10 takeaways from the 2025 Spring Election in Wisconsin
Wisconsin voters send a message to Elon Musk, Susan Crawford's victory is a major one for state politics, the State Superintendent race gets close, regional breakdowns, turnout, realignment and more.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time NINETEEN-TIME Milwaukee Press Clubaward-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
After every election in Wisconsin, Dan Shafer writes an extended column on takeaways from the results. This is that column. It’s a long piece, and isn’t (necessarily) meant to be read all at once. And if you missed Part I of our post-Spring Election analysis and commentary — on Susan Crawford, the candidate — click here.
1. Wisconsin sends a message
The stakes of the 2025 race for state Supreme Court were always going to be gargantuan for Wisconsin, with majority control of the court hanging in the balance, and scores of critical decisions to be made on a host of important issues throughout the 10-year term that candidates were running for.
But as the race unfolded, it became clear that this would be about something that goes beyond the state’s boundaries. Perhaps this was inevitable, to a certain degree, with this election set to occur just 71 days after Inauguration Day. But the national significance became heightened, largely due to the presence of one Elon Musk — the world’s richest man, the 2024 election’s largest political donor, now a central figure in the Trump administration.
From his leadership of DOGE as it’s been taking a wrecking ball to the federal government to the astronomical sums of money he committed to this race — orders of magnitude more than any other donor — this race became a referendum on Musk, and the Elon Effect amounted to all 72 counties in Wisconsin shifting to the left from last fall’s presidential election.
Wisconsin voters had a unique opportunity to send a message to Musk, to DOGE, to the Trump administration, and send a message they did. While the more than $25 million that Musk put into the race had many on edge that it could turn the race in favor of right-wing candidate Brad Schimel, the profound backlash Elon invited proved to be a motivating factor for so many of the liberal and independent voters who cast their ballots for Crawford.
Musk’s efforts reached cartoonish heights the Sunday before the election at a rally in Green Bay, where he was giving out total-not-illegal-or-anything $1 million dollar bribes, one of which went to the leader of the Wisconsin College Republicans, Nicholas Jacobs, and another went to Ekaterina Diestler, who works at a company owned by a Republican donor.
After the event, Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, wrote that Musk is “running the most brazen scheme to buy an election in modern U.S. history.”
But the backlash proved more impactful than the brazen bribery, as the Elon Effect shifted the whole state to the left, and in Brown County — home to Green Bay, where Musk’s rally was held — was won by Susan Crawford. This is a county that was won by Trump last fall, and it saw an 11-point shift in favor of the liberal candidate this spring.
Considering its place at the center of the electoral map as the purplest of purple states, results in Wisconsin are always going to be viewed as a bellwether for something greater. In this case, the signifier is a denunciation of the first two-plus months of Trump’s second presidency, and in particular, Elon Musk’s role in it.
The morning after the election, Politico reported that Trump had told his inner circle and members of his Cabinet that Musk would be “stepping back in the coming weeks from his current role as governing partner” in the administration. Does that happen without the results from Wisconsin? I certainly don’t think so. After this election, the Trump administration has to be questioning its connection to Musk in a myriad of ways.
So as it goes, the first place to send a clear and direct message to the Trump-Musk administration in this critical moment for American democracy happened to be the state of Wisconsin.
Of course it was.
Perhaps we’ll look back at the Spring Election in Wisconsin as the beginning of something.
2. Crawford’s victory has major implications for Wisconsin politics
While the more narrative-driven message Wisconsin voters sent to Musk and the Trump administration dominated headlines this week, the actual on-the-ground implications of this race for Wisconsin are profound.
A Crawford victory likely cements a liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court through at least 2028. That means up-in-the-air rulings on abortion rights, Act 10, and potential threats to recently redrawn maps will not see the sharp right turn that a Schimel victory could have brought. This means that the liberal majority won through years of effort, culminating in the 2023 election of Janet Protasiewicz, was not a fleeting victory, but a lasting one that’s going to have a tremendous impact on the state for years and years to come. These elections are for 10-year terms, after all.
WisDems chair Ben Wikler told Civic Media during the campaign that Schimel donors were fundraising on the potential to re-gerrymander the Wisconsin State Legislature. Longtime Recombobulation Area readers know where we stand on those gerrymandered state legislative maps — for so long, they’ve been at the core of what’s so broken about politics in our state — and going back to The Gerrymander would have been an absolutely devastating outcome (even if I’m not sure how they’d actually pull it off). But we haven’t even had a fully post-gerrymander election in the state. While the Assembly had all 99 of its districts on the ballot under new maps, that was the case for only half of the State Senate, since they’re on four-year terms. Wisconsin deserves to have an actual fair election for the entire state legislature, and now, with Crawford’s decisive victory, it appears we’re going to get it. Finally.
For the immediate future, that also means that votes from legislators in closely competitive districts are going to face more public accountability, as voters finally can bring that accountability to state legislators by way of the ballot box that wasn’t the case in years past. There will be several seats and votes we’ll be keeping an eye on during the upcoming budget process and beyond.
Days after the election, it was announced that retiring justice Ann Walsh Bradley was selected to serve as Chief Justice for her final months on the bench, and she would be succeeded in the role by Justice Jill Karofsky. With Karofsky, Rebecca Dallet, Protasiewicz and now Crawford on the bench for the next few years, Wisconsin’s highest court is going to be in good hands.
Looking forward, Rebecca Bradley’s 10-year term is up next year, and she’s already said she plans to run for another term. With that, a 5-2 liberal majority is very much in sight. Bradley has been quite clearly the most far-right member of the court, and would seem eminently beatable in the 2026 Spring Election. And with no fall election this year, that one is up next on Wisconsin’s political calendar. It’ll be here before we know it.
3. This election saw the effects of the Trump Era realignment — the ones that benefit Democrats
The day before the election, Split Ticket, a very good election analysis site, published a piece with the headline, “Wisconsin Republicans Have An Off-Year Turnout Problem,” saying, “the early vote data we have extensively analyzed and modeled suggests Democratic-aligned liberal judge Susan Crawford is a clear favorite to win this election.”
This turned out to be quite prescient, and also the latest example of how the Trump era realignment is playing out. Here’s how Lakshya Jain and Giacomo Pensa of Split Ticket broke it down:
It’s simple: an election like this generally comes mostly down to turnout (and if Crawford wins, the vast majority of her gains over Kamala Harris will almost certainly be from that alone). And in the Trump era, Republicans have bled massively with higher-propensity white voters, replacing them with lower-propensity ones in the process. While this is fine for presidential elections, it has major consequences in every other election, when only the most engaged voters tend to show up. Increasingly, those voters are backing Democrats, thanks to the party’s firm edge with white, college-educated voters.
As we discussed before the election, turnout in this race is everything — not just in raw volume, but in who is ultimately turning out. There were 3.34 million Wisconsinites who voted in the 2024 presidential election, and 1.85 million who voted in the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race. An incredible 2.36 million people voted in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, but that still means nearly a million people who voted in last fall’s presidential election did not vote in the Spring Election.
And last fall, Trump performed especially well with “low propensity” voters — those who do not vote in every election, or might not vote in midterms or local races, only showing up for the presidential (or, perhaps, only showing up for Trump, specifically). It used to mean that the highest turnout elections would distinctly benefit Democrats, but now that’s changed. Those lower propensity voters are far more Republican than ever (see my recent column on “Donald Trump and the rise of the Pro Wrestling Republicans”).
The other side to that coin, though, is that while the highest turnout elections are benefitting Trump and Republicans, lower-turnout contests are shifting in favor of Democrats. Because of the role education has played in the political realignment we’re experiencing, voters with higher levels of education vote much more Democratic than ever before, and those voters happen to be of the higher propensity variety, voting far more frequently in contests like a Spring Election.
This election had especially high turnout for a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, though, and while the highest of high turnout races might be skewing more Republican, a race like this — or a typical midterm election turnout — might be a Democratic sweet spot.
Because this seemed more like a midterm election turnout than a typical spring race in Wisconsin. In fact, Susan Crawford received more votes in the 2025 Spring Election than Scott Walker gained in the 2018 midterm, albeit a losing effort (h/t Aaron Moriak).
So, as we look ahead to the 2026 Spring Election (which features another Wisconsin Supreme Court race) and the midterms (where every state official will be on the ballot), this realignment is going to be important to consider when forecasting those races and understanding where the fault lines in our politics lie.
Democrats will need to figure out how to better compete for those lower propensity voters, but Republicans face an enormous challenge now in non-presidential races, and will be grappling with perhaps their biggest existential question going forward: Do MAGA voters show up without Trump himself on the ballot?
4. Schimel loses ground on his home turf
Early in the night as results were rolling in, on our live show on Civic Media, Todd Allbaugh and I were discussing Waukesha County and its impact on statewide results. This is the third most populous county in the state of Wisconsin, and has been a long-time Republican stronghold, but the strength of that stronghold has been eroding in recent years. It is also typically one of the first counties to report results on election night.
The key number that we’d been watching for Waukesha County was 60%. In last fall’s presidential election, a New York Times piece asked whether Donald Trump would get to that number, especially considering the Harris campaign’s focus on winning over swing voters in that part of the state, holding an event there with Charlie Sykes and Liz Cheney.
Waukesha County is also Schimel’s home county, where he’s been serving as a circuit court judge and where he served as District Attorney for eight years and was in that office since 1989. Considering his history there, he needed to get not just to 60%, but beyond it if he was going to have a chance to win statewide.
But not only did Schimel not surpass that key 60% marker, he even underperformed Dan Kelly in the county, with just 57.7% of the vote there, below Kelly’s 58.1% there, seen as alarmingly low at the time.
Schimel also lost the city of Waukesha, too. This was a really rough night for him in his home county — and yet another piece of evidence that Waukesha County is no longer the reliable Republican stronghold that it once was.
5. It’s good that Brad Schimel conceded on Election Night
Brad Schimel’s election night watch party was at the Marriott Milwaukee West in Pewaukee, and there, he was playing bass with his band, 4 on the Floor.
According to Civic Media’s Melissa Kaye, who was there reporting on the event, the band was playing “Zombie” by The Cranberries as results became official and Schimel got the news that he was going to lose. Soon after, Schimel would deliver a concession speech to those assembled in the room.
It is a genuinely good thing that Brad Schimel conceded defeat in that moment on Tuesday night.
Yes, this is an extraordinarily low bar to clear. But it’s one that has not always been cleared by certain Republican candidates who lost elections in Wisconsin. Recent U.S. Senate candidate
Eric Hovde, for example, initially refused to concede and spread baseless conspiracy theories about the vote count, particularly from Milwaukee. While these claims were instantly debunked by anyone who knows things about Wisconsin’s elections, pushing false claims like this are still harmful to the legitimacy of our electoral system.
(Sidenote: It was good to see Republican Scott Krug, state representative from the 72nd Assembly District and the Vice-Chair of the Committee on Campaigns and Elections, push back on claims being made by Sen. Ron Johnson in real time as the election count was happening at Central Count in Milwaukee.)
So, good on Schimel for doing the right thing in conceding defeat. Let's hope we can get back to normally acknowledging who won or lost in every election. We’d be a healthier democracy for it.
6. Where are the Trump-Crawford counties in Wisconsin (and what does that mean for our politics)?
While all 72 counties shifted to the left in this election, the degree to which that shift occurred varied around the state. Many of the shifts were most pronounced in the southwestern part of the state — a region that saw the biggest shifts to the right in Trump’s favor last fall. There were 13 counties that shifted 15 points or more, and all of them are in the western and southwestern part of the state. In Crawford County, for example, Donald Trump won by a 14-point margin, and Susan Crawford carried her namesake county by 2%. The Driftless Region contains multitudes.
But in looking at these shifts, we can see which counties saw a majority of voters go for both Susan Crawford and Donald Trump. This provides a unique window into what the true swing counties in the state are.
And those counties are as follows: Vernon, Crawford, Richland, Sauk, Columbia (each in the south/southwest), Brown, Outagamie, Winnebago (Fox Valley and Green Bay), Racine and Kenosha.
While the Driftless Region and Fox Valley are fairly consistently among the swingier regions in the state — see our now award-winning feature story on the Fox Valley from last fall — Racine and Kenosha are especially interesting here, as they’ve been counties that have been trending to the right in recent years.
Racine County, in particular, has not been won by a Democratic or liberal candidate in a top statewide race for several years. Donald Trump and Eric Hovde won there in 2024, Daniel Kelly in 2023, Tim Michels and Ron Johnson in 2022, Daniel Kelly in 2020, Donald Trump in 2020, and Scott Walker in 2018. Tammy Baldwin was the last candidate from the left to win there, in her double-digit victory over Leah Vukmir in 2018.
The results from the Fox Valley are also especially interesting. Crawford won all three of the major Fox Valley and Green Bay area counties — Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago. Trump won all three of those counties last fall, each by at least a 5% margin. The combined population of those counties is just under 650,000. This was a critical shift. Justices Protasiewicz, Karofsky and Dallet also won all three of these counties in their respective elections. I continue to think there is tremendous opportunity for Democrats to improve in this part of the state with the right investments and attention.
Going forward, we can see these three regions as critical battlegrounds in elections going forward in the state. Yes, turnout and margins in Dane County will be a factor, as will shifting patterns in the WOW counties. But the real swing areas of the state are the Driftless Region in the southwest, Racine and Kenosha in the southeast, and the Fox Valley and Green Bay.
7. Jill Underly wins the closest race for State Superintendent since the 1990s
In a piece I wrote shortly after the February primary, I asked the question: Could Brittany Kinser win the race for State Superintendent?
And while I still thought Underly would ultimately prevail, this seemed headed toward being a relatively close race, considering the history of the office. It had been since the 1990s that a race for State Superintendent was decided by a single-digit margin. Elections for this office have not been particularly close for quite some time. Tony Evers was elected to this office three times, all by at least a 15-point margin (and in 2017, he won with nearly 70% of the vote).
But Underly proved to have certain vulnerabilities in office, faced a primary challenge from a public education supporter on the same side of the political aisle, and then did not run an especially public campaign for the general election. Kinser, on the other hand, seemed to say yes to any opportunity to speak to the public in interviews, forums and other events. She also had the financial backing of some of the state’s biggest Republican megadonors, almost immediately after her late arrival to the campaign.
The eventual results of this year’s race very closely resemble the race in 1993, also a roughly 53% to 47% race that centered around voucher schools. Kinser, a former charter school executive and lobbyist, running with the backing of the Republican Party, made this a real race.
The geography of these results again reveal some of Wisconsin’s swingier regions. Kinser won in Racine and Kenosha counties, where Susan Crawford also won. She won in Outagamie County, and only narrowly lost in Winnebago and Brown counties. She posted better margins than Brad Schimel in Waukesha and Ozaukee counties.
The vote in Milwaukee County shows an even wider gulf between Crawford and Underly. Crawford had a very strong performance in the county, winning 75% of the vote, getting more than 227,000 votes out of the county — near midterm levels of turnout, with greater margins than Janet Protasiewicz in 2023 or Tony Evers in 2022.
Underly, though, only gained 67% of the vote in Milwaukee County, with only about 187,000 voting for her. About 40,000 people who voted for Crawford did not vote for Underly. Some voted for Kinser, as she received about 16,000 more votes in the county than Schimel, and some simply did not make a selection in the race.
These results signify some vulnerabilities for Democrats on education matters, particularly in the Milwaukee metro area. We all know that Milwaukee Public Schools has experienced a great deal of controversy in recent years, and while many still will not back a Republican-backed candidate in the race, a whole lot of people in Milwaukee did not vote for the incumbent. Championing her support from Moms for Liberty leaders and campaigning with Republicans like Derrick Van Orden probably did Kinser no favors in winning some of those potential cross-over votes in Milwaukee County, either.
Underly did perform better than Crawford in a few counties. Underly is from southwestern Wisconsin, and won two counties — Grant and Lafayette — that were also won by Schimel. Perhaps the importance of public schools in more rural areas is a factor here, too.
But Kinser ran a strong race. Yes, it was buoyed by record spending on the right in this campaign, but outrunning Schimel is significant, and her name is out there now as a voice on education policy in Wisconsin. We’ll have to wait and see if that voice is more of the GOP-funded one on the campaign trail or the “Blue Dog Democrat” she’s described herself as.
The election for State Superintendent is now on the political radar in ways it really hasn’t been before, too. It’s entirely possible that this election kick-starts a run of more competitive races for this office.
8. The constitutional amendment on voter ID went entirely as expected
When it comes to voter ID in Wisconsin, there are certain truths that need to be acknowledged.
One is that it was pushed forward by Republicans in the early 2010s for entirely partisan reasons. Civic Media’s Todd Allbaugh was a staffer for former Republican State Sen. Dale Schultz, and was in the room when Republicans were crafting this legislation, and said those in the room were “giddy about the ramifications” — suppressing the votes of those who typically vote Democratic. He was there and saw how Republicans pushed this for the purposes of partisan gain. We talked about this in a special crossover segment on the Civic Media airwaves the day before the election. Then-state senator and now Congressman Glenn Grothman, who was in the room with Allbaugh for this discussion, later said on live television that voter ID would help Republicans in the 2016 presidential election (reports would later show that votes were indeed suppressed). To pretend that motivations for this law was about a sincere and principled effort to make elections more secure is pure fiction. This was always about achieving partisan gain.
Second, it’s important to recognize that there was no widespread election fraud before voter ID was implemented. It was always a solution in search of a problem. Voter fraud allegations were being pushed by Wisconsin Republican operatives around that time, and it’s easy to draw a line from that type of conspiracy-fueled absurdity to the election denialism of the Trump era.
Third, and perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this constitutional amendment vote, voter ID is a very popular policy. In the most recent Marquette University Law School Poll, 77% of registered voters favor “requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote” and 73% favored the constitutional amendment.
So, it was not at all a surprise that the referendum question ended up passing with 62.8% of the vote. Actually, I expected that number to be quite a bit higher. Most people just do not have a problem with having to show photo identification in order to vote. I’d wager to guess that the use of photo identification for a great many things is far more prevalent in 2025 than it was in 2011 when this was first being introduced.
The practice of pushing these constitutional amendments that’s been happening more and more frequently with Wisconsin Republicans is, on its own, worth voting against. The policy’s goals of voter suppression are worth voting against. Unintended consequences for those with disabilities, elderly people, young people, those who recently moved and those who do not drive a vehicle makes this worth voting against. The cynical nature of using these constitutional amendments at certain times to boost turnout makes this worth voting against. The practice of amending the constitution to include something that’s already law makes this worth voting against.
But this was never going to pass in this political environment. Instead of fighting it, a better option would be to introduce legislation that makes it easier for people to obtain ID, regardless of their personal situation, and put some actual funding behind it so the process does not add costs to voters.
9. There is no place quite like Madison
For part of our coverage of the Spring Election at Civic Media — you can watch or listen to our special Election Night coverage here — I spent a couple days in the city of Madison. On Election Day, I stopped by a Crawford campaign event on campus (and ran into State Rep. Francesca Hong!), and then spent an hour or two just meandering around, getting the vibe of the city at this critical moment for the state. There was a lot of campaign activity happening, posters everywhere, billboard vehicles driving around, sidewalk chalk all over the place, a goofy inflatable cow for some reason, people walking around on stilts, it had it all.
There was also a whole lot of exhausted, nervous energy among people around town in the run-up to the election, for perhaps one of the most engaged electorates anywhere in the country.
The numbers that the city of Madison posted on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race were remarkable — 90% for Susan Crawford. In Dane county at large, Crawford won 82% of the vote. These numbers are just something else. There is no place quite like Madison.
10. Overall turnout was incredibly high for a Spring Election
Total turnout for the Wisconsin Supreme court race was more than 2.36 million. This level of turnout is much more like a midterm than any typical Spring Election. The stakes — and the outrageous spending — certainly got people’s attention. Schimel’s 1.06 million votes in a losing effort is more than Janet Protasiewicz received in her 2023 victory.
And as Marquette University’s John D. Johnson notes, “Wisconsin’s 50% turnout rate in the formally nonpartisan April 2025 election was higher than the adult turnout rate of 38 states in the 2022 midterms,” adding that “Wisconsin’s electorate is just plain extremely engaged.”
We’re engaged because we have to be. We are living in this unique moment for the state where it is at the center of so many political divides — the laboratory for policy experiments, the canary in the coal mine for so many of the biggest issues of our time. Whatever it is that’s happening across the country, it feels like it happens here first.
Perhaps then, this election can prove to be the first real counterpunch to the rampaging chaos, corruption, cruelty and undemocratic insanity of the first few months of Trump’s second term.
It always starts here. It has to.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he became the Political Editor of Civic Media. He’s also written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 23 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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Follow Dan Shafer on Twitter at @DanRShafer and at BlueSky at @danshafer.bsky.social.
Terrific piece Dan. Thank you so much for putting all of this together in one article.
In addition to making photo ID more accessible, the current requirements for for what photo IDs are accepted at the polls could be loosened considerably under this new addition to the state Constitution.