Republicans Hit Bottom in Supreme Court Race

Judge Chris Taylor (left) and Judge Maria Lazar (right) are running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2026. Courtesy of the campaigns

Wow. Nobody expected this.

The Marquette Law School poll two weeks before the election showed that among the minority of respondents who had made up their mind about the race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, 17% said they would vote for liberal Chris Taylor and 12% picked conservative Maria Lazar.

Before the results came in last night, Brian Schimming, chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, told Fox 6 that Democrats had to be scared because after all their spending on ads, the Marquette poll showed most people hadn’t made up their mind about the election.

Indeed, the poll found only 12% of respondents reported hearing or reading a lot about the race for the state’s highest court, which MU pollster Charles Franklin called “a stunningly low number.”

That boded well for Lazar, Schimming said.

Wrong. Taylor won by 20 percentage points, carrying every major population center and two-thirds of Wisconsin’s 72 counties. In a swing state like Wisconsin, this was a blowout, a blitzkrieg, a bloodbath. Choose your own B word.

It was a brutal defeat for Republicans and conservatives in Wisconsin. Republican Donald Trump had won Wisconsin by less than 1% in the 2024 presidential race. Democratic Gov. Tony Earl won reelection by just over 3% in 2022, which for Wisconsin is a comfortable margin. Even liberal Susan Crawford’s victory for the Supreme Court, considered a huge defeat for Republicans, was by 10 percentage points.

This was by double the margin.

Republicans will no doubt claim they stayed out of this election. And yes, they didn’t spend that much. But that was strategic. That was by design.

Recall that Republicans had the seeming advantage of an incumbent Wisconsin Supreme Court justice they had helped elect in 2016, Rebecca Bradley. But she had developed a reputation as an extremist who was constantly bickering with her colleagues, be they liberal or conservative. Even the photos of her make her look angry or aggrieved. By last summer, it was clear she was raising no money, that the big conservative donors the state Republican Party depended on, like Diane Hendricks or Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, weren’t going to support her. No doubt on the advice of Republican strategists.

By September, Bradley saw the handwriting on the wall and dropped out of the race, blaming the state’s conservative leaders for her departure. “The conservative movement needs to take stock of its failures, identify the problem, and fix it,” she sniped.

Enter Lazar, a state appeals court judge and a fervent conservative who served Republican interests. As an attorney for the state Department of Justice, she defended Republican lawmakers in a lawsuit alleging they violated the state’s open meetings laws while passing the law decimating public unions, Act 10. She also defended the gerrymandered 2011 electoral maps that locked in Republican control of the Legislature for more than a decade and sided with 2020 election conspiracy theorists trying to gain access to private voter information.

In short, this was somebody well connected to the Republican establishment, but that would be downplayed in this election, the party decided. “Political parties have taken over” judicial elections, Lazar declared. “I am not a member of a political party. My opponent spent years in the Legislature,” she added, referring to Taylor’s eight years as an Assembly Democrat. “I’m an independent, impartial judge.”

Republicans had been out front and aggressive in backing conservative Brad Schimel in 2025. It became the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history, with Schimel touting his support from Trump and Elon Musk spending more than $20 million trying to sell Wisconsin on Schimel. And it was effective at driving the turnout of Republicans and conservatives.

But it was even better, it turned out, at driving Democrats and liberals who were appalled by Musk’s antics to the polls. A post-race analysis by Split Ticket found that Crawford gained her 10-point margin mostly because of a higher turnout by Democrats: It estimated that voters in the high court race had backed Democrat Kamala Harris by 7 points in the 2024 presidential election. In short, about 70% of Susan Crawford’s 10-point margin “was attributable to changes in who was voting, rather than changes in how people voted,” the analysis noted.

So Wisconsin’s Republicans read the tea leaves and decided to go quiet, to try a stealth campaign for the court. They would also save money by spending far less on this campaign.

Yes, Lazar’s campaign staff included consultants with deep ties to Wisconsin Republican politics. Yes, Hendricks and the Uihleins supported Lazar, but did not spend as much as in past court races. Yes, Lazar and the Republican Party repeatedly called Crawford a liberal extremist Democrat.

But the campaign wasn’t blanketing the state with ads. Most of the ads were by Taylor, who crushed Lazar in campaign fundraising, with nearly $5.6 million, or six times more than the $904,538 raised by Lazar. Taylor also had nine times more independent spending backing her — nearly $1.1 million — compared to the $118,000 spent on Lazar. Though Lazar probably had the edge in dark money spent on the campaign.

But Taylor seemed to have all the fundraising momentum: She had 61,000 contributions from more than 31,000 supporters, a remarkable accomplishment.

And yet: Taylor’s ads were underwhelming. The quiet style and dogged dullness of the Lazar campaign may have made it harder for Taylor to get more traction. By two weeks before the election, 46% of those responding to the Marquette poll said they were still undecided. It looked like the Republican strategy might be working.

“I think we’ll have a good turnout,” Schimming told WISN 12’s “UpFront,” just a few days before the election. “I think overall people are expecting it’ll be a low turnout overall, but I’ll tell you what, everywhere I’ve been in the state – Ashland, Milwaukee, Madison, La Crosse, Green Bay — Republicans are fired up, and we’re super fired up about the fall for good reason.”

He was right at least about the turnout: It was nowhere near the numbers for the 2025 Supreme Court race or even the 2023 high court election, but for such a quiet and little-publicized campaign, the turnout was impressive.

How was that possible? Two reasons. First, the parties are now upside down from as recently as 15 years ago. Today the more educated voters, those with at least a college degree, who pay more attention to elections, now favor Democrats, not Republicans. Which means for lower-interest elections like this one Democrats have a big edge.

Secondly, it tells us that liberals appalled by the policies of Trump are flocking to the polls to vote against Republicans. Anger drives elections, as the GOP repeatedly proved in past years by pushing hot-button issues. And Democrats are angry.

“With tonight’s results, Democrats have now won or overperformed in 261 of 292 key elections since Donald Trump retook office,” a statement by the national Democratic Party on Wisconsin’s race noted.

Lazar gave a concession speech where she expressed pride at not running a political race, suggesting this would be a model for future campaigns by conservative candidates for the court. Which is absurd.

For starters, Lazar was hardly an apolitical candidate. Her strategy and funding came from Republicans and she appeared at party events like a UW-Whitewater College Republicans event in November saying she supported the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturning the right to abortion established in the 1972 Roe v. Wade decision. Lazar also suggested the public fetal heartbeat laws, which ban abortions about six weeks after conception, could be acceptable to Wisconsinites. This was a hard-core conservative making clear how she would rule in court cases.

Moreover, her drubbing in this election will surely convince Republicans that a stealth campaign by a conservative won’t work. As Franklin has noted, MU polls have repeatedly shown the electorate wants to hear candidates talk about their policy views. That included a “lopsided 83% in October, saying, ‘No, we want them to talk about the issues,’” Franklin said.

All of which leaves Republicans and conservatives in Wisconsin searching for answers and dealing with deserters. Many Republican legislators have announced their retirement, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu. And conservative Supreme Court Justice Annette Ziegler has announced she won’t run for reelection next April, though she will be only 63 then. Odds are liberals will win again and could gain a 6-1 majority on the court.

Republicans do well in presidential elections, but that’s still more than two years — and a couple elections — away. Which leaves Democrats crowing about the current state of the parties. “While Republicans are more scared than ever about losing big this November,” national DNC Chair Ken Martin declared, “Democrats remain on offense.”