Ironically, a federal judge ruled Thursday that the matching funds passed constitutional muster.

When the next Supreme Court election comes around, the matter will likely be moot. While the public financing law will remain on the books until the Legislature decides to kill it, Gov. Scott Walker has moved to dry up the funding source in his budget. That would make it unlikely that any candidate would opt to use public financing because the pool of money would probably be gone before they got all their funds.

Both Prosser and Kloppenburg have said the law has allowed them to avoid the nasty business of fund-raising, which has let them do face-to-face campaigning that otherwise would not have been possible.

But it's clear in these final days of the campaign that the candidates' messages are being hijacked by groups that see this election as pivotal. Democrats, progressives and union backers see a Prosser defeat as a way to send a message to Walker that his attempts to strip public workers of union rights have electoral consequences. And Republicans and business interests see it as an epic struggle to keep their hard-won conservative majority.

"That's sort of the typical impact of well-intentioned campaign finance reform," Marquette University Law professor Rick Esenberg told me a few weeks ago. "Everybody was upset because of the ads these independent organizations ran. So what they decided to do, because it's all they could do, is basically set up a system that marginalized the candidates because they'll never be able to raise enough money to have their own voice be heard. That's what's going to happen if this turns into a competitive race. The independents will come in and they'll dominate the debate."