Wisconsin voters on Tuesday will select a state supreme court judge to replace an outgoing conservative in a race that could further solidify the liberal majority on the bench ahead of the midterms, when Trump and his allies could try to overturn election results again.
Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative, is retiring, giving liberals a chance to further consolidate their hold on the high court ahead of the next presidential election, when the swing state is sure to see challenges to election results.
Chris Taylor, a liberal judge on the state’s court of appeals who previously served as a Democratic lawmaker, is running against conservative Maria Lazar, who is also on the court of appeals and a former deputy state attorney general.
A win from Taylor would give liberals a 5-2 bloc on the bench. Taylor is seen as friendly to voting rights, while Lazar’s views align more closely with Republicans pushing for policies that could hinder voting access and impact. Lazar has continued to defend maps in Wisconsin that were gerrymandered to lead to more Republican victories, which have since been overturned.
Bradley wrote the court’s opinion that banned dropboxes, a frequent target of false election fraud claims about mail ballots, though liberals overturned that decision once they held control of the court. She has served on the state supreme court since 2015.
While this year’s court election has not garnered anywhere near the level of attention as the previous two, advocates for voting rights say voters should continue to stay engaged with the court’s makeup.
“Wisconsin has been in the crosshairs of extensive litigation in terms of the way the state runs its elections,” Victoria Bassetti, a senior adviser to States United Democracy Center, told Bolts, a news website. “While this supreme court race may seem like a sleeper contest, from the democracy perspective, it’s anything but low-stakes … These issues never go to sleep in Wisconsin.”
Though the high court’s justices are officially non-partisan, liberals currently hold a 4-3 majority after flipping the court in 2023 in what was then the most expensive judicial election in US history, according to the Brennan Center. In 2025, Elon Musk got involved, and the supreme court race topped $100m, with Musk himself throwing in several million and groups he supported spending heavily. Liberal Susan Crawford ultimately won.
This year’s race is much quieter – and significantly less expensive – than the previous two state supreme court elections.
Taylor has the money edge in this year’s race, significantly fundraising more than Lazar. In a sign of the lower profile of this year’s contest, more than half of voters were still undecided in a March poll by Marquette law school conducted less than a month from election day.
Judicial elections function differently depending on the state. In some, like Wisconsin, justices are directly elected. In others, and at the national level, they are appointed by partisan executive office-holders. Some states appoint judges, then hold retention elections where voters can decide whether to keep them in their roles. Overall, judicial elections have become much more expensive in recent years.
The race will provide another gauge of Democrats’ durability in this year’s midterms, particularly in a closely watched swing state, though the November ticket and voter turnout will be much different than a court election. Democratic candidates have recently won upset victories throughout the country in places typically held by Republicans, giving them momentum heading into November. Voters often side against the president in midterm elections.
In the final days of campaigning, Lazar attacked Taylor as too partisan for the court, saying at a county Republican party office that “the court is not for sale”, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.
“We actually want someone on that court who is extremely law nerdy and boring, and doesn’t care about politics at all, and only cares about the law and the constitution,” Lazar said.
Taylor, speaking at a county Democratic headquarters, emphasized the court’s ability to push back against the federal government, WPR reported.
“We have an opportunity with this election to strengthen a pro-democracy majority on our court that’s going to protect our rights and freedoms, that’s going to protect our democracy and our elections, and that is going to hold and resist the efforts of the federal government to come into our state and to take away and infringe on our independence as a state,” Taylor said.
Taylor is favored to win, polls show, but she told Politico that voters still need to make sure to turn out.
“The composition of this court can change very quickly because we have so many elections coming up,” she told Politico. “So nobody should feel that this current majority is set in stone. It’s not.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
