December 10, 2006

That's the headline atop the National Law Journal's story about last month's state court balloting, in which candidates backed by trial lawyers and labor unions beat business-backed candidates in several high-profile races. The story's lead sentence refers to special interests having donated large sums but "failed to defeat their opponents". For example, they failed to unseat incumbent Georgia Justice Carol Hunstein, who won handily after becoming "the first judicial candidate in Georgia to raise nearly $1 million in a campaign, mostly from trial lawyers." Nice to know who counts as a special interest and who doesn't.