Wisconsin’s next major election is already here
The election for Wisconsin Supreme Court is on April 1. It will be the first swing state electoral test happening since Donald Trump's return to office.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
The first big electoral test of the Trump 2.0 era is happening in less than 50 days and it’s happening in Wisconsin.
Of course it’s happening in Wisconsin. Ever the center of the political universe, the state is host to one of the biggest state-level elections happening anywhere in the country in 2025, and the election is rapidly approaching.
This election is for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and it will determine whether the balance of power on the seven-member court leans 4-3 liberal or conservative. It is projected to be the most expensive state court race in American history.
If that general framework for a nonpartisan-in-name-only Spring Election race for a seat on the state’s highest court sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Just two years ago, there was an election for an open seat on the state Supreme Court that would determine its ideological balance of power. That race was won by Janet Protasiewicz in a ground-shifting 11-point victory, flipping the court to a liberal majority for the first time in more than a decade. She was sworn in for a 10-year term as justice in August of 2023.
But just a few months later, in April of 2024, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley announced she would not be seeking another term, leaving an open seat for the Spring Election in 2025. Bradley, 74, is currently the court’s longest-serving justice, first elected to the role in 1995, and aligns with the four liberal-leaning justices. With her pending retirement, the ideological balance of power is again on the line.
Months before she made that decision, though, a right-wing candidate had already begun campaigning. Brad Schimel, currently a circuit court judge in Waukesha County and formerly the Attorney General in the state of Wisconsin (2015-2019), launched his bid for Wisconsin Supreme Court in November of 2023. After losing their long-held grip on the court — with liberal-aligned candidates winning in 2018, 2020 and 2023 — conservatives were going to be ready for the Spring Election in 2025.
While this Wisconsin Supreme Court term has proved critical in state politics — perhaps most notably striking down the state’s legislative maps — it was also one that produced fewer rulings of any two-year term in nearly three decades. There’s much work still to be done for the court’s liberal majority.
Now, that majority could prove to be short lived. Schimel could win this election. Who knows, in this day and age, what flipping the majority back to right-wing control might mean?
So, once again, Wisconsin has an everything-on-the-line race for state Supreme Court.
Unlike two years ago, though, there is no primary. We already know who the two candidates are going to be. On the right is Schimel, and the candidate running to keep the court in liberal control is Susan Crawford. She is a circuit court judge in Dane County, who previously served as chief legal counsel to Gov. Jim Doyle, worked in the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and Department of Corrections, and served as assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice in both Iowa and Wisconsin. She launched her campaign in June of 2024.
Crawford’s candidacy is not unlike those that have been successful in prior races for Wisconsin Supreme Court. Like Justices Rebecca Dallet, Jill Karofsky and Protasiewicz before her, Crawford is a circuit court judge from a blue county, and is a woman with a wealth of experience.
While this race has a number of similarities to the 2023 campaign, there are key differences that will shape this one.
For one, 2025 is very much not 2023, and with this race happening less than six months after the 2024 presidential election, voters in Wisconsin are suffering from a real case of campaign fatigue, and everything in the political universe is going to be viewed through the prism of Donald Trump’s scorched-earth return to office. The April 1 general election is just 71 days after Inauguration Day.
For Schimel, he’s clearly running a race playing to the MAGA base of the Republican Party, right down to defending the Jan. 6 rioters. There’s a certain logic to this for his campaign. Since Donald Trump won Wisconsin last fall, it stands to reason that the voters who showed up to elect him in November would go back to the polls to elect Schimel in April. From the outside, this seems to essentially be the Schimel campaign’s thesis statement, and the race he’s running is as brazenly partisan as it gets for a judicial election.
But a presidential electorate is much different from an off-year electorate, and the realignment that’s occurring might mean those lower-propensity voters who helped power Trump’s victory might be less likely to turn out for a Special Election just a few months later.
The higher-propensity voters, then — those most likely to turn out in every election, from a presidential race down to a school board — are becoming more liberal or Democratic-leaning (think: Dane County). We’ve seen this in other recent elections for Wisconsin Supreme Court, too, as swingier regions of the state — the Fox Valley, southwestern Wisconsin, etc. — have favored the liberal candidate. In recent years, Democrats have tended to overperform in special elections (and just did in Iowa and Virginia). In this election, a more-likely-to-turnout coalition would presumably favor Crawford, certainly a point in her favor.
But Crawford does not have the good fortune that Karofsky (in 2020) and Protasiewicz (in 2023) had in terms of their opponent. Both ran against Daniel Kelly, the former justice who was appointed by Scott Walker in 2016, and lost both of his bids for a full term on the court, each by double-digit margins — in the 50-50 state that is Wisconsin. Kelly is perhaps the worst performing statewide candidate to have run in Wisconsin in a generation.
So, to be sure, Schimel is a stronger candidate than Kelly — but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear. Schimel has run and won a statewide race, and that’s significant (even if it was more than a decade ago, at this point). But Schimel’s one term as Attorney General can and will (and has) provided a wealth of campaign fodder for Crawford. Stances and positions taken on reproductive rights, opioid settlements, health care and the Affordable Care Act could prove damaging for his campaign. Early ads, too, have criticized the backlog of thousands of rape kits that went untested for years on his watch. There's a reason he wasn’t re-elected, after all.
And as these campaigns tend to go for candidates with long judicial careers who have ruled on many cases, there will undoubtedly be ads finding problematic rulings to be exploited for political gain — and those ads will be coming from both sides. I suppose that’s just how these kinds of campaigns are run now, unfortunately.
Crawford’s campaign does seem to be a bit different from Protasiewicz’s in 2023, too. Protasiewicz came right out at a public forum and called the legislative maps “rigged.” She talked about her “values” and how they inform her approach. Crawford seems less inclined to make those types of bold claims and is more commonly discussing the impartiality she’d bring to the bench, and protecting constitutional rights. They do seem like fairly different candidates.
Not unlike 2023, when that race became the most expensive state judicial race in American history, we know this race is going to attract national attention, and big dollar donations. Elon Musk tweeted about the race in late January, and it would surprise no one to see Trump himself weigh in before April 1. The campaign is also drawing a ton of outside spending. Crawford and Democrats have the advantage there for now, but when it comes to statewide races in Wisconsin, you can always expect the Uihlein family — who spent more than $140 million backing Republicans in the 2024 election cycle — to provide plenty of financial support for the right-wing candidate.
There’s a bigger picture component to this race that’s different, too. This election begins a run of six consecutive years in which there will be a Wisconsin Supreme Court race on the Spring Election ballot. In 2023, it felt like the culmination of a years-long project to win the majority on the court. Now, the liberals are playing defense as this new era of elections in consecutive years dawns.
But a whole lot of what comes next hinges on the outcome of this election now in 2025. If Schimel wins, the 2026 race would again be one for the balance of power on the court, as right-wing justice Rebecca Bradley’s 10-year term comes to an end next year. And again in 2027, another conservative, Chief Justice Annette Ziegler, would be up for re-election. In both cases, then, it would be an opportunity for the liberals to flip the seat (and potentially the court’s majority).
If Crawford wins this year, though, a different dynamic would be introduced. There would comfortably be a liberal majority on the court until at least 2028. That majority could potentially extend even further out, too, depending on the outcome of the Bradley and Ziegler races.
So, Wisconsin. This race now, in 2025, is an extraordinarily big deal. It will go a long way toward determining the balance of power on the court for years to come, and whether it will be a liberal — or, as Ben Wikler likes to call it, a “pro-democracy” — majority, or flip back to right-wing control after just two years. It will go a long way toward determining where the state stands on issues like reproductive rights or fair maps or labor rights or local control or the separation of powers or checks and balances (which, uh, seem pretty important right now!) and so much more.
And it will undoubtedly be seen as a major state level test of where voters stand just a few months into Trump’s second term. If the people of Wisconsin want to send a message — to Trump, to Elon Musk, to the Uihleins, to the right-wing forces bringing chaos, corruption and cruelty to the highest levels of American leadership — this right here is the opportunity.
The April 1 general election beckons, and we are yet again at the precipice of another seismic Wisconsin election.
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 18 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.