Read: Wisconsin’s warning for the November election

By the day of the election, Democrats were handcuffed: They had ceased all efforts to turn out voters in person, and it was too late to push more supporters to request ballots by mail.

“We’ll find out if Republicans succeeded in stealing the election by weaponizing the pandemic,” declared Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, on a conference call with reporters before the results were released yesterday. He urged Wisconsinites who may have been disenfranchised to keep records of their attempt to vote, suggesting that they or the party could challenge the legitimacy of the election in court.

A few hours later, fears of a grand electoral larceny had swiftly melted away: Karofsky had won, and with a nearly 11-point margin in a state Donald Trump had carried by less than a single percentage point in 2016, it wasn’t even close.

“I am stunned,” Wikler told me when we spoke by phone shortly before midnight last night. The party’s internal polls had forecast “a close election,” he said—nothing like the relative romp Karofsky had won.

Republicans won a narrow victory in a supreme-court race last year, but the scheduling of this year’s election on the same day as the Democratic presidential primary—when the GOP had no competitive nomination fight to boost turnout—gave Karofsky a significant advantage. The parties had poured money into the judicial race, which would determine whether conservatives would maintain a 5–2 advantage on the supreme court or whether liberals would narrow it to 4–3. The outcome could also have a direct impact on the November election in Wisconsin, since the court appeared divided in a case it will likely have to decide, over whether more than 200,000 voters are dropped from the state’s rolls.

Then came the pandemic, which scrambled everything. The Democrats’ panic over holding the election; the closure of all but five polling places in Milwaukee, where the party has its largest concentration of votes; and the GOP’s insistence that the election go forward gave way to assumptions that Kelly would coast to victory.

“There was an array of very powerful factors blowing in opposite directions,” Wikler said.

Were the Democrats crying wolf over a catastrophe that didn’t happen? Were Republicans actually more disadvantaged by the reduction in in-person voting, because it was their base of older voters who couldn’t get to the polls and was unfamiliar with the requirements for voting by mail? Or did the GOP’s refusal to encourage more participation or postpone the election motivate Wisconsinites to turn out and punish it?

“The Republicans’ effort to suppress turned people out to vote against them,” says Dakota Hall, a Milwaukee activist who runs a group devoted to organizing young voters of color. As for older voters who might have been forced to risk their health to cast a ballot, Hall says: “They conspired against their own base.”