What Wisconsin's election might say about what's to come in 2025 and 2026

Turnout practically mirrored a midterm, and trended higher in left-leaning places

Dear subscribers and readers — yes, I am alive. I don’t love starting this Substack with only two posts in two weeks. Ideally, I would post more often, and I intend to eventually do so. But I’ve got a four-week old, which has been known to eat up a great deal of time and energy! It’s amazing but also exhausting. Nonetheless, there’ll be plenty to write about in the weeks and months ahead, so you’ll hear plenty from me.

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We often “read the tea leaves” of an election to gauge what the larger electoral environment may look like in the near future. But in Wisconsin, you might say we want to taste the cheese curds to accomplish the same goal — preferably deep fried. Delving into what happened in the April 1 election for a pivotal seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, there are reasons to think that Democrats may have more cheesy deliciousness to enjoy in the coming elections of November 2025 and in the 2026 midterms.

In the April 1 election, Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford defeated Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel, 55%-45%, in a state that Donald Trump won by less than 1 percentage point in 2024. Crawford’s 10-point victory marked the third consecutive win for liberals in races for Wisconsin’s high court dating back to 2020, each by about the same margin. And this came in a race that featured Wisconsin’s highest turnout in an April Supreme Court election dating back to 2009, as a whopping 53% of the voting-eligible population cast a ballot.

The margin may have looked similar to recent high-court races in the Badger State, but the notably high turnout is what really stands out. Participation in this election looked closer to that of a November contest than a traditionally low-turnout spring election. No recent Wisconsin April ballot involving a Supreme Court race had turnout this high, and few have come even close to it. The previous high came in 2016, but that election coincided with Wisconsin’s presidential primary, obviously a high-profile event. Yet the 2025 election had higher turnout than 2016 did, even though the latter featured competitive races in both party primaries — Ted Cruz defeated Donald Trump in Wisconsin, the last significant pushback Trump faced in the 2016 GOP contest, and Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side.

Still, the 2025 Wisconsin race attracted extremely high voter interest for a few reasons. First, control of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court rested on the outcome — Crawford’s win allowed the liberals to maintain their 4-3 seat advantage. This could have ramifications for a least a couple of issues in the coming months and years: Democrats hope that the court will order the drawing of a new congressional map ahead of the 2026 election — Republicans hold six of the swing state’s eight U.S. House seats — while the future of abortion rights remains highly salient in Wisconsin. The power of the liberal majority was already felt after the 2023 election, when it threw out Wisconsin’s state legislative maps, precipitating a redraw that left the state’s legislative seats far more evenly-split between the parties.

Second, the 2025 Wisconsin race is now easily the most expensive state supreme court race ever, with candidates and outside groups spending a hair more than $100 million, per the Brennan Center. This essentially doubled the $51 million spent in Wisconsin’s 2023 Supreme Court race, which previously held the record. Money isn’t the end all, be all, but such high levels of spending meant tons of ads ran on television and online, helping draw even more outsized attention to the race. To put this spending in perspective, it was roughly equal to the $98 million spent in Wisconsin’s 2022 election for U.S. Senate, which Republican Sen. Ron Johnson narrowly won over Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, 50%-49%.¹

The spending in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court contest also demonstrated how nationalized the race became. In his efforts to slash federal government programs, Elon Musk has become the bête noire for Democrats second only to Trump. And Musk and his political action committee, America PAC, were big players in the Wisconsin race. All told, Musk spent around $20 million — about one-fifth of all spending — which made it easy for Democrats to argue that Musk wanted to buy the seat for Republicans and to make him the face of the conservative campaign.

Such nationalization and stakes helped drive turnout levels to nearly those of a midterm in Wisconsin, which is one of the highest-turnout states in the country (at 77%, Wisconsin had the highest voting-eligible population turnout of any state in the 2024 presidential election). In the past four midterm elections, Wisconsin’s turnout among the VEP has varied from 53 to 62 percent, according to data from the University of Florida Election Lab. The Supreme Court race matched the low end of that range, meaning the result came amid voter participation levels more on par with what we see in a regular November election than in an April election.

This is notable because of what we know about the makeup of the party coalitions. Democrats have become increasingly reliant on support from college-educated voters, with an especially large split among white voters based on their education level. Republicans, meanwhile, have benefited more from the votes of less politically-engaged voters, who are more likely to show up in the highest-turnout races like a presidential contest or even some midterms.

Still, even with a near-midterm level of turnout in a spring judicial election, the liberal contender won by about 10 points, practically the same result as in 2020 and 2023. The Wisconsin result could augur a high-turnout midterm environment in 2026 not unlike the 2018 election, when Trump was last in the White House. Once again, we will see a high-stakes electoral landscape with a divisive Republican president driving more Democrats to the polls and shifts in the coalitions of the parties that make the GOP more reliant on voters who are less likely to turn out. To be clear, the story is more complicated: Democrats are also heavily reliant on voters of color, especially Black voters, and even as Republicans have made notable inroads among them, turnout among such voters also suffers in midterms. Plus, no one election should be seen as a guarantee of future results.

Nonetheless, if we dig into turnout across Wisconsin, more Democratic-leaning places tended to have higher levels of participation in the 2025 Supreme Court race, potentially pointing to favorable conditions for Democrats moving forward. To get a sense of turnout, I compared how many voters went to the polls in Wisconsin’s cities, villages and towns in the 2025 race as a share of the total that voted in the same place in the 2024 presidential election. Because the presidential race had very high turnout, it acts as a something of ceiling for what we could expect from different localities. And as the chart below indicates, the most left-leaning Wisconsin localities in November 2024 tended to come closest to replicating their vote totals in April 2025.

As the fit line on the chart (gray) suggests, the more Democratic-leaning a place was in 2024 (placed farther to the left horizontally), the higher its turnout was in 2025 relative to 2024 (higher vertically). A big driver of this was the state capital of Madison and neighboring localities in Dane County (pink), as well as places outside of Dane but in the Madison metropolitan area (purple). Turnout in and around Madison was mostly above the fit line, indicating higher-than average turnout relative to 2025.

Now, this doesn’t mean turnout was necessarily way up in every blue place, or way down in some important sources of Republican votes. The two biggest sources of Democratic votes in Wisconsin are Dane and Milwaukee counties, and turnout in the city of Milwaukee was on the lower side and mixed among other Milwaukee County communities (orange). Meanwhile, turnout in localities in the traditionally Republican-leaning and fairly populous WOW counties around Milwaukee (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties, in maroon) was often higher than average.

Nevertheless, turnout remained closest to 2024 in places that are more educated, clearly a boon to Democrats. The chart below compares the share of the 2024 vote in localities based on the share of the population 25 and older that had at least a four-year college degree in the 2019-2023 American Community Survey. Among localities that had available education data and at least 200 votes in 2024, you can see a clear increase in turnout as education levels increased. Correlation is not causation, but given what we know about the party coalitions, all of this adds up when we see the overall outcome in the 2025 Wisconsin race.

Such turnout figures suggest that voters with a higher education level, who again have been more Democratic-leaning in recent times, were the most likely to show up across the state. As such, it’s no surprise that Crawford improved markedly on former Vice President Kamala Harris’s showing, helped out by “differential turnout”, whereby the average voter from the party out of power (the Democrats) is more likely to vote in a midterm or off-year election than the average voter from the presidential party.

We remain about seven months away from the November 2025 elections in places like Virginia and New Jersey, and about a year and a half from the 2026 midterms, so a lot can change in that time. However, the result in Wisconsin — as well as improved numbers for Democrats in lower-turnout specials in two of Florida’s House seats on the same day — provide an early signal that we could be headed toward the sort of political environment akin to 2017 and 2018 that benefited Democrats.

1. About $105 million in 2025 dollars.