A Blue Horizon in Wisconsin?
By the end of this year, it is possible we will see Democratic dominion over the state legislature, governor’s office, and Supreme Court.
THERE’S SOMETHING HAPPENING here. What it is ain’t exactly clear. But at least some observers are seeing signs that the pivotal swing state of Wisconsin is shifting from purple to blue.
The upcoming April 7 election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is shaping up to be a blowout win for the liberal contender, which would make it the third consecutive high-court contest to go the liberals’ way. This fall’s race to replace two-term Democratic Gov. Tony Evers seems to have a lopsided level of energy, with more than a half-dozen serious contenders on the Democratic side (to be narrowed to one in an August 11 primary), and just one serious contender among Republicans: Tom Tiffany, an acolyte of President Donald Trump currently serving in the U.S. House. And even given existing skewed electoral maps, the Dems have a fighting chance of flipping one or even two of the state’s eight congressional seats, for which Republicans now enjoy a six-to-two advantage.
Moreover, in recent weeks, several prominent Republican lawmakers, including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and state Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, have announced that they will not be seeking re-election this November. While they publicly gave other reasons—Vos mentioned concerns regarding his health following a heart attack last November; LeMahieu said he was looking forward to spending more time with his wife and “rooting for bold conservative reform from the sidelines”—it’s entirely possible that one main reason they are heading for the exits is that they expect that Democrats to win back the state Senate and maybe even the Assembly this fall.
“Holy smokes the entire WI GOP is jumping ship,” posted one wag on X. “They’re telling you all you need to know.”
Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Devin Remiker, in a statement following LeMahieu’s announcement he will not seek another term, warned “all potential Republican candidates” to take note that “your leaders have abandoned you.” He went on: “Your policies are causing working people to turn against you in droves as the Trump administration crashes and burns. Consider retiring alongside your colleagues before you are voted out in November.”
But it is Remiker’s job, as he seeks to fill the shoes of his highly successful predecessor, Ben Wikler, to say things like that. Here’s Remiker’s response to Vos’s mid-February announcement that he would be stepping aside as the state Assembly’s longest serving (thirteen years) speaker: “History . . . will remember him as a little man who was only remarkable for his gift of still managing to punch down despite his own smallness.” Yikes.
Now, the case can be made, and I have made it, that Robin Vos can be a bit of a jerk. But still, it’s wise to take the pronouncements of people who are paid to push narratives with a grain of salt. Have Republican prospects in Wisconsin really changed so dramatically? Could the state be turning from purple to blue?
TO GET A MORE NEUTRAL PERSPECTIVE, I spoke with Brandon Scholz, the former executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, who stopped being a Republican the day after the January 6th Capitol riot. Scholz, now an independent analyst and commentator, urged caution in attributing the legislature’s leadership exodus to concern over the upcoming election.
Vos, he noted, has floated the idea of leaving before, and he might have already left in 2024 had “the Trump people not tried to recall him” over Vos’s refusal to decertify Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. But Scholz does think LeMahieu and others may have stepped aside in order to avoid the blame that will come when Democrats reclaim the state Senate this fall, as he expects will happen.
“Certainly if they lost the majority, it’s natural that everybody looks at leadership and tries to blame somebody,” Scholz says. “Devin [LeMahieu] would be at the top of that list because he’s the majority leader. He’s the one that makes the decision, casts the votes, puts the bills up, raises the money.”
Scholz also believes that proclamations that Wisconsin is turning from purple to blue are premature. State voters re-elected Republican U.S. Senator Ron Johnson in 2022 and picked Trump for president in both 2016 and 2024. If liberal Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor handily beats conservative Court of Appeals Judge Maria Lazar in the state’s April 7 Supreme Court election, “that’s one box to check”; if Democrats gain control of the state Senate this fall, that’s another. Finally, if one of the multiple Democratic candidates for governor beats Tiffany, “who will have a Trump endorsement and the mythical MAGA vote, which never shows up”—well, if all that happens, he thinks “you could put that check mark into maybe they’re moving from purple to blue.”
Scholz blames the state Republican party, and especially its chairman, Brian Schimming, for its declining fortunes. “The Wisconsin Republican Party is a skeleton of itself,” he says.
There is no more Republican party in Wisconsin. It is inept. Is incompetent. It can’t raise money. It has a chairman [who] should be somewhere else. Trump should give Schimming a job out in Washington and get him out of the state. And they should get some leadership into that party that knows how to run elections and knows how to act like adults. I’ve never seen a state party so inept as it is today.
For what it’s worth, a lot of factors have come into play to create the possibility, which now exists, that Wisconsin will head into 2027 with an unusual trifecta: a liberal-dominated state Supreme Court, a Democratic governor, and at least one of two legislative chambers under Democratic control.
SUPREME COURT JUSTICES IN WISCONSIN are elected to ten-year terms in what are officially nonpartisan elections—although, for the last two decades, they have mostly been high-spending affairs pitting conservatives backed by Republicans against liberals backed by Democrats.
The 2023 state Supreme Court race, in which liberal Judge Janet Protasiewicz beat former justice and hardcore religious conservative Dan Kelly, was at the time the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history by far; spending, mostly by outside groups, topped $50 million. The state’s next Supreme Court election, in 2025, shattered that record. That race, between circuit court judge Susan Crawford and former Republican state attorney general Brad Schimel, gobbled up more than $100 million (in one tally reaching $144.5 million), including $22 million from multi-billionaire Elon Musk and groups that he funds. The eccentric multi-billionaire issued $100 checks to voters who signed a petition against “activist judges” as well as three $1 million payments to lottery-selected (or not so lottery-selected) voters, for which he still faces a civil lawsuit alleging that he violated state election bribery laws.
Protasiewicz won by a 11-point margin, Crawford by a 10-point one.
In the current race between Taylor and Lazar, the spending is relatively modest. Through early March, Taylor had raised more than $3.8 million over the past year, compared to Lazar’s paltry $438,000. A March 18 tally from the watchdog group Wisconsin Democracy Campaign found that only $638,300 has been pumped into the race by various outside groups—almost all of it on behalf of Taylor.
Scholz, whose two-word synopsis of the current race is, “It’s over,” says the money isn’t flowing because the Republicans see Lazar’s candidacy as a losing battle and also not one of key importance. After all, it’s for an open seat vacated by a conservative; liberals will retain control of the court no matter who wins. He illustrates how that value proposition sounds: “So let me get this straight. You want me to donate ten million, one million, whatever, to a race that even if they win, they’re still going to be in the minority?”
But the stakes in the race are still substantial, because a win by Taylor would give court liberals a 5–2 advantage and ensure that, barring deaths or resignations, they will retain a court majority at least through 2030. The next race is for the seat held by two-term Justice Annette Ziegler, who has announced that she will not be seeking re-election; if liberals take that seat in addition to the one this year, they would be assured of court control until at least 2033.
Despite these stakes, a Marquette Law School poll released Tuesday found that just 12 percent of Wisconsin registered voters said they had heard “a lot” about the April 7 election, while 53 percent remain undecided. Among those who had made a decision, 23 percent backed Taylor compared to 17 percent for Lazar.
One main reason for Taylor’s likely win is that she is avowedly pro-choice in a state still wincing from a 15-month shutdown of access to abortion following the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dodd decision. Taylor worked as a policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin for eight years, from 2003 to 2011, before serving as a Democratic state lawmaker, as a circuit court judge, and later as an appeals court judge.
Lazar spent twenty years in private practice focused on civil litigation before working as an assistant state attorney general, then a circuit court judge, and later an appeals court judge. She has called the Dobbs decision “very wise” and suggested that the people of Wisconsin may want to ban abortions after six weeks, before many women even know they’re pregnant. She has insisted that her personal views on abortion are irrelevant to how she would rule and referred to the state’s current “20-week compromise” as settled law. Of course, that’s also how recent Republican nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court described Roe v. Wade before voting to overturn it.
Moreover, Lazar has wooed extremist groups including Moms for Liberty. Last October she appeared at an event that featured Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who was convicted of felonies for lying to the FBI before Trump pardoned him. Also on hand to suck up the right-wing fumes was GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany, who in January 2021, after the attack on the Capitol, voted to set aside the election result in two states.
These positions and affiliations could quite likely cost these contenders support in the spring and fall elections. But in terms of the state legislature, it is not what they accomplished or stood for that has kept Republicans in power in recent years but power itself, as expressed through redistricting.
FOR YEARS, WISCONSIN HAS HAD some of the most gerrymandered legislative maps in the nation. This is the main reason that both the state Assembly and the state Senate have been under continuous GOP control since 2011, despite the fact that Wisconsin voters are about evenly divided between the two parties. In the 2022 election, when Gov. Evers was re-elected with 51.2 percent of the vote, Republicans still managed to obtain a 22–11 supermajority in the state senate and a near-supermajority of 64–35 in the state Assembly.
The conservative majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was fine with this imbalance. But the 2023 election of state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz—who as a candidate openly flagged the maps as “rigged” and “unfair”—gave liberals a majority on the court for the first time in decades. In December of that year, the court struck down the GOP-drawn maps as unconstitutional. The Republicans, facing the prospect of a court-imposed redistricting outcome that would erode its advantage even further, agreed to maps proposed by Evers.
In the fall 2024 elections, with the new boundaries in place, Democrats picked up ten seats in the Assembly and four in the Senate. This year, the Dems could secure majority control in the legislature by flipping just two seats in the Senate and five in the Assembly.
Meanwhile, two pending lawsuits challenging similarly skewed maps that give Republicans an enormous advantage in races for Congress are considered unlikely to be resolved in time for the fall elections. But there is still a chance that, even under the current maps, Democrats could bump off one or even two of the seats—those now held by Republicans Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden. Both are Trump loyalists at a time when the president is wildly unpopular on account of, you know, everything.
Steil was booed last year while defending Trump’s tariffs at a town hall in his district. Van Orden, in the running for recognition as the single nuttiest member of Congress, has backed Trump on some of his most controversial actions, including his sadistic immigration crackdown and war of choice against Iran.
In the race for governor, Tiffany’s main GOP rival, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, dropped out of the race in late January, one day after Trump endorsed Tiffany, declaring that the Wisconsin congressman “has always been at my side.” Apparently, it is understood that it is impossible for a Republican to win a statewide race without Trump’s support. But it may also be that, in Wisconsin as elsewhere, winning with Trump’s support may prove to be equally difficult.
In other words, it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.
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