A Stealth Campaign for Supreme Court?

Wisconsin Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar is running for Wisconsin Supreme Court. Screenshot courtesy of Lazar Campaign

Attention voters. The April 6 election for Wisconsin Supreme Court is less than three months away. And what exactly is the Republican strategy to elect a conservative? It seems non-existent.

By contrast, the campaign of liberal judge Chris Taylor has been quite visible. Today her campaign announced she had raised $2.6 million in campaign dollars in 2025 from more than 13,000 donors, a stunning total considering she only entered the race eight months ago and none of the money came from the Democratic Party.

When Taylor entered the race in May she was challenging conservative Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley. Given that incumbent justices historically win, most observers assumed Bradley would run for reelection.

But it soon became clear Bradley was raising no money from the Republican Party’s big donors. Party strategists apparently decided she was too extreme, and too bizarre to get reelected. In late August, little more than three months after Taylor entered the race, Bradley dropped out.

It took a month for conservative Judge Maria Lazar to enter the race. Lazar, who has served on Wisconsin’s District 2 Court of Appeals since 2022, announced her candidacy in a four-minute video that gave a hint of what the Republican strategy would be.

“We are bombarded by political ads for a judicial position,” Lazar declared. “My candidacy will be different.”

The April 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court was the most expensive court in race in U.S. history and perhaps most partisan in Wisconsin history, with massive spending by Elon Musk and support for conservative Brad Schimel by Donald Trump. The result was a loud, rancorous campaign and a big win for liberal Susan Crawford, who won by 55% to 45% for Schimel.

For Republicans the takeaway was obvious: All the noise and endless ads in the 2025 race had helped turn out Republicans, but had an even bigger impact on Democratic turnout. An analysis by Split Ticket found that voters who voted in the 2025 Supreme Court election had backed Democrat presidential Kamala Harris by 7 points in the 2024 Wisconsin presidential election. The much higher turnout of Democrats, responding angrily to the conservative blitzkrieg led by Musk, was decisive. Roughly 70% of Crawford’s win margin was attributable to the disproportionately higher turnout for Democrats, the analysis found.

Lazar’s campaign video made it clear she wanted a different kind of campaign. “Political parties have taken over” judicial elections, she 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.”

One Republican observer says the party’s state chairman Brian Schimming has not been as active in pushing Lazar’s appearance at Republican events as he was for Schimel’s campaign. Is that because the strategy is for Lazar to look less political than Schimel did?

Or is it because the state party has already written off the race as a lost cause? Lazar has announced that she raised just $200,000 in campaign dollars, leaving her way behind Taylor, as Mary Spicuzza reported. The Republicans have lost to liberal candidates in four of the last five high court races in Wisconsin by at least 10 points. Lazar’s anemic campaign funding total suggests her odds of overcoming that history aren’t good.

If the goal is for Lazar to look apolitical, that strategy has been undercut by Lazar’s comments at 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 and a possible law Gov. Tony Evers and the Legislature could compromise on, as Spicuzza reported.

These comments show Lazar favors one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. Polls have consistently shown a huge majority of Wisconsin voters, about 64%, opposed overturning Roe v. Wade and support abortion rights. That issue may not matter so much in a race for U.S. Senator or even governor, but it’s a key issue for a Supreme Court race, given that judges are likely to rule on abortion-related cases, and has been very helpful to liberal candidates for Wisconsin’s high court.

Not only has Lazar made herself look extreme on this issue, but she did it at a Republican event, undercutting the entire rationale for her campaign, that she would be a non-political candidate for the state high court. She has also made it harder for her to portray Taylor as the party ideologue, now that Lazar has offered red meat to young Republicans.

That said, it might have been hard to Lazar to turn the clock back to the old days of judicial candidates who ran on their experience and avoided any opinions on the issues. We’ve now had more than a decade of high court candidates telegraphing their views and attacking their opponents on the issues.

“Our polls show big majorities of both parties and independents want the judicial candidates to talk about issues, over 80%,” says Marquette University Law School pollster Charles Franklin. “But judicial candidates have some limits on what they are supposed to say about issues that could come before them. Still, voters what to know what they are voting for.”

You can expect to see attack ads calling Lazar an extremist on abortion. Will Lazar let herself be attacked without responding in kind? Will she have enough money to try to match Taylor in campaign dollars? The answer to those questions could decide the election.