At a time when the surgeon general is warning that this week could be the nation’s most dangerous to date — comparing the scale of the potential loss to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 — Wisconsin is on the verge of becoming the only state in April that failed to find a way to delay voting. The Democratic governor made a last-ditch plea to close the polls. The GOP-led Legislature and Wisconsin Supreme Court shut him down.

It’s a civic catastrophe that never should have happened. But it’s also the culmination of a decade of total political war waged across one of the nation’s most competitive states — a Midwestern battleground poised to play an oversized role in the presidential election in November.

“I’ve been here 10 years watching this. I am surprised that I’m surprised,” former Wisconsin Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate said of the politics he believes pushed the election forward amid a pandemic. “If anybody thinks that if we were under Gov. [Scott] Walker that this court would have ruled the same way that they have today has not been paying attention to what’s been going on in this state for the last decade.”

The scorched earth politics that led to this moment dates back long before the polarization of the Trump era. Hundreds of millions of dollars — much of it from outside groups — have poured into state races since 2010, when Walker’s first election as governor kicked off years of acrimony that infected the state’s political culture at every level.

In 2016, when Donald Trump narrowly and unexpectedly defeated Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin, the state’s polarization rose to a new level.

On the eve of Tuesday’s election, it reached a fever pitch. The state Supreme Court — which includes Walker appointees — overturned an order by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, who himself was initially reluctant to postpone the primary, even over pleas from fellow Democrats.

A source close to Evers said the first-term governor, hemmed in by the GOP-controlled Legislature, considered it counterproductive to force an issue he would not win at a time when he needed Republican help to advance a coronavirus funding package. Evers further feared if the matter went before the state court, which holds a conservative majority, he risked inadvertently creating precedent that could threaten a governor’s emergency powers.

As the pandemic — and pleas for delay from local mayors — intensified, Evers changed his tune, leading to Monday’s order to delay the primary.

“It was a refusal of the Republicans to do their job,” Evers said in an interview. “They’ve had some opportunities, they had an opportunity to take my proposal in special session, they didn’t even talk about it. They didn’t even come back with ‘here’s Plan B; It’s clear they don’t want to deal with this.”

All of this has taken place against the backdrop of a state Supreme Court contest Tuesday in which the individual campaigns and outside groups have helped collectively spend more than $8 million.