s 2020 win.