The voters of Wisconsin cast their vote yesterday in a race for a vacant seat on the state’s supreme court, as ideological control of the court hung in the balance at a critical moment for Wisconsin’s future. The result was deeply disappointing: Progressive circuit court Judge Susan Crawford of Dane County handily defeated conservative Waukesha County circuit court Judge Brad Schimel. Crawford’s margin of victory — in this swing state which voted for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris in 2024 by less than one percentage point — was a robust ten percentage points.
The race was for an open seat, with Republicans hoping to take the majority. Instead, progressives will continue to control the court, 4-3.
The loss is another sign of a deep change in the electorate: As the major parties have slowly bled their ancestral voter bases to one another throughout the Trump era, the side effect is that Democrats — increasingly the party of ideologically motivated, high-frequency voters — now demonstrate a significant turnout advantage over the new Republican coalition in any election where Donald Trump himself is not on the ballot.
As the party controlling the White House, Republicans also inevitably faced structural headwinds in special elections, and Trump’s actions during his first months in office have predictably motivated his opponents.
In that regard, it probably wasn’t a good idea for Elon Musk to make it easier for Democrats to make the race about national politics by showing up for his own high-profile campaign event in the final days. But the talk about Democrats “overcoming” Musk’s millions is absurd given that Democrats had a massive spending advantage prior to Musk’s engagement in the race, driven by well-heeled donors like George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker.
Regardless, the failure to reclaim Wisconsin’s court will have large-scale consequences given the activism of the liberal majority. Activists are seeking — as always — to undo former Governor Scott Walker’s signature conservative achievement via lawsuit: Act 10, the landmark 2011 reform bill that finally disentangled Wisconsin’s government from its statutorily incestuous relationship with the state’s once-dominant public sector unions. As we wrote earlier this year:
Act 10 was a top-to-bottom win for Wisconsin taxpayers, and it was achieved by breaking unions’ power over the state government. They’ll likely get that power back if Brad Schimel doesn’t win the supreme court election.
He did not. And now a decade’s worth of conservative reform in the state — the Tea Party’s greatest substantive legacy, no less — threatens to be judicially undone. The court may also rewrite the state’s congressional map, potentially swinging two seats to the Democrats.
It shouldn’t be that, “As goes the Wisconsin Supreme Court, so goes Wisconsin public policy,” but that’s what the state is looking at.