All 72 counties in Wisconsin shifted to the left in Tuesday’s state Supreme Court election, solidifying Dane County Judge Susan Crawford’s strong win.
Crawford beat former Wisconsin Attorney General and Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel by 237,884 votes, or 10%, retaining the liberal majority on the court. While the Wisconsin Supreme Court races are technically nonpartisan, a win for Crawford, who was backed by Democrats, proved to be a decisive win for the Democratic Party in the battleground state.
“I don’t think it’s a shift left. I think that it’s a shift to sanity,” Patrick Guarasci, a campaign strategist for Crawford, told the Washington Examiner in an interview.
— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) April 2, 2025
Two years ago, Wisconsin was subject to the most expensive judicial race in history when liberals won their first majority of the court in 15 years with Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s win. Approximately $56 million was spent in total on the race.
The 2025 race far outspent that. This year’s race nearly doubled that figure, totaling around $90 million spent on both candidates. Around 20% of that figure was from Trump adviser Elon Musk, who donated around $20 million to organizations supporting Schimel.
The state’s Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane counties saw a large increase in turnout. Some polling locations in the city of Milwaukee reported a shortage of ballots on Election Day. Compared to 2023, voter turnout in Milwaukee County increased by 30%, with Crawford getting nearly as many votes as either judicial candidate did there in the race two years ago.
In the city of Madison, located in Dane County and historically the state’s most Left-leaning county, voter turnout increased heavily. In 2023, around 120,000 people voted, and in 2025, 132,633 people voted. Additionally, 90% of Madison voted for Crawford over just 10% for Schimel.
The trend leftward continued in the suburban Milwaukee counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington, the GOP strongholds of the state. In Schimel’s home of Waukesha County, the town of Brookfield saw a 4.2% shift left in the race as compared to the 2023 race.
These counties have overall become less Republican over time as well. From 1996 through 2020, no Democratic candidate won even a single municipality, town, or city in these three counties. Former President Joe Biden changed that trend, narrowly flipping the city of Cedarburg in Ozaukee County in the 2020 election.
In the state’s many rural and suburban counties, Crawford managed to flip counties President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election. Crawford flipped Kenosha County, which sits along the state’s border with Illinois, Racine County, Winnebago County, and Brown County, home of Green Bay, among other counties.
The liberal judge flipped Outagamie County, which encompasses the mid-sized city of Appleton, cutting Trump’s winning margin in half.
“I’m honestly shocked. I thought we had it in the bag. I thought [Musk] was going to be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports. Maybe I have blinders on,” Pam Van Handel, chairwoman of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County, told Politico.
While the race had many statewide implications as to the future of abortion rights, collective bargaining rights, and election law in the Badger State, Wisconsin Democrats began to frame the race as a referendum on Trump and Musk’s actions so far in 2025.
“I don’t think that we should get it twisted. I don’t think that this was a blue wave, as much as it was a recognition that Susan was the fair, impartial candidate that was going to be the right person for the Supreme Court,” Guarasci said. “But it was a complete rejection of the Trump and Musk agenda in Wisconsin.”
Crawford’s win means liberal-leaning justices will retain control of the high court until at least 2028. Two conservative justices are set to be on the ballot for reelection in 2026 and 2027.
Crawford won by 279,306 more votes than Protasiewicz won in just those two years. Overall turnout in the race was also incredibly high for an off-year election in an odd year. In the state’s 2023 Supreme Court race, 1,839,656 people in total voted, and in Tuesday’s election 2,364,372 voted, which translates to a 28% increase in voter turnout.
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Schimel and the Wisconsin GOP had said that if 60% of voters who supported Trump in the 2024 election turned out for him, he would win the race. It didn’t quite turn out that way as Schimel earned 62% of the Trump vote, more than their target, and Crawford garnered 78% of the vote that former Vice President Kamala Harris received in the state last year.
To his part, Schimel received around 232,000 more votes than Dan Kelly, the 2023 Republican nominee for the high court, did. Had this been the turnout of the 2023 race, it would have been a win for Schimel and conservatives.