Republicans Seek Someone to Blame After Supreme Court Blowout

A sign for Wisconsin Supreme Court Candidate Maria Lazar at one of her campaign events Tuesday, March 10, 2026, in Germantown, Wis. Angela Major/WPR

Staggered by a 20-point loss in the April Supreme Court election, Wisconsin conservatives are arguing about who’s to blame. And behind the scenes, members of the state Republican Party are split on whether Chair Brian Schimming should be fired.

The social media comments from conservatives came fast and furious after the Wisconsin Supreme Court race was called within 40 minutes of polls closing. Despite liberals winning the last three Supreme Court races by double-digits, seeing Justice-elect Chris Taylor defeat conservative Judge Maria Lazar by the biggest margin in decades hit differently.

Some conservatives immediately called for Schimming to resign or be fired, while others blamed Lazar. There was even debate on whether the Republican Party as a whole made a mistake by trading reliable, suburban, college-educated voters for more rural voters who are strongly behind President Donald Trump but much less likely to vote when he’s not on the ballot.

Thompson: Wisconsin is now a ‘blue state’

In an interview with WPR, Wisconsin’s longest serving governor, Republican Tommy Thompson, said the biggest problem right now are the massive margins Democrats have been able to stack up against GOP candidates in Dane and Milwaukee counties. Unofficial results show Taylor got around 234,000 more votes than Lazar there on Tuesday.

Thompson said chipping away at those margins by campaigning hard in the liberal strongholds is how he was able to flip the governor’s mansion red and win reelection three times.

“It’s obvious that the state is turning back to where it was. It’s a blue state, and the only way Republicans can win in Wisconsin is to organize, get good candidates and cut into the tremendous, tremendous amount of votes out of Dane County and Milwaukee County.”

Liberals have also made continued gains in Milwaukee’s suburbs, an area once dominated by Republicans. Taylor won a majority of the vote in Ozaukee County, part of the “WOW” counties along with Waukesha and Washington.

“Any time a statewide race is won by 20 percentage points over the Republican, and they (Democrats) carry Ozaukee County, you better damn well believe that portends not to be good for the Republicans in the fall,” said Thompson.

Schimming in the hot seat once again

Money talks in elections, and an analysis by WisPolitics found Taylor and the Democrats supporting her campaign had around eight times as much to say. While Lazar and a couple political action committees spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign ads, Taylor and allied outside groups spent millions.

The day after the election, influential conservative WISN-AM radio host Dan O’Donnell echoed the social media fundraising frustrations. He said he likes Schimming, but “he is not the right man for the job” of leading the state GOP.

“The job is not pumping up the base,” said O’Donnell. “Candidates do that. The job is 100 percent raising money. And thus far in his tenure, Schimming has shown, and … everybody at the top levels of the Republican Party of Wisconsin have shown, that they are unable to do the single most critical thing that they need to do, and that is raise gobs and gobs of money.”

Unless Schimming resigns as chair, he’d have to be fired by the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s Executive Committee, which meets this week.

In a brief phone call on Friday, RPW Vice Chair Bill Feehan told WPR the results from last week’s rout show the party is “broken” with regard to fundraising and running a “professional organization.” He said discussions about needed changes are happening but no decisions have happened.

But executive committee member Bob Spindell, who also serves on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told WPR he doesn’t think it’s fair to blame Schimming for Lazar’s lackluster fundraising in a race conservative donors knew wouldn’t flip the Supreme Court’s liberal majority. Spindell also said he sees the chair’s role, which the party changed a from voluntary to paid position in 2022, as being just as much about traveling the state to meet with county chapters and strategize with campaigns that accept the help.

“There are a number of people that say, ‘Hey, you know, we don’t care about us going around, and that his only job is to stay on the phone and raise money,’” said Spindell. “Well, I just don’t believe that. And I think we have the resources out there. When we need the money, the money will come. And I think the money will come for the 2026 elections.”

For his part, Thompson said it would be “stupid at this point” to try to get a new GOP chair up to speed before the November midterm elections. In a statement sent to WPR, Schimming said all Republicans in Wisconsin are “angry, disappointed, and upset about the results of the recent Supreme Court race.”

“There are things we can always improve in politics, and I remain dedicated to continue improving as we head into November,” Schimming wrote. “What we must all remember is that the results on Tuesday do not and will not decide the November election. With Democrats in disarray, our candidates are in a good position. We must come together and turn our anger towards the Democrats as we work to defeat them.”

Republican Party of Wisconsin Chairman Brian Schimming speaks ahead of Vice President JD Vance’s remarks Thursday Feb. 26, 2026, at Pointe Precision in Plover, Wis. Angela Major/WPR

Lazar’s fundraising figures were just a fraction of the Republican money poured into former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel’s 2025 campaign against liberal Justice Susan Crawford. Despite getting millions from conservatives, Schimel lost his race by around 10 percentage points. Schimming faced calls to resign from within the Republican Party following that loss as well.

Overall, around $115 million was poured into the 2025 court election thanks to campaign finance changes passed by Republicans in 2015, which allow state parties to raise and transfer unlimited amounts of money to candidates. After initially complaining, Democrats have been able to harness the law and consistently outraise Republicans in high-profile, statewide races.

In an interview on WISN-TV’s “Upfront,” Schimel said while he used it during his Supreme Court race last year, he called the 2015 change “a terrible law” and said he hopes lawmakers repeal it.

Some conservatives point finger at Lazar

Conservative criticisms of Lazar were prefaced by compliments about her niceness as a person and competence as a judge. But several Republican commentators claim she didn’t help her prospects by focusing on the “rule of law” during her campaign.

The morning after Lazar’s drubbing at the ballot box, conservative WISN-AM radio host Vicki McKenna complained on social media that Lazar “refused to be a PARTISAN” in what is ostensibly a nonpartisan race.

“Elections demand partisanship,” McKenna said. “She needed to make the case bluntly that she was the conservative antidote to the leftist disease on the court. She never did.”

Wisconsin Supreme Court Candidate Maria Lazar speaks to attendees at a campaign event Tuesday, March 10, 2026, in Germantown, Wis. Angela Major/WPR

During her campaign, Lazar said she hoped her run would encourage voters to reject the growing partisanship in Supreme Court races. After conceding, she told supporters on election night that she still believes her campaign moved the needle and future candidates with the same message can bring the focus of court races back to experience and integrity rather than politics.

McKenna also called the state’s Republican infrastructure a “mess” due to infighting among the GOP, said “absentee balloting is killing us” and suggested moving the Supreme Court election to the fall, which would require a constitutional amendment.

The problem is, or isn’t, Trump

While conservatives tend to agree Trump was a major factor in motivating Democrats to vote for Taylor on Tuesday, they are split on whether his takeover of the Republican Party and the electoral shifts it’s brought to Wisconsin played a role in Lazar’s defeat.

In a social media post April 8, Rick Esenberg, who founded the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, argued that since Trump took office in 2017, “the GOP or conservative candidate in statewide races for Senator, Governor, AG or Supreme Court has lost 11 of 13 races.”

“Populism never lasts and is clearly turning off potential GOP/conservative voters,” said Esenberg. “You should learn from populist frustration, but it’s time to move on.”

Esenberg also pushed back on claims that conservative judicial candidates should abandon their focus on the rule of law during campaigns, questioning how it would “be possible to continue to call these candidates ‘conservative’ since all of this is essential to the American Tradition.”

Sawyer County Republican Party Chair John Righeimer concurred in his social media post the same day, stating that if conservatives want to win statewide, “our brand needs to look more ‘Reagan’ like.”

“Going forward MAGA is done,” said Righeimer. “How many more statewide losses do you need to incur to see we’re on the wrong path?”

Former President Donald Trump smiles after giving a speech at the RNC on Thursday, July 18, 2024, at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis. Angela Major/WPR

But during his broadcast that day, O’Donnell rejected the claim from the “never-Trump movement in Wisconsin.”

“Trump has the support of 90 percent of Republicans,” O’Donnell said. “It is not Trump. This election had absolutely nothing to do with Trump, except Trump is a massive motivating factor for lefties.”

O’Donnell did acknowledge a decline in the number of high-propensity voters who reliably supported Republicans during former GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s era. Rather than blame the president for turning off suburban residents to the GOP, O’Donnell suggested those voters left Wisconsin to retire in Florida, which doesn’t have a state income tax.

After 20-point Supreme Court loss, Wisconsin Republicans look for who’s to blame was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.