Brad Schimel, the conservative nominee in the supreme court election, says like-minded voters feel ‘figuratively punched in the face by what this court is doing.’
Brad Schimel, the conservative nominee in the supreme court election, says like-minded voters feel ‘figuratively punched in the face by what this court is doing.’
W hen traditional conservative judicial candidates make their pitch to voters, one crucial jurisprudential dictum typically tops everything else: Judges don’t make law; legislatures do.
This conservative principle is at stake in this spring’s Wisconsin supreme court election, argues conservative nominee Brad Schimel, the Badger State’s former attorney general who now serves as a circuit court judge in Waukesha County. “Judges should faithfully apply the law the way the legislature wrote it to the facts of a case,” he told National Review in a wide-ranging interview about his candidacy. “We shouldn’t decide what’s good policy and what’s bad policy. “The legislature is, frankly, free to write bad laws if they want to. Judges don’t get to interfere with that.”
“If they do,” he continued, “then it unravels our whole constitutional system.”
On April 1, Wisconsinites will cast their ballots in a crucial judicial contest that will determine the balance of power on the battleground state’s highest court. The stakes are incredibly high, since liberals’ 4–3 majority hangs in the balance.
State supreme court elections in Wisconsin are technically nonpartisan but draw state party endorsements and millions in outside spending from political action committees, billionaire donors, and grassroots groups. And the contest between Schimel and Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford — a former prosecutor and attorney who has represented Planned Parenthood and a teachers’ union — will have a major impact on how the state supreme court handles legal challenges on a range of topics, from collective bargaining to abortion.
To win, Republicans must convince low-propensity Trump-leaning voters to show up to the polls for an off-year contest. This may prove tougher than it sounds.
“It’ll be challenging because if you look at the data in Wisconsin, what carries President Trump is a group of voters who only vote when Trump is on the ballot,” deputy White House chief of staff James Blair said onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month.
Schimel insists he’s running a very different campaign from that of Dan Kelly, a former state supreme court justice who lost the most recent supreme court race in 2023 to liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz by eleven points — a stunning margin for perennially purple Wisconsin. Spending in that race exceeded $50 million, breaking records for the most money ever spent in a state supreme court race and flipping the balance of power on the court for the first time in 15 years.
The key problem in that contest, Republicans say, is that Kelly declined contributions from the state party — a fateful decision that left him badly outspent by his opposition and that completely drowned out on the airwaves.
To avoid a messy primary and better compete on the spending front this time around, Schimel got into the race 16 months before the election and made clear from the start that he welcomes heavy spending on his behalf, so long as it’s legal. “When you get elected, you can’t be partisan,” Schimel tells NR. “But it is clear that in these races, we have to accept all legal contributions. Dan wouldn’t accept contributions from the Republican Party.”
Republicans have gotten the memo. As National Review reported last month, the Republican State Leadership Committee recently committed $2 million in advertising spending in the race, buoying another multimillion-dollar spending commitment made by Elon Musk–aligned groups: Building America’s Future and America PAC. Crawford has predictably drawn spending from a network of deep-pocketed liberal donors, including George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
Schimel believes that Trump’s narrow 2024 victory in Wisconsin gave conservatives “proof of life” in statewide elections. Conservative voters have not paid close enough attention to state supreme court contests in the past, he says, because “they didn’t get how the court could damage us as a state.” Now that liberals have the majority, they’re awake and “they feel figuratively punched in the face by what this court is doing.”
Asked whether the current court has egregiously erred, he pointed to the liberal majority’s recent decision to overturn the state’s legislative maps as a prime example of liberal judicial overreach. During the 2023 campaign, Republicans lambasted then-candidate Janet Protasiewicz for calling Republican-drawn state legislative maps “rigged.” She later dclined to recuse herself from a case involving the same map, siding with the liberal majority in overturning it.
“No surprise: The day after she’s sworn in, the lawsuit is filed, and within months, our court on a sham decision, struck down our legislative maps,” said Schimel of the court’s ruling, which invited a stinging dissent from conservative Justice Annette Ziegler. For Schimel, decisions such as these demonstrate that the stakes couldn’t be higher come April 1. “This liberal court is taking away that stability where people can predict what the law will be tomorrow based on what it is today, because we have a court that’s flipping it back and forth based on their political agenda.”