Attorney Rick Cveykus Announces His Candidacy for the Marathon County Circuit Court
After an unsuccessful run for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals last year, Attorney Cveykus appears to be trying a different approach. However, it's unlikely to work in his favor.
Rick Cveykus, managing law partner at Cveykus Law Office in Wausau, Wisconsin, announced his candidacy for the Marathon County Circuit Court—Branch Two on his campaign’s Facebook page today. This stands in stark contrast to his approach when running for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in the previous spring election—where in mid-October 2020, relatively early in the campaign cycle, he officially announced his candidacy in a press release, which immediately received media coverage from multiple news outlets.1 (Disclosure: I was one of the candidates who ran against Cveykus in the 2021 spring election for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals—District Three.)
After getting shellacked in that race, though, a change of approach by the Cveykus campaign this time around is not entirely surprising. However, Cveykus has failed to learn from his loss in last spring’s judicial election. Unless he fundamentally changes his current approach, he’s likely to suffer the same fate, once again.
Attorney Rick Cveykus Runs for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals—and Loses Badly to Outagamie County Circuit Court Judge Gregory Gill, Jr.
When Cveykus ran for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals in the previous spring election, his first act was to hire Nation Consulting, a political consulting firm “with ties to the Democratic National Committee and [Wisconsin] Democratic Party.” According to his campaign committee’s finance reports, Cveykus ultimately paid a total of $10,000 in consulting fees to the Democratic-affiliated political consulting firm. But the decision to hire National Consulting did not bode well for the Cveykus campaign.
Unlike his opponent, who had backing from most of Wisconsin’s state court of appeals judges, Cveykus did not receive a single endorsement from a current or former Wisconsin appellate court judge. And although Cveykus nominally raised $62,500 over the course of the campaign, that figure obscured the amount of popular support behind it—as most of the campaign contributions the Cveykus campaign received came directly from the candidate himself, in the form of a $40,000 personal loan to his campaign committee.
While his campaign was not as popular as he marketed it to be to the public, Cveykus did receive some from the Wisconsin Democratic Party apparatus. For instance, Cveykus received monetary support from Tricia Zunker, a former Democratic candidate for Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District, and Wausau Mayor Katie Rosenberg, a self-identified political “progressive.” Furthermore, Cveykus received an in-kind contribution from the Wisconsin Democratic Party—apparently, in the form of political consulting services.
The political support the Cveykus campaign received from the Wisconsin Democratic Party was not surprising. As the Wisconsin Law Journal reported, Cveykus had made a number of monetary contributions to Democratic candidates over the past decade—including one made just five and a half months before he declared his candidacy for the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.
In the end, though, Cveykus did not win. Instead, he lost to Outagamie County Circuit Court Judge Gregory Gill, Jr.—a candidate who hired an extreme nationalist as his campaign manager and then endorsed fetal personhood later in the campaign. And Cveykus lost to him badly, by a 10 percent margin.
In retrospect, maybe Cveykus should have reconsidered his decision to forgo developing a formal campaign platform in favor of raising money for his judicial campaign and collecting endorsements from Democratic political insiders. Then again, implementing that change might not have affected the outcome of the election anyway. The public could still have plausibly decided that Judge Gill, Jr., was the more qualified candidate of the two.2
Attorney Cveykus Announces His Candidacy for the Marathon County Circuit Court—Seemingly Ready to Repeat the Mistakes His Campaign Made in Last Spring’s Election
A few months ago, back in mid-October, Marathon County Circuit Court—Branch Two Judge Greg Huber filed a notification of non-candidacy with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, according to a document posted on the commission’s website. That notification informed the state elections commission that Judge Huber was not going to seek reelection.
Five weeks later, on the last day of November, William Harris, an attorney who works at Wisconsin Judicare and also serves as a Marathon County Board supervisor, announced his candidacy for the position on his campaign’s Facebook page. Branding himself as an agent of change, Harris argued that the “rights of both victims and defendants” need to be balanced in order “to ensure fairness” for all participants in the state court system, but also contended that state court judges need to “be more thoughtful in looking at rehabilitative solutions and not just purely punitive ones.”
Harris also discussed how being a member of a racial minority would inform his duties as a judge. “[A]s a black man, I will bring a different perspective, life experience, and a new voice to the [Marathon County Circuit Court],” he wrote.
One day after Harris announced his candidacy, the Cveykus campaign committee amended its registration statement to inform the state elections commission that Cveykus was also going to be seeking election to the soon-to-be vacated judgeship on the Marathon County Circuit Court. The campaign committee’s amended registration statement indicates that, Carly Wilson, a senior associate at Nation Consulting, is serving as the committee’s treasurer. Like his candidacy in last spring’s election, it appears that Cveykus has again hired Nation Consulting to help run his campaign operation.
A few weeks later, Cveykus announced his candidacy for the position on his personal Facebook page. “I can’t thank enough those who have supported me before, and have supported me to run again,” he wrote.
However, neither the Cveykus campaign website nor the campaign’s Facebook page reveal a formal campaign platform—or anything remotely suggesting what the candidate might attempt to accomplish once elected as a circuit court judge.
Apparently, Cveykus has failed to learn from his loss in last spring’s judicial election. Unless he fundamentally changes his current approach, he’s likely to suffer the same fate, once again.
In a previous essay for Wisconsin Jurisprudence, I argued that “Cveykus does not possess the basic competency required to be an appellate attorney—let alone an appellate court judge—in the Wisconsin court system.”