Liberal Justice-elect Chris Taylor’s win in Tuesday’s Supreme Court election was so lopsided that political observers had lots of ideas for what to call it: a landslide, a romp, an outlier — and possibly a harbinger, with the caveat that this is Wisconsin, and things can change fast here.
Labels aside, Taylor’s dominant victory continued two trends that have now spanned multiple elections. Liberals can’t seem to lose statewide judicial races in Wisconsin. And, as the November midterms draw near, the pendulum keeps swinging in Democrats’ direction.
“The president and his party should be freaking out,” said longtime Democratic consultant Joe Zepecki, pointing to election results in both Wisconsin and Georgia on Tuesday. “They have lost their political mojo with a little over 200 days to go until the midterm elections. This should be a five-alarm fire for Republicans.”
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Judge Chris Taylor waves to the crowd at her election night event Tuesday, April 7, 2026, at the Madison Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wis. Angela Major/WPR
Around a million more people will vote in November, Republicans counter, including some who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 but stay home in these court races.
“It’s a warning sign, but it’s not a five alarm — the spring election and the fall election don’t track,” said longtime GOP consultant Bill McCoshen. “Hopefully it’s a wake-up call for conservative candidates.”
Taylor, a state appeals judge and former Democratic state lawmaker from Madison, defeated conservative Judge Maria Lazar by 20 percentage points Tuesday, growing the liberal majority on the court from 4-3 to 5-2. She dominated in deep blue counties, and flipped red counties that were once considered foundations of the GOP’s base.
Here are some of the big takeaways.
This blowout was about as big as they come in Wisconsin
In a state where elections are routinely decided by a single percentage point or less, a victory like Taylor’s is something you just don’t see very often.
“It’s maybe not a surprise that the liberal won, given the recent track record,” said Marquette University pollster Charles Franklin. “But the size of that margin really is very striking.”
Even in Supreme Court races, where liberals have now won double-digit victories in the last four elections, in percentage terms Taylor’s win stood head-and-shoulders above the rest.
The total number of voters did not match the record set in the 2025 Supreme Court election, when the court’s majority was at stake and the eyes of the nation were on Wisconsin. It also fell shy of 2023 numbers.
But unofficial turnout still hit 32 percent Tuesday, one of the highest figures of the past two decades.
“What this tells me,” Zepecki said, “is that the Democratic base is so fired up and ready to vote that you don’t need to spend $50 or $75 or $100 million to let them know they have an opportunity to go and express their outrage at what’s happening in Washington, D.C. at the ballot box.”
The Trump coalition sat this one out
Nobody expected Wisconsin’s April election to rival November turnout numbers, when candidates run with party labels and dominate the state and national discourse.
But one might expect the ratio of voters to look somewhat similar. That’s not what happened Tuesday.
In 2024, Democrat Kamala Harris won just 13 Wisconsin counties. In 2025, liberal Justice Susan Crawford won 23. And Tuesday, according to unofficial totals from the Associated Press, Taylor won 42.
“When Trump’s not on the ballot, his folks generally don’t come out, but the Democrats do,” McCoshen said. “He is the best motivator for Democratic voters.”
The ‘WOW’ counties were once a deep red bloc. This year, the ‘O’ went blue.
A decade ago, when conservatives held a Supreme Court majority that felt like it could last forever, they owed much of their success to suburban voters, especially in the vaunted “WOW” counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington.
On Tuesday, Ozaukee County went blue, a milestone in Wisconsin politics.
Ozaukee is the smallest of the three WOW counties and has been slowly trending blue in court races and other statewide contests.
Notably, Waukesha County, the biggest of the three, also veered in liberals’ direction, with Taylor winning 46 percent of the vote and Lazar winning just 54 percent.
“That’s a nearly unheard of low performance” by Lazar, said Franklin.
Only Washington County remains strongly Republican. Lazar won it by 24 percentage points.
Dane County reaches new heights
Everyone expects Dane County to turn out big for liberal candidates, but it hit numbers never before seen in Tuesday’s election.
Taylor received a whopping 84 percent of the vote in Dane County, meaning Lazar received just 16 percent.
“Which is the worst ever for a conservative candidate,” McCoshen said. “Sixteen percent is literally the worst any statewide Republican or conservative candidate has ever done in Dane County.”
The trend was especially hard on conservatives Tuesday because Dane County turned out more votes than even Milwaukee County, which has far more residents.
“That is one that I’m worried about as it relates to the fall,” McCoshen said.
In November, McCoshen said Dane County could run up the score and make it hard for Republicans to catch up. It didn’t matter as much Tuesday, when Taylor was up so big she could have won without Dane County.
The liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court could last for years
This election cycle favored liberals. So did the last court election. There will come a time when that’s not the case.
But conservatives find themselves in a deep hole when it comes to who runs the court. And there’s a very real chance it will get worse before it gets better.
Judge Chris Taylor, right, is greeted by Wisconsin Supreme Court justices during her election night event Tuesday, April 7, 2026, at the Madison Concourse Hotel in Madison, Wis. Angela Major/WPR
Conservatives will again be on defense next April in the race to replace Justice Annette Ziegler, who is part of the court’s two-justice minority.
If they win that race, they’d next have to defeat liberal Justice Rebecca Dallet, whose double-digit victory in 2018 created the blueprint for how liberals could win judicial races in the era of Trump.
They’d next have to defend the seat of conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn in 2029, the last conservative to win a court race, albeit by fewer than 6,000 votes. And Hagedorn, who angered Trump when he ruled against the president in a barrage of 2020 election lawsuits, could face a conservative primary challenger.
If conservatives won all three of those races, they’d have a chance to flip the court in 2030. If they lose any of them, the clock gets set back to at least 2033.
Conservative Judge Maria Lazar, left, hugs a supporter at her election night party at the Ingleside Hotel in Pewaukee on April 7, 2026. Lazar lost her Wisconsin Supreme Court race to liberal Judge Chris Taylor. Rich Kremer/WPR
McCoshen thinks it can be done, but Republicans need to nominate better candidates, who start running earlier and raise more money. They also have to match liberals when it comes to finding political issues that will motivate voters.
“They want to know where you stand on key issues that they care about,” McCoshen said. “That didn’t used to be how judicial races were run in Wisconsin or anywhere else. But it is now.”
Zepecki said that if Democrats want to build a sustainable majority for “decades to come,” the real prize is this fall, when they’ll have a chance to elect a Democratic governor, Assembly and Senate.
“Democrats will have to deliver,” Zepecki said. “Or the pendulum could swing right back the other way before we know it.”
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