Wisconsin voters will return to the polls this spring for the first major election in a battleground state since the 2024 presidential race.
The April 1 contest for a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court — which will determine the bench’s ideological balance for the second time in two years — has already drawn millions of dollars from big names on both sides of the political aisle, with the future of a bevy of hot-button issues related to abortion rights, unions and congressional maps at stake.
The seat is open after liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley announced last year she would not fun for a fourth 10-year term. The general election campaign quickly got underway after both sides quickly lined up behind a candidate and the primary was canceled.
The liberal candidate in the race is Susan Crawford, a state judge in Madison who worked earlier in her career in the administration of former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle. She’ll face off against conservative candidate Brad Schimel, a state judge in Waukesha County who previously served as the state’s Republican attorney general.
For Crawford and Wisconsin Democrats, it’s most prominently reproductive rights.Schimel and Republicans, meanwhile, have accused Crawford of not being tough on criminals as a judge and have been digging in specifically on a handful of sexual assault cases she oversaw or was involved with. Crawford has also attacked Schimel in ads that focus on how the state’s Department of Justice allegedly mishandled the maintenance of thousands of rape kits under his watch as attorney general. Schimel has said there were problems with the backlogged tests, that they predated his tenure and that he helped fix existing problems in the unit that handles the kits.
Posted by John3262005
2 Comments
Would this also serve as a good litmus test for how free and fair elections will be in 2026 and 2028?
[WI GOP legislature almost immediately moved to impeach the judge that won the last race but backed off at the last second.](https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/a-wisconsin-supreme-court-justice-under-impeachment-threat-isnt-the-only-member-to-get-party-money/) They don’t have the numbers for impeachment and removal this time. And their attempts to forcefully remove an election administrator, Meagan Wolfe, failed in the courts (lol), though that’s been a wild ride to see.
Though how meddlesome Trump amd Elon will be is the question for me, Elon ensuring Twitter algorithm shares negative feeds of the Democrats and Trump threatening to use the federal government to ensure elections are “free and fair”. Their political power and influence has been ascendant since January and will we see if they there is a limit yet.