How Wisconsin liberals have made spring elections a nightmare for Republicans

Wisconsin’s big April court election was many things.

A rebuke of Elon Musk.

A red flag for President Donald Trump.

A sign that Democratic voters are on fire.

An astounding case study in voter turnout.  

But more than anything else, this election was the most powerful signal yet of the transformation of judicial politics in Wisconsin.

Liberals now enjoy something close to a vise grip on the state Supreme Court. For conservatives, control is increasingly out of reach.

Big spring elections have become a nightmare for Republicans, who have lost four of the last five court races. And the underlying ingredients driving comfortable liberal victories in 2018, 2020, 2023 and 2025 seem likely to shape the elections to come in 2026, 2027 and 2028.

What are the broader forces behind this political transformation?  Why is the election math in April so different from the election math in November? Why do court elections in the Trump era look so different from court elections in the decades before?

From 2000 to 2016, conservatives won seven of nine contested elections for state Supreme Court. But since 2018, they have only won one out of five, and that 2019 victory came by less than 6,000 votes. The four liberal wins have all come by double digits, including Susan Crawford’s 10-point victory over Brad Schimel April 1.

Throughout this century, Wisconsin has remained an extremely competitive and evenly divided state in big fall elections.  But spring judicial elections have changed quite dramatically.

I see four broad and overlapping factors at work here:

∎ One, liberals and Democrats have become better than conservatives and Republicans at waging judicial campaigns, whether it’s fundraising, strategy, mobilization or candidate quality.

∎ Two, the partisan realignment of the Trump era is helping Democrats in spring elections. The GOP coalition now includes a lot of sporadic voters who turn out only for presidential races. The Democratic coalition includes a growing share of highly engaged, college-educated voters who can be counted on to vote in lower-turnout spring contests.

∎ Three, outrage over Trump has been highly motivating for Democratic voters.  Trump was in the White House for three of the four big liberal court victories (2018, 2020 and 2025), and the other (2023) came after the U.S. Supreme Court, with three Trump appointees, overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion the central issue in that race.

∎ Four, the transformation of nonpartisan court races into highly partisan and increasingly nationalized political battles has worked in combination with the first three factors to advantage Democrats, especially in maximizing their vote in the big blue counties of Milwaukee and Dane.  In effect, Democratic voters are behaving in the spring more like they do in the fall. That is less true of Republican voters.

A good way to illustrate this is to look at how regional voting patterns have changed in judicial races.

That story starts with the state’s two biggest counties, Milwaukee and Dane. They exemplify how Democrats have mobilized their urban and suburban base in these campaigns. And because of their size, they have played the leading role in the liberal ascendancy on the court.

But the spring voting histories of these two counties are also quite different. Of the two, Dane’s contribution to the election performance of liberal court candidates is a more familiar story: a growing electorate, ultra-high turnouts and eye-popping margins.

How Milwaukee has helped transform spring elections

The contribution of the city of Milwaukee and its inner suburbs is a much newer and underappreciated story.  In some ways it is even more consequential because it represents such a departure from the past.

The reliably Democratic city of Milwaukee used to be the prime example of liberal “underperformance” in statewide court races. The way that Milwaukee voted in April bore little resemblance to the way it voted in November.

Judicial elections weren’t as partisan as they are today. They were often dominated by the issue of crime, which helped conservatives. And they typically saw a massive drop-off in Democratic turnout in the city compared to the fall, including among voters of color.

In fact, conservatives won the city of Milwaukee in the 2000 and 2003 state Supreme Court races and almost won in 2007.

This began to change in the late 2000s, when liberal court candidates started to carry the city by 20 points or more.

But those margins have truly exploded in just the past two elections of 2023 and 2025, when liberals won the city of Milwaukee by 64 and 67 points.  Not only is liberal performance in the spring no longer lagging far behind Democratic performance in the fall, but it is exceeding it (measured by point margins).

Turnouts have risen, too. Milwaukee has never turned out like Madison. Few cities do. But in this last race, Milwaukee’s turnout grew significantly more than it did in the state as a whole.

The effect of this on the statewide vote is substantial.  Liberal court candidates carried the city by an average of 6,000 votes in the 2000s and by an average of 27,000 votes in the 2010s.

But on April 1, Crawford carried the city by more than 103,000 votes. That equals 4.4% of the total statewide vote, which means the city of Milwaukee generated almost half (4.4 points) of Crawford’s 10-point winning margin statewide.

This is a new and big development in judicial politics in Wisconsin. How has it happened? That probably deserves its own analysis.  But it reflects in part the success of Democratic organizing and turnout efforts.

And I think it also reflects the growing partisanship of court races. The fact that the state’s biggest city now votes in court elections more like it votes for president or governor is an important part of the leftward shift of state Supreme Court races in Wisconsin.

Milwaukee suburbs also contributing to shift

The rest of Milwaukee County is also playing a role.  Milwaukee’s inner suburbs and nearby small cities have gotten far bluer in both fall and spring races. Collectively, “suburban” Milwaukee County voted for the conservative court candidate by an average of 12 points from 2000 to 2016.

In the five races since 2018, it voted for the liberal candidate by an average of 21 points. On April 1, Crawford’s winning margin across these communities averaged 30 points.

The suburbs north of Milwaukee with high shares of college-educated voters help illustrate how the education divide has boosted Democrats in lower-turnout races.

In the village of Shorewood, which Crawford carried 88% to 12%, turnout equaled 82% of the total 2024 presidential vote, an astonishing figure for a spring election. Turnout exceeded 80% of the presidential vote in Bayside, Fox Point and Whitefish Bay and fell just shy of 80% in Wauwatosa, which all backed Crawford overwhelmingly.

The same combination of sky-high turnout and huge liberal margins was the story in Dane County, the Democratic Party’s other geographic base. Crawford carried it by 181,746 votes, a bigger raw vote margin than any presidential candidate has ever achieved in Dane County other than Kamala Harris last fall.

The city of Madison voted for Crawford 90% to 10%. Turnout in one small Madison suburb, Shorewood Hills, was roughly 85% of its presidential vote. Turnout in Dane County as a whole was 78% of its 2024 presidential vote, tops in Wisconsin.

Here are three other takeaways about Dane’s ongoing and massive role in judicial elections:

∎ Crawford’s winning margin of roughly 182,000 equals about 8% of the total votes cast statewide, meaning Dane County essentially added a net 8 points to the statewide liberal vote. That is roughly the same impact Dane has had in the past five court races dating back to 2018. It is a very big deficit for conservatives to make up in the rest of the state.

∎ Dane is playing a bigger role in these races than Milwaukee County, which gave Crawford a 150,000-vote margin. But Milwaukee County has arguably played a bigger role in the transformation of court elections from conservative preeminence to liberal preeminence.  That’s because liberals have made bigger gains in Milwaukee. Put another way, Dane has gone from giving liberals huge margins to giving them even “huger” margins. Milwaukee County has gone from voting against liberal court candidates to voting for them by huge margins.

∎ It is a testament to the size of the four liberal court victories in 2018, 2020, 2023 and 2025 that the liberal candidate would have won each one without Dane County (you can look it up).

Meanwhile, ‘red Wisconsin’ has been underperforming in April elections

So, what about the other side of the political equation? How have spring voting patterns changed in “red” Wisconsin?

The short answer is that Republican areas now produce smaller point margins in the spring than they do in the fall, which is the opposite of the old pattern. The high-turnout outer suburbs of Milwaukee that used to boost conservative court candidates have gotten less Republican. And rural areas that have gotten much redder in recent years haven’t swung behind conservative court candidates the way they have swung behind Trump.

Let’s take the suburban part of the story first.  Taken together, the high-turnout WOW counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington used to vote for conservative court candidates by 30 to 60 points. In the past two court races, those margins fell to 18 and 17 points.

Schimel won Ozaukee County by just 3 points; in the big 2011 court race that preceded the recall fight over Gov. Scott Walker, conservative David Prosser won Ozaukee by 43 points. In Waukesha County, Schimel lost the city of Waukesha and the village of Elm Grove. He carried the city of Brookfield by less than 2 points and the village of Menomonee Falls by 1 point – two large suburbs that in past decades generated conservative landslides.

It’s not that the WOW counties are performing dramatically worse for Republicans in the spring than the fall (Trump only carried the WOW counties by 22 points last November). It’s that they aren’t as red as they used to be.

What about the GOP’s rural base? Here, the differences between the spring vote and the fall vote are much bigger.

In big partisan elections, Republicans have offset Democrats’ gains in the Milwaukee and Madison metro areas by making huge inroads with voters in western, central and northern Wisconsin, especially in rural counties. But that hasn’t happened in April court races.

Take the western Wisconsin media market of La Crosse, which covers 12 counties. In presidential races, the La Crosse region has gotten much redder. It went from voting Democratic by 10 points in 2012 to voting Republican by 5, 5 and 8 points in the three Trump elections. But in April court races, the La Crosse market has supported the liberal candidate in the last seven contested elections. Crawford won the region by 7 points over Schimel.

In the larger 16-county TV market of Green Bay, Trump has carried the region by 16 to 18 points in his three races. But conservatives have won the Green Bay market by an average of just 5 points in the past three court races.In the northern Wausau TV market, Trump won by 19 points last fall, but Schimel beat Crawford by just 10 points.

These margins aren’t nearly big enough to compensate for the growth of the liberal court vote in metropolitan Madison and Milwaukee.  The Schimel campaign understood it had to get more Trump voters to turn out in the spring. And it did boost the conservative vote, but not by nearly enough to match what was happening on the other side.

There are many campaign factors that may be contributing to the new April election math, including money and candidates and messaging and organizing. Perhaps crime is no longer as potent an issue in court races as it used to be, or perhaps liberals and Democrats have gotten better at defusing it.

Abortion certainly overtook crime as an issue in 2023 and maybe again in 2025.  Elon Musk’s central role in the 2025 campaign boosted turnout on both sides, but probably mobilized more Democrats than Republicans.

The Trump era has produced blow-outs for liberals in court races

But there are also broader forces at work than the campaigns themselves.

The Trump realignment has produced two very narrow Republican presidential victories in Wisconsin when turnout is maximized and Trump’s advantage with less habitual and less engaged voters has been critical.

But it also has produced a slew of blow-out court defeats in April when fewer voters go to the polls. These defeats have occurred not just in low-turnout court races like 2018, when 22% of voting-age adults voted. But they also have occurred in high-turnout court races like 2023 and 2025, when 40% and 50% of voting-age adults voted.

Turnout in the Crawford-Schimel race approached the levels of a November midterm.

With Trump in power, Democrats have typically been more energized than Republican voters in non-presidential races. And partly because of that, Democrats have been benefiting more than Republicans from the fact that voters overwhelmingly view these races now through a partisan lens.

Wisconsin has court seats currently held by conservatives on the 2026 and 2027 ballots, and a seat currently held by a liberal on the 2028 ballot.  That means 2028 is the earliest opportunity conservatives will have to win the court back. But they must win each of the next three races to do so, which seems improbable based on recent history.

These races won’t simply be reruns of the one-sided victories that have produced a liberal court majority in Wisconsin. They will feature different candidates and maybe different issues.

But they will likely share the underlying dynamics of a Democratic electorate energized by anger and outrage over Trump and an education divide that has favored them in spring contests. Those won’t be easy challenges for conservatives to overcome.

Craig Gilbert provides Wisconsin political analysis as a fellow with Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Prior to the fellowship, Gilbert reported on politics for 35 years at the Journal Sentinel, the last 25 in its Washington Bureau. His column continues that independent reporting tradition and goes through the established Journal Sentinel editing process.

Follow him on Twitter: @Wisvoter.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin liberals have made spring elections a Republican nightmare