MILWAUKEE — In a stunningly candid interview, Alejandro Verdin, Campaign Manager for now Justice Janet Protasiewicz, revealed the vulgar reason astute viewers and listeners may have noticed an equine motif in attack ads targeting former Justice Dan Kelly. It’s because a guy, years ago in a focus made the off-color remark about Kelly’s appearance:
“One guy blurted in the middle of the focus group, ‘This guy looks like a horse f***er.'” And the campaign ran with it.”
Verdin’s interview with a liberal podcast for the Daily Kos, The Downballot, opened the playbook on the campaign strategy liberal operatives used to defeat Kelly in the pivotal race. Verdin first revealed to host David Beard that the Protasiewicz campaign was rooting for Kelly to win the Primary election over Waukesha County Judge Jennifer Dorow.
“In retrospect, we would have beaten Dorow… but at the same time we saw her as a stronger candidate, so we wanted Dan Kelly,” he said.
Protasiewicz beat Kelly by 10 points in the spring election, flipping the ideological bent of the State Supreme Court from 4-3 Conservative to 4-3 liberal. Kelly was appointed to the High Court by Governor Scott Walker in 2016. He lost an election to the post in 2020 to liberal Judge Jill Karofsky. He ran again for a seat in 2023.
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Verdin told The Downballot podcast in a January interview that while the “horse f***er” comment was an inside joke amongst campaign staff, their media strategist thought there was something there.
“He literally hid visuals of horses in nearly every negative ad he produced against Dan Kelly,” Verdin bragged to the host. “He did it really well.”
It went further still. Verdin says media strategist Ben Nuckels deliberately used horse sounds and a Western theme in producing the “Dirty Dan Kelly” commercial.
“Nuckels even designed a radio ad that started with a horse sound and featured a cowboy voiceover taunting conservatives,” Verdin continued. “Just trying to like, demotivate these folks.”
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports Kelly called the revelations, “sick,” and that a source indicates Justice Protasiewcz claims she had no idea about the horse stuff.
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