Wisconsin’s Supreme Court elections were once low-key, low-turnout April affairs. Not so much any more. In 2023 total spending on the court race reached $50 million. Two years later, in 2025, total spending doubled that, passing $100 million. The big spending reflects the stakes in a shifting majority on the court. In the 2019-20 term, conservatives held a 5-2 majority. In 2020 liberals narrowed the conservative majority to 4-3. After the 2023 election it became a 4-3 liberal majority, which was maintained in 2025. With a retiring conservative justice, the 2026 election can either hold the 4-3 liberal majority or increase it to 5-2 for the 2026-27 term. (The seven justices are elected to 10 year terms.)
This recent shift contrasts with consistent conservative majorities from 1995 until the recent shifts. The figure shows the results of court elections since 1995. From 1995 through 2003 conservatives won 5 elections to 2 for liberals. From 2005 to 2013 conservatives again won 5 elections to 2 for liberals. But since 2015 liberals have won 5 seats to 3 for conservatives.
Since the 1990s Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have become far more partisan with voting patterns coming to be strongly linked to partisan elections and with the parties endorsing and financially supporting candidates in the formally non-partisan court races.
The next figure shows this changing partisan structure to court voting. As an example, I use Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, who won in 1995 and 2015 before retiring in 2025. (In 2005 she ran unopposed.) In 1995, there was a moderate correlation, .45, between how counties voted for the court race and how they voted in the previous presidential race. But by 2015, the correlation between Bradley’s vote and the 2012 presidential vote had risen to .78. In 2025 when Bradley retired, the correlation for liberal Susan Crawford with the 2024 presidential vote was an astonishing .99. This reflects the surge in party polarization in Wisconsin and the emergence of court races more tightly tied to partisan divisions.
This increase in partisan voting structure is not a sudden phenomena, but one which has grown steadily since the 1990s. In the 1970s and 1980s there was little partisan structure to court elections. Indeed, in 1978 the correlation was nil, .002. This rose sporadically in the 1990s, then grew steadily since 2007 to the current astonishingly high .99 of 2025.
This extremely high correlation doesn’t mean outcomes are locked in. Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative, won in 2019 by less than a 1 percentage point margin, with a correlation of .92 with the 2016 outcome, while Justice Rebecca Dallet, a liberal, won the year before with a 10 point margin and a correlation of .89 with the same 2016 presidential race. If all counties shift their votes up or down by the same amount, the correlation remains high though the outcome can shift, as in these two cases. Correlation tells us about the structure of the votes but not where the majority necessarily falls. What we have now is that the most Republican counties are now virtually certain to also be the most conservative in their court votes and the most Democratic counties the most liberal. That wasn’t the case before the 1990s when knowing a county’s presidential vote told us very little about their court vote.
The April 2026 election is likely to reflect this strong partisan structure of voting, though we can’t yet say if the net election forces will shift in the liberal or conservative direction.
The geography of the court vote has shifted dramatically over 30 years. In 1995, liberal Justice Bradley won with 55% of the vote. In 2025, liberal Justice Crawford replaced the retiring Bradley with a nearly identical 55% of the vote. But the sources of these two victories was dramatically different. In 1995, Bradley was strongly supported in the north, north-central, and southwestern parts of the state. Notably her vote was significantly less in Brown, Dane and Milwaukee counties. In 2025, Crawford lost badly in the north, north-central and most of the southeast, while she ran up large margins in Dane and Milwaukee, much more than Bradley’s 1995 totals in those counties. She also ran a little ahead in Brown, a county Bradley had lost badly in 1995. The maps shows how dramatically the geography of the vote has shifted even with identical vote margins in the two races.
With so much of the state shifting from blue to red, how is it that the vote margin is unchanged? Democratic gains have been large and come in counties with large populations. Republican gains are widespread but mostly in less populous counties. In large Republican leaning counties, Waukesha, for example, the conservative majority has increased but only slightly, with a larger increase in Washington, but a slight decrease in Ozaukee. Republicans have gained in Marathon, but the conservative margin is only moderate.In contrast, Dane has gone from pretty liberal to overwhelmingly liberal, and Milwaukee which was quite competitive has also become very liberal in its court vote. These shifts also highlight the greater geographic polarization in the 2020s compared to the 1990s, while not shifting the statewide balance at all.
Public opinion
Since 2023 the Wisconsin Supreme Court has held a consistent net approval rating, though about 15% say they don’t have an opinion. Court approval slightly improved during and after the 2025 court election, declining slightly in October.
As of October, the candidates for the court in 2026 were little known to the public. This is not unusual in court elections and especially so with no incumbent. The Marquette Law School poll in October asked registered voters if they had a clear idea what the candidates stand for. For both candidates, 69% said they hadn’t heard enough, and only 10% or 11% said they did have a clear idea. With less than 3 months left before the April election, the campaigns have a lot of messaging to do.
Voters have a strong preference that candidates for the court discuss issues so voters know what they stand for, 83%, while only 17% say candidates should avoid discussing issues so as to not appear to have prejudged issues. On this, partisans and independents are in agreement.
The balance of the court
With the current balance of the court, and the justices coming up for election in the next 10 years, the liberal majority is assured until at least 2028. Should the liberal candidate win in 2026 the majority will remain in liberal hands until at least 2030 (absent an unscheduled vacancy occuring.)
After more than two decades of conservative majorities, the liberal victories in five of the last eight court elections has altered the balance, and created the prospect for continued majorities well into the 2020s or beyond.
The shifting balance of the court since 2019 is shown in the table below.
And for those who want way more detail (you know who you are), here are all Wisconsin Supreme Court elections since 1976. My ideological classification of justices may be debatable in some cases prior to 2000. In those less partisan times ideology played less of a role and moderate justices may be mislabled. The distinctions since 1995 are much more clear, though note that Hagedorn was elected as a conservative candidate but does not align strongly with either the liberal or conservative wings of the court in his decisions, siding with conservatives a little more than half the time in some terms and a little more than half with liberals in other terms. See the excellent SCOWstats.com for detailed analysis of court alignments since 1918.
