Here & Now

Inside Wisconsin Politics: The 2026 State Supreme Court Race

Frederica Freyberg:
The morning before the only statewide debate between candidates for Wisconsin Supreme Court this week, one of them had to pull out. Liberal candidate Chris Taylor went to the hospital for kidney stones, according to her campaign. Conservative Maria Lazar wished her a speedy recovery. Now the debate has been rescheduled for next Thursday night, which puts it just five days before the April 7 spring election.
Meanwhile, the latest Marquette Law School poll found voters still don’t know who they’ll vote for. Among registered voters, 53% remain undecided, with 23% supporting Chris Taylor and 17% choosing Maria Lazar and 7% saying they won’t vote. The state Supreme Court election is the focus of this week’s new “Inside Wisconsin Politics,” with Wisconsin Public Radio reporter Shawn Johnson and Rich Kremer and PBS Wisconsin “Here & Now” reporter Zac Schultz.

Shawn Johnson:
The Wisconsin Supreme Court race is coming up, and polling shows a majority of you say you don’t know enough about the candidates. Let’s fix that. This is “Inside Wisconsin Politics.” I’m Shawn Johnson here with my colleagues, Zac Schultz and Rich Kremer. Hey, guys.

Zac Schultz:
Hello.

Rich Kremer:
Hey.

Shawn Johnson:
So this is not something we’re just making up here. There has been polling on this race, and the leading vote getter in that poll was a majority of people saying they don’t know who they’re going to support. That is so different than in 2023 and 2025, when we in Wisconsin were the Super Bowls of election for our Supreme Court races. So, Zac, what is the difference this year?

Zac Schultz:
Well, the simple difference is this isn’t for the majority. The liberals will have a four-person majority for the next session no matter what. If Chris Taylor wins, it goes to 5-2. If Chris — if Maria Lazar wins, it stays at 4-3. But that simply is the difference between $100 million in campaign and the attention of the world on this very important swing state, and the court’s decisions on election laws versus a snooze fest, even in the state for people that normally tune in for these elections, are still trying to figure out, oh, when is that coming up?

Shawn Johnson:
And that’s not hyperbole either. That $100 million was a real number from last election, when we shattered the 2023 record not just for Wisconsin, but for national judicial races. Rich, the 2025 race was the first one you’d covered really closely. What was a day in the life like on that one, and how does it compare to what you’ve observed in this Supreme Court race?

Rich Kremer:
I mean, it’s like night and day. I covered a Republican, former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, spent a day with him on the campaign trail. And, you know, first off the bat, he took money directly from the Republican Party of Wisconsin. Also, I was at a campaign event at the Republican Party in La Crosse, where Brad Schimel framed the race as a fight between good and evil. And he also used an analogy of driving the serpent out of the Garden of Eden. So the language used by Schimel is very different than what we’ve seen from Judge Lazar. She’s promoting that she is the independent candidate compared to Chris Taylor, who she attacks as being an activist and former Democratic lawmaker. But she just hasn’t made the same kind of statements that I’ve heard that Schimel did last year.

Shawn Johnson:
It’s almost like an old-fashioned Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, Zac.

Zac Schultz:
It harkens back to a day where things weren’t as heated, that your TV wasn’t filled with ads nonstop in the lead up to it, where you really did have to pay attention to learn who these people were. Now it’s still Republican/Democrat. You know, they may use the labels conservative/liberal, but Chris Taylor is a former legislative Democrat but now independent judge. But her connections to the Wisconsin Democratic Party run deep. Lazar’s connection to the Republican Party covered go deep. I’ve attended multiple events with her. She’s been speaking at GOP rallies with the next speaker as Eric Toney running for attorney general. So it’s not like either of these are running down independent lanes. They’re still following that traditional — the new path. If you want to become on the Supreme Court, you keep the political parties at arm’s length in your name, but you take all the money under the table. You take all their effort for grassroots, because that really matters when it comes to getting people out to vote. Those turnout operations, those dollar operations still belong to the parties. There is no independent structure for anyone to remain independent and actually win a campaign.

Shawn Johnson:
Zac, what should people know about Chris Taylor’s background and what led her to this point?

Zac Schultz:
She’s got heavy partisan activity in her background and she doesn’t deny that. But like every judge or justice, she wouldn’t be the first one. I mean, former Justice Prosser served as the Assembly speaker for Republicans. And back in the day when they could say, “Well, I’m a conservative justice, not a conservative politician.” With Chris Taylor in this modern environment, I don’t know if it really matters because the candidates are so tied to the parties anyway that her background doesn’t seem to have any baggage. And we saw with Brad Schimel, as Rich, you were talking about last year, he’s a former Republican attorney general for Wisconsin, and he did not shy away from those Republican connections. But you see a difference with Lazar and how she’s handled herself.

Rich Kremer:
Yes, she’s leaning on her, you know, her experience in the courtroom, but also, you know, her political ads kind of let you know where she stands on certain things, or at least where her campaign does. So there’s plenty of signals out there.

Shawn Johnson:
You know, some of these candidates, when they run for Supreme Court, they come from the law. And maybe you’re hearing about them for the first time or getting introduced to them for the first time. But, you know, Chris Taylor and Maria Lazar, as you both mentioned, have been around for a little while. I remember Maria Lazar defending Republican drawn legislative maps in 2012 alongside co-counsel Dan Kelly, who — former Supreme Court justice and who ran in a couple races and lost. I remember Chris Taylor very well for her role in the minority on the Legislature’s Budget Committee, where if you have that position, you are expected to be able to talk and defend every position and attack the majority’s position aggressively. And so she did that well. She wasn’t just a backbencher legislator. She was the person who was on that front line of attack. And, you know, since we’ve — since she’s become a judge, that’s changed. And she has indicated and her friends have indicated, look, she knows this is a different role on the court, but it is striking a very big change for her to go from that, you know, attack, attack, attack Democratic legislator to a judge going to see things differently.
Rich, there was another finding in the Marquette poll that we recently covered that, you know, it’s hard to say where people stand on the candidates when more than half of voters say they don’t know. But what we did see, what you saw, there’s a lot of tells in there about which side is more enthusiastic right now at this moment in time.

Rich Kremer:
Yeah. Big time. There was a big disparity in terms of who’s excited to vote in the April 7th election. So some numbers I’ll run off here. People saying that they’re certain to vote on April 7th, Democrats are up 18 points over Republicans. How important the election is to the outcome or how important is the election outcome to you? That was a 19-point spread in Democrats favor as well. So there’s all kinds of metrics. And not to mention that President Trump had his lowest net negative approval rating in Marquette poll history. So those are all some headwinds for conservative candidates.