Chris Taylor, a former Democratic state legislator and Planned Parenthood policy director, won a 10-year seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday, giving the court's liberal bloc a commanding 5-2 majority that conservatives cannot challenge for at least four years. NBC News projected the result on election night, with Taylor leading conservative appeals court judge Maria Lazar by more than 20 points with most of the expected vote counted.
The margin was not close. And the implications are not small.
Taylor's victory cements a liberal stranglehold on Wisconsin's highest court that began in 2023 and now extends deep into the next decade. Liberal candidates have won four straight Wisconsin Supreme Court elections and five of the last six. Since 2017, Democratic and Democratic-aligned candidates have won 19 of the last 24 statewide races in a state that was once the definition of a toss-up.
For conservatives in Wisconsin, the numbers tell a blunt story: the court that once upheld Republican-drawn legislative maps and left an 1849 near-total abortion ban on the books is now firmly in the hands of justices backed by the state Democratic Party. And the next chance to change that math will not come until 2030 at the earliest.
Taylor, a state appeals court judge who previously served in the state legislature and as a policy director for Wisconsin's Planned Parenthood group, ran on abortion rights and voting rights. She leaned into messaging that targeted President Donald Trump. The state Democratic Party backed her candidacy.
Lazar, her conservative opponent, served as a conservative appeals court judge and previously worked in Republican former Gov. Scott Walker's administration. She was running for the seat being vacated by retiring Justice Rebecca Bradley.
The result was a 10-point swing toward the Democratic-backed side compared to the 2025 state Supreme Court race, and a 21-point swing from the 2024 presidential contest in Wisconsin. That kind of gap, in a state where recent presidential elections have been decided by razor-thin margins, should alarm every Republican strategist in the country.
The broader trend in Wisconsin's judicial races has been building for years. In 2023, liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, giving liberals a 4-3 majority on the court for the first time in 15 years. Protasiewicz told the Associated Press after her win that the race "was really about saving our democracy, getting away from extremism and having a fair and impartial court where everybody gets a fair shot in the courtroom."
Conservatives might describe the trajectory differently. The court's new liberal majority wasted little time overturning the state's legislative maps, resulting in new district lines that went into effect in 2024. Last year, the court ruled 4-3 to formally strike down a near-total abortion ban dating to 1849, a law that had gone back into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
With a 5-2 edge, the liberal majority no longer needs every vote to hold. That buffer matters. It means the court can absorb a recusal or an absence and still rule along ideological lines. And the agenda ahead is long.
Democrats hope lawsuits over Wisconsin's congressional map will make their way before the state Supreme Court. Republicans currently control six of the state's eight House seats. A court-ordered redraw could reshape the state's congressional delegation, not through elections, but through litigation.
The stakes at the federal level remain just as charged. The U.S. Supreme Court has faced its own high-profile ideological clashes in recent terms, and the Wisconsin court's leftward shift adds another front to the broader judicial battle playing out across the country.
Beyond redistricting, the court could scale back or overturn other conservative legislation from previous Republican administrations. That includes a law that eliminated most collective bargaining rights for public workers, a signature achievement of the Walker era that reshaped Wisconsin's labor landscape more than a decade ago.
Democrats also have their sights set on flipping at least one legislative chamber this fall for the first time in 16 years. If they succeed, a friendly state Supreme Court would remove one of the last institutional checks on a unified Democratic state government.
This year's race was quieter and cheaper than the last two Wisconsin Supreme Court elections. Groups and candidates spent just $6.5 million on the airwaves, compared to the $85 million spent on ads in the 2025 race, according to AdImpact. Of this year's total, $4.7 million went to support Taylor. More than $1 million was spent opposing Lazar.
The spending gap tells its own story. Last year, tech billionaire Elon Musk poured millions into the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history on behalf of the conservative candidate, and lost. This year, the conservative side was outspent and outmatched in a race that drew far less national attention.
Tensions among liberal justices at the federal level have occasionally spilled into public view, but in Wisconsin the left's judicial coalition has held firm. Four straight wins. A 5-2 majority. And the calendar working in their favor.
Conservative Justice Annette Ziegler has declined to run for a third term, giving liberals another opportunity to expand their majority next year. After 2027, three other justices are set to face re-election for 10-year terms between 2028 and 2030. The liberal majority is not just safe, it could grow.
Wisconsin was supposed to be the state where the right held the line. Republicans dominate the congressional delegation. The state legislature has been in GOP hands for years. Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 and came within a whisker of holding it in 2020.
But the courts have moved in the opposite direction, and the consequences are tangible. Legislative maps redrawn. An abortion ban struck down. Collective bargaining protections potentially on the chopping block, this time from the other side. The court is now the most powerful institution in Wisconsin politics, and it belongs to the left.
The pattern raises hard questions for Wisconsin Republicans. How do you lose five of six Supreme Court races in a state you still win at the congressional level? How do you let a former Planned Parenthood policy director win a 10-year judicial seat by 20-plus points?
At the federal level, ideological battles on the bench have become routine. But those fights at least feature a conservative majority that can hold ground. In Wisconsin, the ground is gone.
Part of the problem is structural. Judicial races are officially nonpartisan in Wisconsin, but the campaigns are anything but. Taylor ran explicitly on abortion and against Trump. The Democratic infrastructure treated this as a party election. Conservatives, meanwhile, were outspent and apparently outorganized in a lower-turnout spring election that favors motivated activist bases.
The question of judicial independence, whether justices truly serve the law or a political agenda, is one that Chief Justice John Roberts himself has addressed publicly. In Wisconsin, the answer increasingly looks like the latter, at least from the left's side of the bench.
Taylor's 10-year term means she will sit on the court until 2036. The liberal majority is locked in through at least 2030. Democrats are already eyeing the Ziegler seat next year to push the margin to 6-1.
For Wisconsin voters who care about legislative maps, abortion law, collective bargaining, and the balance of power between the legislature and the courts, the most consequential elections in the state are not in November. They are in April, in low-turnout spring races that most people ignore.
Conservatives ignored them. The left did not. And now the bill is coming due, for a decade.
