Normal People Do Not Like What the Conservative Legal Movement Is Peddling

On Tuesday, Susan Crawford won the race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, handily defeating her Republican-backed, Elon Musk-boosted opponent, Brad Schimel. For all the anticipation surrounding a hotly contested election in a state that President Donald Trump won by less than 1 point in 2024, the early returns were sufficiently one-sided that Schimel called Crawford to concede shortly after polls closed for the night. The last time Wisconsin watched a reactionary weirdo endure this decisive a 10-point loss on national television, Aaron Rodgers and the Packers fell at home to the Titans on Thursday Night Football, 27-17.

It’s rare that a single election has such cut-and-dried implications for the immediate future of governance, especially when the election is (at least formally) nonpartisan. But in a swing state like Wisconsin, where most political fights end up before the seven-justice supreme court, Crawford’s victory means that the justices will probably strike down the state’s 1849 total abortion ban sometime later this year. It also clears the way for the court to decide that Act 10, former Republican Governor Scott Walker’s legislative attempt to gut the power of the state’s public-sector unions, is largely unconstitutional. 

Perhaps most importantly, a four-justice liberal majority shores up Democrats’ ability to compete for legislative seats using maps that actually approximate the state’s electorate. Until fairly recently, the state supreme court’s conservative majority had upheld the cartoonishly gerrymandered maps that Republicans used to make a mockery of representative democracy in the state: In 2022, when voters re-elected incumbent Democratic Governor Tony Evers by a bit more than 3 points, Republican candidates nevertheless managed to win about two-thirds of seats in both the Wisconsin State Assembly and Wisconsin State Senate.

In the 2023 state supreme court election, however, voters turned out in record numbers to elect the liberal candidate, Janet Protasiewicz, flipping control of the court to liberals for the first time in almost 15 years.  Soon after, the court found the existing district lines unconstitutional in a 4-3 decision that broke along ideological lines, and ordered the Republican-controlled legislature to come up with more competitive maps before the 2024 election. 

Sure enough, although Republicans maintained majorities in both chambers in 2024, the new maps helped Democrats pick up 10 seats in the State Assembly and four in the State Senate last fall. Going forward, Crawford’s win will allow liberals to continue to police Republican efforts to reverse this modest progress, and could also open the door to legal challenges to the state’s congressional maps, which also disproportionately favor Republicans. (Of the state’s eight seats, four are safe Republican seats, two are safe Democratic seats, and just two are competitive.) The upcoming supreme court elections in 2026 and 2027 will each require conservative incumbents to defend a seat, which means that liberals are almost sure to keep, and maybe also expand, their majority in the years to come.

Judicial elections in Wisconsin are ostensibly nonpartisan, but no one involved in the process—the candidates asking for votes, the people casting ballots, or the megadonors pointing novelty money cannons in the state’s general direction—treats them that way. Spending in this race topped $90 million, which nearly doubled the $51 million spent on the 2023 state supreme court election, which easily quintupled the paltry $10 million spent on the 2020 state supreme court election. On the campaign trail, both candidates emphasized the real-world consequences of the race and sent pretty unambiguous signals about their respective ideologies: Crawford cast herself as a “common sense judge who will protect” abortion rights, while Schimel’s enthusiasm for the president runs so deep that he dressed up as Trump last Halloween.

This transparency carried into Tuesday night, when Crawford took the stage arm-in-arm with the other liberal justices, all of whom had endorsed her candidacy and had no reservations about celebrating the moment. Meanwhile, in an interview from a decidedly muted Schimel campaign HQ, Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative, said that Crawford ran a “disgusting” race and described her as “bought and paid for by the Democratic Party,” which is generally not something that judges who believe in the apolitical rule of law say with a camera in their face.

I do not think anyone believes that a judicial selection system that empowers out-of-state billionaires to inject eight figures’ worth of dark money into elections is good, let alone ideal. But in a state like Wisconsin, where divided government means that the court often gets to decide high-stakes policy questions, it is at least useful for people to understand that judicial candidates can be just as partisan as politicians who have little Rs and Ds next to their names on the ballot. Tuesday’s election allowed voters—even some who cast ballots for Trump four months ago—the rare opportunity to weigh in directly on the conservative legal movement’s anti-choice, anti-worker, anti-democracy agenda. They did not find the decision especially difficult.