Inside Wisconsin Politics

Why voters should follow Wisconsin's 2026 Supreme Court race

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. 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 elections 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 to 2. If Maria Lazar wins, it stays at 4 to 3. But that simply is the difference between $100 million in campaign spending 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 who are still trying to figure out, oh, “When is that coming up?”

Shawn Johnson:
And that’s not hyperbole either. That $100 million is 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 former Republican Atty. Gen. Brad Schimel, spent a day with him on the campaign trail. First off, 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. 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 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, where 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 they may use the labels conservative and liberal but Chris Taylor is a former legislative Democrat but now independent judge. But her connections to the Wisconsin, to the Democratic Party go deep. Lazar’s connections to the Republican Party go deep. I’ve attended multiple events with her, where she’s been speaking at GOP rallies with the next speaker is 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:
So let’s talk about the candidates here. Let’s start with Chris Taylor. She got into the race first. Zac, what should people know about Chris Taylor’s background and what led her to this point?

Zac Schultz:
Well, the clearest thing is she had worked for abortion rights groups before she became a member of the Legislature. She ran as a Democrat in an Assembly race in the Dane County area. I covered that race way back when. She was here through a lot of the tumultuous times in the Capitol, and then she left. She was appointed Dane County judge by Gov. Evers. Then she ran for the appellate court and became a judge there, which is what she’s doing today. So she has followed the judicial pattern, but 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. 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, Rich, as 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:
So, Lazar has been focusing on her career in the courtroom. She’s been a lawyer since 1989. She worked for the Department of Justice under former Republican Atty. Gen. J.B. Van Hollen, and that was in the early years of Republican control of state government. So after 2011, when a lot of laws were passed that wound up in court Democrats tried to sue to stop the voting maps passed by Republicans, abortion restrictions and Act 10 Maria Lazar, as an assistant DOJ attorney, was representing the state and defending those. She was elected to the Waukesha County Circuit Court, but that was, both of her races were unopposed. Then in 2022, she became a judge on the Second District Court of Appeals. But to your point, yes, she’s leaning on her experience in the courtroom, but also, her political ads also 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:
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 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, a former Supreme Court justice who ran in a couple of 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. Since she’s become a judge, that’s changed. She has indicated, and her friends have indicated look, she knows this is a different role in court. But it is striking a very big change for her to go from that attack-attack-attack Democratic legislator to a judge going to see things differently. You mentioned those ads, Rich, for Maria Lazar. She is trying to go for this kind of above-it-all judge: “I don’t want to get into politics.” The ads tell a different story, though. I mean, she’s definitely not going that way with her campaign.

Rich Kremer:
Yeah, the ads have focused on basically attacking Taylor on things like abortion. Lazar’s campaign ads say that Taylor wants abortion up to the moment of birth, which is a line you’ve heard a lot of Republicans say over the years. The latest one that I think just came out this week features a woman saying that she’s afraid of her daughter having to compete against biological men in school sports.

Shawn Johnson:
Republican themes pulled right from congressional races and state Assembly races, governor races hitting the points that work for them.

Rich Kremer:
Yeah. So the ad lays out the political part of it. And then you’ve got a picture of Lazar saying that she’ll uphold the law. So it seems like she’s still trying to walk that line, but the ads do send a signal.

Zac Schultz:
Well, Shawn, let me ask you. We’ve seen low-turnout elections in the past, and that was at a time when conservatives really won a lot of these races, when there was lower turnout, when their consistent voters from the suburbs of Milwaukee came out to vote no matter what, and the liberal candidates really struggled to get the attention that they needed to win these races. And then we saw things flip from Rebecca Dallet on in 2018. So what do you see as the impact of less attention right now on this race?

Shawn Johnson:
I think we’ll find out what a less-attention race means here. I think, though, in the era of Donald Trump for one, since Donald Trump realigned the Republican Party and its base of voters, a base that reliably elected conservative justices for many years up until around 2017 we don’t know what that shift is going to mean in a lower-turnout election. But we know that conservatives start out at kind of a structural disadvantage in these races. We also know that liberals have just found a pattern for what it takes to run talk about their values. They’re not afraid to talk about cases that have happened. They are not afraid to talk about women’s health. It’s just been a winning formula for them, really, since 2018, with one exception in 2019. That has been the liberal path to victory year, in and year out. So there have been a couple of cases, Zac, that you have asked both candidates about., where you actually got to hear them, you gave them a chance to weigh in on some very high-profile cases that came before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Let’s look at those if we can. There was one about the 2020 election, which we will be talking about forever as reporters, I think. There were a lot of challenges to the election results and to Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin that came before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. What did you ask the candidates?

Zac Schultz:
The case that ultimately decided that election in Wisconsin was called Trump v. Biden, and it was brought by Trump’s lawyers, one of which is Jim Troupis, who is currently being prosecuted in Dane County Court for forgery related to the false electors thing, tied in around the same time period.

Shawn Johnson:
It’s a very small world in law.

Zac Schultz:
Especially in political lawyers, times. But yes, that case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The question was the Trump administration, the Trump campaign wanted to throw out 200,000 votes in Wisconsin, specifically in Dane and Milwaukee counties regarding absentee ballots. The question before the Supreme Court was should they even take the case? So the question was standing in the legal sense of did Donald Trump and his campaign have a legal right to even file a lawsuit in the first place? Ultimately, it was a 4-3 decision and this is a time when conservatives controlled the court 4-3 that said no, we won’t take the case. It was Brian Hagedorn who ultimately sided with the three liberals to throw out the case. That solidified the win. Biden won Wisconsin definitively, election conspiracies be damned. And it was the three conservatives who didn’t necessarily say they would have thrown out the votes, but they said we should at least hear the case. When I asked both candidates about this, Chris Taylor was absolutely on the side of the liberal candidates, saying of course they made the right decision and they never should have thrown out those votes, should have never gotten that far. It was Maria Lazar who really didn’t want to take a position on it. But she said the issue of standing is still going to come back before this court, which is true. She wouldn’t even go the one step further, because I asked her point blank, like, there are people going to hear this answer and say, “Well, what about the 200,000 votes that were going to get thrown out?” She said, well, I don’t want to weigh in on that, I don’t want to talk about that. That was just a place she wasn’t willing to go. The Democratic Party and Taylor’s campaign immediately jumped all over that, saying she’s still connected to election deniers and conspiracy and this whole issue. The 2020 election will not go away. It’s still present, and it’s present in their answers, too.

Shawn Johnson:
Rich, two things can be true. That is a position that a lawyer can take, that look, this has to deal with standing, we’re not going to get into it. Another thing that is undeniably true is that there are people in Maria Lazar’s base, or the conservative base, who have strong feelings about the 2020 election.

Rich Kremer:
Yeah, they absolutely do. So in 2022, she was endorsed by people she was attacked for being endorsed by people like Michael Gableman, and also for associating with Troupis. Gableman is a former Supreme Court justice who led the 2020 election investigation that was kind of widely panned. And also he was also fired by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who had hired him before. I mean, it was a whole thing. So she’s still getting hit for even associating with those two people. But yeah, the standing issue the other thing that comes to mind is we’ve heard the president, President Donald Trump, say, well, all those cases, they never looked at the cases, they just found these technicalities and they tossed them out. That’s not true. There were plenty of cases that were dismissed on the merits lack of evidence, et cetera. But it just kind of reminded me of that when I heard that answer from Lazar. I’ve seen that same answer from a lot of people who do believe that the 2020 election was stolen.

Shawn Johnson:
Zac, I feel like we can’t talk about a court race in Wisconsin these days without talking about the issue of abortion. That’s another one where you asked the candidates about their positions. What was your question and how did they handle it?

Zac Schultz:
Specifically the question was how would they have decided if they had been on the court when Kaul v. Urmanski was brought before the court? To be clear, that was the case that looked to throw out the 1849 abortion ban from Wisconsin. That was the attorney general suing Sheboygan, that wasn’t the point, that was what the case was called 4-3, the liberal majority threw out that law, said it was essentially annulled by laws passed after that, specifically one by Scott Walker and the Republicans. Chris Taylor said it was absolutely the correct decision. Maria Lazar once again didn’t say how she would have voted, but she kind of answered it in the end of her answer by saying, well, if I win, it’ll still be a 4-3 court. So I wouldn’t have changed the outcome of that case, which sounds a lot like her saying she would have decided with the conservatives on the case, which really shouldn’t be all that shocking. Those are who her colleagues would be if she wins, and then another conservative wins, then she would be in the majority, and who knows? That is the question that Taylor and other people are saying. If the court flips again, will abortion rights come up before the court? I will say Lazar finished her answer by saying, however, she views that Supreme Court decision as final, and that the abortion issue is settled as far as the courts are concerned. Obviously, it’s not settled when it comes to gubernatorial and legislative elections. So those will still play out, and we’re going to be covering a lot of that coming up. But their answers kind of fell into the camps that you might expect them to, especially given their messaging and ads.

Shawn Johnson:
And Rich, there was another finding in the Marquette Poll that we recently covered 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 7 election. Some numbers I’ll run off here. People saying that they are certain to vote on April 7 Democrats are up 18 points over Republicans. 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.

Shawn Johnson:
Zac, I guess against that backdrop, what can Maria Lazar point to and say, I’ve got a good chance nonetheless?

Zac Schultz:
The quick answer is she’s relying on Hagedorn’s race from 2019. Like her, he was another conservative candidate who was vastly outspent and written off towards the end of the race. People thought he was not going to win, so much so that the liberal candidate at the time really took her foot off the pedal when it came to running through the finish line. Lazar directly points to that race and says that’s the path to follow. That’s get out the vote. That’s grassroots advocacy. If we can’t win on ads, we have to make sure our voters get to the polls, especially in a lower-turnout election. Taylor said she’s aware of it she’s going to run through the tape, not letting off the pedal at all.

Shawn Johnson:
She is running a different kind of race than Judge Neubauer, who ran in that year’s race ran. I mean, you mentioned taking her feet off the pedal she ran more like a judge than a candidate, I guess, in that race. So we’ll see how that plays out in the closing days. Thanks for joining us for this week’s Inside Wisconsin Politics. Our colleague Anya Van Wagtendonk will be back next week. Be sure to follow us on pbswisconsin.org, wpr.org, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.