Wisconsin voters effectively gave Democrats a supermajority on one of the most important state supreme courts in the country on Tuesday.
Democrats just locked down control of one of the most important courts in America
Dems won a swing-state election in a 20-point blowout.
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
The result was a blowout. Justice-elect Chris Taylor defeated Judge Maria Lazar by a 20-point margin. Although Wisconsin Supreme Court races are technically nonpartisan, every recent race has pitted a “liberal” backed by Democrats against a “conservative” supported by the Republican Party. Taylor previously served in the state legislature as a Democrat.
She will replace Justice Rebecca Bradley, a “conservative” in the euphemistic language Wisconsin uses to describe Republican justices.
Taylor’s victory also means that, barring the death of a justice or some other unlikely event, Democrats will retain effective control of the judiciary in one of the nation’s most hotly contested swing states during the 2028 presidential election.
In 2020, after President Donald Trump lost Wisconsin to former President Joe Biden, Trump asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to toss out 220,000 ballots cast in Democratic areas of the state. Although Trump did not prevail in this lawsuit, three justices, including retiring Justice Bradley, concluded that at least some of these voters should have been disenfranchised.
Partisan control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court has national implications
Although Taylor’s victory gives Democrats a supermajority on Wisconsin’s highest court, the battle to control this swing state court has long been one of the most contested judicial fights in the country.
Billionaire Elon Musk ostentatiously backed the “conservative” candidate in 2025, warning the future of “Western Civilization” was at stake and even handing out million-dollar checks at a political rally. With Musk sitting things out, Democrats favored more strongly this time, and partisan control of the court no longer in question, this week’s race was less high-profile and less expensive.
Republicans controlled the court as recently as 2023, when Justice Janet Protasiewicz won her seat and gave Democrats a narrow majority. Protasiewicz’s win also ended a period of more than a decade when Wisconsin did not hold competitive elections for control of its state legislature. After a strong electoral performance in 2010, Republicans gained control of Wisconsin’s government and used that control to aggressively gerrymander the state in order to prevent Democrats from ever regaining control of the legislature.
In 2018, for example, Democratic candidates for the state assembly received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats thanks to the GOP’s gerrymander.
But Protasiewicz campaigned on abolishing this gerrymander. After she took office, she joined her three Democratic colleagues in striking down the gerrymander in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (2023). Though Republicans retained control of the state legislature in 2024, they lost a total of 14 seats in the state assembly and senate thanks to the new, less biased maps.
With the state supreme court now firmly in Democratic hands, Wisconsin will hold another free and fair election for control of the state legislature in November, potentially giving Democrats their first opportunity to govern the state in more than a decade.
Meanwhile, Taylor’s win will most likely prevent a Republican from convincing the state supreme court to overturn the result of the 2028 election in Wisconsin, as Trump asked them to do in 2020.
Justice Annette Ziegler, a Republican, plans to retire in 2027. And Democratic Justice Rebecca Dallet’s seat is up in 2028. But even if Republicans win both of these races, the state supreme court will still have a 4-3 Democratic majority during the 2028 presidential election.
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