Tens of millions of dollars flooding into a state election. A nakedly political candidate for a judgeship. Huge policy stakes for a key battleground state.
Two years ago, a race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court vividly demonstrated how local elections that once flew under the radar were becoming expensive, nationalized and highly partisan affairs.
Now, Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin are preparing for yet another contest in April that will again determine control of the state’s top court — and with it the fate of abortion rights, labor rights and two congressional districts.
The race is likely to be even more partisan, negative and expensive than the 2023 election, whose $56 million price tag shattered national spending records for a judicial contest.
The election will be the first test of Democratic and Republican enthusiasm in the new Trump era, and it will unfold in the state where the new president won his narrowest margin of victory. With few marquee contests in 2025 — and no other statewide races until November — Wisconsin’s court race stands out as potentially the biggest, highest-stakes election in the year after Mr. Trump’s return to power.
And while the contest is formally nonpartisan, it has already been stripped of any veneer of nonpartisanship.
Democratic allies of the liberal candidate, Judge Susan Crawford of Dane County, say that electing her will preserve abortion rights in the state and lead to new congressional maps that will help Democrats flip two Republican-held House seats.
Republican supporters of the conservative candidate, Judge Brad Schimel of Waukesha County, a former Wisconsin attorney general, warn that maintaining the court’s 4-to-3 liberal majority will bring about the end of a host of laws enacted a decade ago by former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican.
“We’re going to see a campaign where decorum is dead,” said Brian Reisinger, a former aide to Wisconsin Republicans including Mr. Walker and Senator Ron Johnson. “This is going to be a bare-knuckle fight in a state that has a history of bruising Supreme Court races. It’s about to get turbocharged.”
Electing a ‘third legislative body’
The contest is just the latest state judicial election to become a pitched political battle.
In North Carolina, Republican Supreme Court justices could overturn a narrow victory by a Democratic judicial candidate. In Ohio, Republicans swept three State Supreme Court races last year after millions of dollars in spending for the Democrats by former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and for the Republicans by the billionaire Richard Uihlein. And on Pennsylvania’s top court, three liberal justices will face retention elections in November, when they will run without opposition and voters will decide whether they should serve another term.
“We might as well be electing a third legislative body and having that body — whichever way the ideology goes — decide these important issues, as opposed to looking at this through a constitutional lens,” said Janine P. Geske, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who has called for ending court elections because of their increasingly political nature.
Since 2023, when liberal justices in Wisconsin seized the majority for the first time in 15 years, they have prompted the Republican-controlled Legislature to redraw State Assembly and State Senate maps and have undone a prohibition on ballot drop boxes.
This year, the court is expected to decide cases involving abortion rights and a 2011 law signed by Mr. Walker that ended collective bargaining rights for most public employees — a measure that has been the bane of Democrats and their labor-union allies.
And then there are the state’s congressional maps. Since 2023, they have resulted in Republicans holding six of eight House seats, even as other statewide elections have been decided by a percentage point or less.
“Chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026,” read the subject line of an email invitation to a briefing last week for Democratic donors with Judge Crawford and Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic chairman.
Among those who organized the event were aides to Reid Hoffman, the billionaire Democratic donor and a robust supporter of Wisconsin Democrats. Former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who is the chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, also plans to travel to Wisconsin to campaign for Judge Crawford.
Republicans look to learn from their 2023 errors
Republicans, who last year watched Democrats shrink the G.O.P.’s state legislative majorities under new maps, agree that the stakes are high.
Edith Jorge-Tuñón, the president of the Republican State Leadership Committee, which helps candidates for state legislatures, wrote in a memo to donors this month that if Judge Schimel won in April, last year’s Wisconsin legislative redistricting “could be reversed by a new conservative majority.”
Representative Tom Tiffany, who represents northern Wisconsin, was among several Republicans who said the Supreme Court election was more important than the state’s 2026 governor’s race.
“There’s a virtual guarantee that they will overturn the congressional maps if Ms. Crawford wins this race,” Mr. Tiffany said. “It’s no longer an academic exercise that this is what could happen. This is what is happening.”
Republicans have pointed to a weak candidate and a divisive primary in their 2023 Supreme Court defeat, when a conservative former justice, Dan Kelly, lost by 11 percentage points to Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge.
A larger factor was Justice Protasiewicz’s decision to accept an endorsement and funding from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which funneled $10 million to her campaign, while Mr. Kelly declined direct funding from the Republican Party of Wisconsin. He relied instead on outside groups and super PACs, which spent less and paid far more for television advertising than he could have as a candidate.
Brian Schimming, the Wisconsin Republican chairman, said he had maintained most of the party infrastructure that won the state for Mr. Trump to help Judge Schimel. But more important, Mr. Schimming said, is how he hopes to funnel money from conservative donors through the state Republican Party, which can accept unlimited contributions and send the cash to endorsed candidates.
“This race is not Dan Kelly the sequel,” Mr. Schimming said. “The party is very, very committed to making sure that we are competitive in April.”
Television advertising, which began this month with ads from both candidates, is likely to focus on base-motivating issues like abortion rights for Democrats and crime and transgender issues for Republicans.
In interviews last year, Judge Schimel said that “we’re going to nationalize” the race and that he expected outside conservative groups to spend $10 million to $15 million on his behalf. Last week, he attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration. On Thursday, Elon Musk posted on his social media site that it was “very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” nodding to baseless claims about drop boxes and voter fraud.
Mr. Kelly declined to comment about the race.
Abortion rights on the line
The race, like many others in Wisconsin, is likely to be dominated by abortion rights.
As attorney general, Judge Schimel helped map out a strategy to restrict abortion rights. And last summer, in the early stages of his campaign for the court, he told supporters he backed the state’s 1849 law banning abortion, which became valid when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The old law was put on hold in December 2023 and is likely to come before the state high court later this year.
“They’ve got several issues in front of them,” he told a crowd in Adams County, according to audio of the meeting shared with The New York Times. “One is the 1849 ban on abortions, which, by the way — what is flawed about that law?”
At another stop, in Chilton, Wis., Judge Schimel declared: “There is not a constitutional right to abortion in our State Constitution. That will be a sham if they find that.”
He declined to be interviewed, but his spokesman, Jacob Fischer, said that Judge Schimel would “not prejudge any case” and would “enforce and respect the will of the voters.”
In an interview, Judge Crawford declined to address the 1849 law or the challenge to collective bargaining by public employees. But she did say that the state government should not be in the business of regulating abortions.
“I believe as a woman that I should be the one to make decisions about my own body and my health care, together with my doctors,” she said. “I trust other women to make those same decisions.”
Judge Crawford said she had not thought about whether the state’s congressional lines were fair. Judge Schimel, during his term as attorney general, defended previous Republican-drawn maps that gave the G.O.P. an advantage in both the State Legislature and Congress.
Both candidates are expected to describe the other as a partisan extremist in a torrent of attack ads, turning the election into yet another test of which side is more energized to vote.
“I don’t know how much of voting these days is determined by issues” said Representative Mark Pocan, a Democrat who represents Madison, the state’s capital, “as opposed to Team Red or Team Blue getting out their vote.”
Theodore Schleifer and Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/us/politics/wisconsin-supreme-court-race.html
