The last time Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul defeated Republican challenger Eric Toney, it was 2022 and then-former President Donald Trump was not a factor in the contest. Four years later, Trump’s “I am your retribution” presidency has no limits in Congress and no guardrails in the US Department of Justice, leaving it to state attorneys general to be the legal bulwark against federal government overreach, once a core principle of Republicanism.
Kaul has been part of dozens of lawsuits that ask courts to determine that the Trump administration has illegally taken actions that diminish rights and cut federal spending. Toney, the district attorney in Fond du Lac County, would likely dismantle many if not all of those challenges and also march in lockstep with Trump over voting rights and abortion access.
State lawsuits
There have been at least 70 state-initiated lawsuits that attorneys general have filed to protect rights and secure federal funding. Kaul has enlisted the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ) to file in support of many of them.
Most recently, Kaul signed on to a lawsuit challenging Trump’s latest effort to institute global trade tariffs, despite being told by the US Supreme Court earlier this year that such tariffs were not constitutional.
“The Trump administration’s illegal tariffs have been harmful to the economy and made life less affordable for Wisconsin families,” said Kaul. “President Trump needs to let go of his fixation with tariffs.”
Many of the lawsuits target Trump for trying to rescind funding that had already been approved by Congress in the past and had become law to fund grants or programs affecting a wide range of services: public health programs and medical research, libraries and museums, even emergency response and counterterrorism funding.
Others seek to block rule changes such as the proposed weakening of clean air standards, rolling back limits on PFAS industrial chemicals in drinking water, restricting the mailing of absentee ballots, and weakening protections for retirement accounts by allowing risky investments in cryptocurrency.
Toney, speaking to delegates at this year’s state Republican Party convention, criticized Kaul for filing “lawsuit after lawsuit — driving resources away from public safety to push a radical, left-wing agenda.”
Toney would be more likely to use the attorney general’s office to target Madison rather than Washington, saying he would be a “firewall” against a “left-wing agenda” from a “liberal supermajority” on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, referring to justices elected by Wisconsin voters.
Abortion rights
Last October, when Toney announced this second attempt to unseat Kaul, Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Devin Remiker emphasized how women’s reproductive rights would be a top issue.
“Eric Toney is an extremist when it comes to taking personal health care decisions away from women,” Remiker said. “In 2022, Toney said he would not rule out weaponizing the DOJ to prosecute victims of rape or incest.”
The 2022 campaign was held in the shadow of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling that repealed abortion rights protected by Roe v. Wade. For a time, abortion care in Wisconsin was suspended in legal limbo over the meaning of an 1849 state statute. Kaul filed a lawsuit that ended with the liberal state Supreme Court majority ruling that more recent state laws restricting the availability of abortions supersedes the 19th century language.
“Unfortunately, for 15 months, women in Wisconsin had to experience something that for essentially two generations, people hadn’t had to go through, which was being denied the autonomy and the freedom to make their own reproductive health care decisions,” Kaul told reporters upon the ruling in July 2025. “We can’t let Wisconsin return to that kind of environment again.”
Four years ago, Toney said he would defend whatever version of state law is in effect.
Voting rights
The winner of November’s election will likely be running the state DOJ when the 2028 presidential election is being held, and Kaul will likely remind voters that Toney once called for the removal of five of the six members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission over a decision made about how nursing home residents could vote safely during the COVID pandemic in 2020.
During his unsuccessful run in 2022, Toney also filed criminal charges against five people in a case labeled by one critic as “a real abuse of prosecutorial discretion” because the voters listed a UPS Store as their voting address. One case involved a couple that had received mail there for decades because they live out of their recreational vehicle and travel the country. The complaint was dismissed, but the couple racked up more than $17,000 in legal bills because of Toney’s action.
Last year, Toney was named special prosecutor in a case involving Wausau Mayor Doug Diny, who faced potential charges after he removed an absentee ballot drop box from outside of City Hall in September 2024.
Drop boxes had enjoyed Republican support for years until Trump falsely blamed his 2020 election loss, in part, on baseless claims that drop boxes had been misused. In 2022, a conservative-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court banned their use. The current progressive-controlled court then restored their legality in 2024.
Both Diny and Toney spoke in support of the drop box ban. Toney ultimately did not file charges against Diny for the drop box removal.
Kaul has pointed to a series of false claims of voter fraud as being responsible for any reduction of public confidence in elections.
“The problem is we have baseless allegations being made by the president in particular and other people who know better not correcting that,” Kaul said in an interview. “We need to make sure that folks are able to exercise their right to vote freely and fairly. The reality is that our system works. The people who get the most votes win our elections and that’s how it should be.”
