The Wisconsin Supreme Court election last year was supposed to decide the fate of “Western civilization.” Tuesday’s contest has been a decidedly muted affair.
Voters will choose between liberal Chris Taylor and conservative Maria Lazar in the state’s third spring high court election in just four years. But unlike the last election — which drew more than $100 million in spending and attracted major national attention — this year’s contest is barely even resonating with voters inside Wisconsin.
“I’m a big college basketball fan, and you couldn’t watch a game a year ago without seeing a Supreme Court ad,” said Alec Zimmerman, a longtime GOP operative in the state. “Watching tournament games right now, it feels like there are significantly fewer. It’s been really quiet.”
A packed November election, and the general sense that Tuesday’s contest may well be a foregone conclusion, is part of the reason why.
Statewide elections in Wisconsin have often been decided on razor-thin majorities in recent years. But liberal candidates have romped in the last three state Supreme Court races, taking control of the court in the process. It’s left Republican voters and donors in the state de-energized, some operatives say.
“I think there’s a donor burnout on the conservative side because they haven’t been winning,” said Brandon Scholz, the former executive director of the Wisconsin GOP who left the party in 2021. “If you win, sure, another check. Who loves to win? Everybody. But that wasn’t happening here.”
Then there’s the fact that, unlike last year, this election won’t immediately decide which party moves into a majority on the court. A conservative victory would merely keep the current 4-3 liberal majority from widening.
The narrow liberal majority ushered in three years ago has already brought major changes to Wisconsin. In the last year alone, the court voted to overturn an abortion ban that took effect in the state after the U.S. Supreme Court rescinded its landmark Roe v. Wade ruling. The court’s liberals also joined forces to approve Gov. Tony Evers’ use of a line-item veto to lock in a 400-year-long school funding increase. And in 2023, the newly installed liberal majority ordered new legislative maps, breaking a long-held GOP gerrymander.
Even Republicans concede that Taylor is far more likely to pull out a victory.
“It’s definitely an uphill fight,” said Ben Voelkel, a former longtime senior aide to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and onetime candidate for lieutenant governor.
The two met face to face in a fiery debate hosted by a Milwaukee television station on Thursday, in which Lazar slammed Taylor, a former Democratic state legislator, as a judicial activist and Taylor cast her opponent as beholden to “right-wing special interests.”
The two clashed over abortion restrictions and redistricting just days before the close of polls.
Lazar raised roughly a million in campaign contributions in 2025 and 2026, according to the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, to Taylor’s roughly $6 million. Data from the ad tracker AdImpact showed that Taylor and liberal groups backing her had spent more than $5 million on advertising, compared with less than $400,000 from the Lazar campaign and conservative groups.
The spending is a far cry from 2025, when Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, poured millions into Republican Brad Schimel’s Supreme Court campaign. Musk was the one who argued bombastically that the fate of Western civilization rested upon the results of the spring election, and he personally barnstormed the state to drum up support.
Schimel was then soundly defeated by liberal Judge Susan Crawford.
“They’re like, wait a minute, you want me to drop how many more millions this cycle, like I did the last two, three cycles, for a losing effort?” said Scholz. “You want me to drop a couple million dollars to preserve a minority?”
Democrats are bullish about their chances, despite a March poll from Marquette University that indicated Taylor is nearly as unfamiliar to voters as Lazar. Fifty-three percent of voters said they remained undecided.
“It shows me somebody else’s messages are falling flat,” argued Nathan Conrad, a campaign spokesperson for Lazar. “If you have that much money and you can’t win over voters this early it means that you’ve got a message problem. And I think Maria definitely does not have a message problem.”
Democratic strategists concede that the intense national attention and statewide frenzy that helped them rack up large margins in the last several elections isn’t there this time.
“This does feel like more of a race like six years ago,” said Alejandro Verdin, the campaign manager for liberal state Justice Janet Protasiewicz’s successful 2023 Supreme Court bid.
But they are still confident that Taylor will win — perhaps by a hefty margin.
“This race for Supreme Court is very different because Republicans have completely rolled over,” he said. “They’re still licking their wounds from the massive whooping they received from Janet Protasiewicz and Susan Crawford.”
Democrats are still eager to turn out their voters, looking for some way to communicate urgency in an environment where the majority isn’t at stake. Voters can’t rest on their laurels, Taylor said in an interview.
“The composition of this court can change very quickly because we have so many elections coming up,” she said. “So nobody should feel that this current majority is set in stone. It’s not. We have four elections after me.”
And few believe Tuesday’s election will project much about the state of the state later in November — or in two years when a presidential election roars through the battleground.
The governor’s race, which will see Trump-endorsed Rep. Tom Tiffany go up against the winner of a crowded Democratic primary, figures to be among the most closely watched elections this fall.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes are among the Democrats running for their party’s nod in the August primary. Both sides expect a hard-fought — and expensive — battle at the polls.
Still, Lazar’s camp is arguing the Supreme Court race isn’t over, and that she can pull off an upset.
“I think we were always going to be playing the underdog when you have someone who has almost unlimited resources to come against you, it’s always going to feel like it’s an uphill battle,” Conrad, Lazar’s spokesperson, said. “But I think we have the right message, and I think we have an opportunity here for people to feel like they can get some common sense and sanity back on the court.”
A version of this article first appeared in POLITICO Pro’s Morning Score. Want to receive the newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories.
Read the full article here
