On Monday evening, Wisconsin released the results from its controversial April 7th election, which took place amid poll closures and fear for the health and safety of voters during a pandemic. Joe Biden easily beat Bernie Sanders in the state’s Democratic Presidential primary. (Sanders, as was widely expected, suspended his campaign the day after the election.) The more surprising result was on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where a progressive challenger, Jill Karofsky, defeated a Donald Trump-backed incumbent, Daniel Kelly, by more than ten percentage points. The court, which is expected to weigh in on at least one crucial voting-rights decision this year, is now split between four conservatives and three liberals.

Karofsky’s win was especially significant because, just a few days earlier, the state’s Supreme Court had played a central role in the conflict over whether to hold the election. On April 3rd, Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor, Tony Evers, called on the Republican state legislature to postpone the election. It refused, and Evers then invoked broad emergency powers to do so, but he was overruled by the state Supreme Court, and the United States Supreme Court blocked efforts to extend absentee voting. Many Democrats described Republicans’ insistence on holding the election as an effort at voter suppression. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Democratic stronghold, only around three per cent of polling stations were open, owing to limited numbers of poll workers. Across the state, voters complained that they never received absentee ballots that they had requested.

Shortly after the results were released, I spoke to Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. In the weeks leading up to the election, Wikler and the state Party had organized a massive absentee-ballot effort. Wikler, who until last year was the Washington director of MoveOn, often stresses the importance of delivering Wisconsin to the Democrats in this fall’s Presidential election. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Republican voter-suppression efforts may have backfired; whether Evers, who at first resisted efforts to postpone the election, made strategic errors; and what Joe Biden needs to do in order to beat Donald Trump in the state in November.

Do you view this result as a response to Republican efforts to suppress the vote?

I think the Republican attempts to suppress votes in Wisconsin backfired profoundly. There is a concept in psychology called “moral injury,” which refers to seeing something happen—or feeling like one failed to prevent something from happening—that is so fundamentally wrong that it tears at the fabric of your moral expectations of the world. And that describes how voters across Wisconsin felt as they watched the G.O.P. force us into an in-person election that every public-health official warned could cost lives. It reminds me of the height of the family-separation crisis and the backlash that followed, in 2018. And, like in 2018, people wanted to fight back with everything they could. For many voters, that meant finding a way to request and return an absentee ballot. For others, it meant braving the coronavirus and standing for hours in line, even in rain and hail, to cast a vote.

You tweeted that voters who “don’t like being suppressed, rose up.” But I have seen you, in interviews, cite voter suppression as the reason that Democrats have had trouble in Wisconsin. Is there any inconsistency there?

Voter-I.D. laws, restrictions on registering to vote, elimination of funded student governments that conduct campus outreach—all those voter-suppression tactics clearly drive down voter participation. Forcing an in-person election during a pandemic and suing all the way to the United States Supreme Court, in a last-ditch effort to prevent an obviously necessary measure to protect public health, had the kind of acute and vicious quality that invites a different kind of reaction.

Do you have some sense of how many of these absentee ballots were cast before the coronavirus really hit the state and the controversy erupted?

There are graphs of absentee ballots requested and returned day by day. The spike in absentee ballots absolutely took place after the coronavirus started to spread. The sea change happened as public fear of this pandemic began to explode.

Why did it take Governor Evers so long to call for a postponement? Was that an error?

Governor Evers issued the safer-at-home order on March 24th and called for ballots to be mailed to every Wisconsin voter three days later. By the next week, a federal judge declined to postpone the election itself, and said it was an action that had to be taken by the Governor and the state legislature, and the Governor called on the state legislature to act the following day. This has been a fast-moving public-health emergency, and the Governor is responsible for every aspect of keeping the public safe and has taken heat from Republicans each time he has pushed further to protect the public health. I am grateful he tried to do the right thing, and I am still furious that Republicans shut down efforts to protect voters, both through their power in the legislature and by suing to the highest courts in the state and country.

I understand that, but, into early April, the Governor was trying to keep the election date and said it was important to democracy that it happened. Republicans may have been unwilling to move it, but Democrats were also divided on it for a while.

Other states only had primary elections. In Wisconsin, our spring election included the Presidential primary but also three thousand eight hundred and thirty-one state and local elections. Wisconsin elections are also unusually complicated in the way they are administered. We have eighteen hundred and fifty-two municipal clerks who are responsible for sending out absentee ballots. If there had been a safe way to conduct in-person elections, that would have been far preferable. But it became increasingly clear that that wasn’t the case, and poll workers were dropping out in accelerating numbers, leading to more and more election-site closures as the date drew near.

So you are saying that is why it was harder to push the vote off?

Yes, exactly. In some places, the Party has the authority to change a primary or caucus. In Wisconsin, election laws are written in the statute, and the whole machinery of government revolves around them.

What are your biggest concerns about efforts to suppress the vote in November, and how are you planning to respond? Moreover, what voter issues are likely to come up before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which now is seen to be divided between four conservatives and three liberals?

If voter-suppression Republicans control the courts and the legislature, the most powerful method to protect the vote is organizing, and, as we approached the spring election, the Democratic Party in Wisconsin and an array of progressive groups organized with a greater volume and depth than we have ever seen in a spring election in our state. As we go toward the fall, we have to fight for the right to vote with everything we have got, which means negotiating in Congress and state legislatures across the country. It means bringing court cases wherever possible to protect the ballot, and it means exposing what Republicans are doing to the harsh light of public scrutiny. Republicans don’t like to admit that so much of their electoral strategy is built around suppressing the vote of people who disagree with them, and, when it is as naked and raw as what they just did in Wisconsin, it can undermine itself by outraging the public conscience.