Every four years, the race for attorney general in Wisconsin gets overshadowed by the attention paid to the race for governor. But the attorney general’s office is extremely important, with control of the Wisconsin Department of Justice and the ability to represent the state in lawsuits in both state and federal courts.

Each of the candidates wants voters to focus on several key issues when they fill out their ballot.

“Good morning everybody, thank you for being here, I’m Josh Kaul and I’m here to talk about my re-election campaign for attorney general,” said the state’s Democratic incumbent for the office on Aug. 27, 2026.

“Good morning, great to be with everybody — I am running for attorney general,” said Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, the Republican challenger for the office, on Feb. 7.

Kaul and Toney are no strangers to running against each other for attorney general. The 2026 election is a rematch of the 2022 race, where Kaul narrowly defeated Toney. It’s not often that Wisconsin voters see a rematch in statewide elections, but Toney said a mini-stroke and open heart surgery in 2023 made him want to run again.

“I was starting to think about what do I want to continue to do if this surgery goes well? But I was, at that point, just trusting God through the hands of my medical team that hoping and praying things would go well,” Toney said. “And I, as it got closer, knew that would want to run again.”

Kaul said the rematch should make it easy for the voters.

“One of the things that’s interesting about a rematch is you can look back at what the candidate said in the prior race and see how those things held up,” Kaul said. “And I think that that’s really instructive here. In the last campaign, it was shortly after Roe v. Wade had been overturned. I had filed a lawsuit seeking to block enforcement of a law that dates back to the mid-1800s. Eric Toney, my opponent, had attacked me for that case. He called it a partisan stunt, he said it should be dismissed.”

The liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed with Kaul and overturned the 1849 abortion law in a decision issued in July 2025. A 20-week limitation that was already on the books is now the law in Wisconsin.

Toney said he would not seek to change that.

“I have not and am not advocating for any changes to the law in Wisconsin,” he said. “And if there is going to be any change, that’s something that needs to be voted on by the people of Wisconsin and not decided on by politicians in Madison.”

Toney said the issue voters need to look at from the last four years is the operation of the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratories.

After his close loss in 2022, Toney joined Kaul in the spring of 2023 to push the Republican-controlled Legislature to fund 16 more positions at the state crime lab.

“I’ve always talked about putting public safety over politics. I stood with our attorney general after that 2022 race, helping him get more crime lab positions in that state budget, working with Republican legislators behind the scenes,” Toney said.

The Legislature approved just 3 of the 16 positions, none of them for DNA analysis.

In the 2025 budget, Kaul tried again to lobby for more positions.

,”In this budget, we are requesting 19,” Kaul said in March of that year.

The Republicans on the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance gave them 0.

Toney said the lack of investment doesn’t matter.

“What we saw our attorney general do during this period is put a hiring freeze in place,” Toney said. “And so I mentioned those crime lab positions I helped him get. Well, over a year later, we saw a nonpartisan audit released of our crime labs, and they said he hadn’t even filled those positions. We saw that he had less DNA positions filled compared to 2020. And we see that they’re taking for DNA, for example, taking on average over twice as long to test less from when he started to where we are now.”

Kaul said politics are at the heart of this issue.

“Now in terms of the labs themselves on a day-to-day basis, one of the things I’ve been clear about is where we need resources from the state Legislature,” Kaul said. “And in the last state budget, my office requested 19 additional positions for the labs. Eric Toney’s allies in the state Legislature provided 0 positions. And look, that’s not an accident — this is politics being played here.”

Toney accused Kaul of overlooking the crime lab in favor of joining federal lawsuits against the Trump administration.

“He campaigned against all of the political lawsuits when he first ran, and now that’s effectively what he’s running his entire campaign on is those lawsuits where he’s putting politics over public safety,” Toney said.

President Donald Trump was sworn into office for the second time on Jan. 20, 2025.

Kaul and Wisconsin joined their first lawsuit against the Trump administration the very next day, challenging a Trump executive order that threatened to end birthright citizenship. Since then, Kaul has joined more than 60 lawsuits, many dealing with federal funding cuts that Trump tried to implement through executive orders.

“We have consistently fought back, and we have won case after case, and what that has meant is that those funds either are not illegally conditioned or they’re not frozen or ultimately cut,” Kaul said. “Instead they can come to our communities and support critical programs in Wisconsin.”

Toney said Kaul was wasting resources because Democratic attorneys general from other states were already suing.

“He’s not filing lawsuits, what he’s doing is called joining them,” Toney said. “So the vast majority of those lawsuits, whether he signs onto that or not, are going to continue to move forward because other attorneys general across the country have actually done the legal work on those.”

Kaul described why the state joined these lawsuits.

“Well, of the 60-plus cases that we’ve been involved in, I don’t think any single Republican AG has joined us in challenging the Trump administration in any of those cases,” Kaul said. “And I’m not aware of a single case where Eric Toney has said he would have challenged the Trump administration. What that would mean in some cases is Wisconsin wouldn’t get the relief that happens in court, because in a number of these cases, it’s only the states that have brought the challenge that get the relief. And so it could be that we no longer have protection for critical programs if an AG is not part of one of those challenges.”

Wisconsin voters haven’t elected a governor and attorney general from different parties since 2006.

Typically the race for governor gets the most votes, and then about 2% of voters don’t vote for attorney general at all. But twice over the previous five elections, a candidate for attorney general received more votes than that party’s candidate for governor.

In 2006, Republican J.B. Van Hollen became the last attorney general elected alongside a governor from the other party, in that case Democrat Jim Doyle. The other instance was in 2022, when Toney received about 30,000 more votes than Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels.

In 2026, that pattern means Toney may need to rely on Republican Tom Tiffany defeating Democrat David Crowley in the race for governor — or he can once again outrun the top of the ticket.

“I’m running my own race from when I got into this back in October of 2025,” Toney said. “I talked about the forensic testing failures, the fentanyl epidemic and how partisan our attorney general has become. I mean, we have driven home issues that affect people in all 72 counties. And that’s what I’ve been focused on, is what our Department of Justice can do to help protect everybody in Wisconsin by putting public safety over politics.”

Kaul has won twice by less than a percentage point.

“The results tend to be fairly close, but in Wisconsin we have a lot of close elections, and so sometimes those small differences can make a big difference in the outcome,” Kaul said. “But I’m running based on my record and my time as AG, and the focus can be different. My top priority as attorney general has been public safety, and we’ve made significant progress on really important public safety issues.”