Wisconsin liberals secured their most dominant State Supreme Court victory in decades Tuesday night, with Judge Chris Taylor defeating conservative Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar 59.8% to 40.1% — a 19.7-point margin that nearly doubled the liberals’ previous winning margins. But the numbers tell a more complicated story: conservatives didn’t lose because voters rejected their candidate. They lost because their voters simply didn’t show up.
The result was called just 38 minutes after polls closed, with Taylor receiving 901,052 votes to Lazar’s 604,584 out of 1,506,442 total ballots cast — a 37% drop from the 2025 Supreme Court race that saw roughly 2,393,000 votes cast.
The math is brutal for conservatives. Brad Schimel’s 2025 losing total of approximately 1,078,000 votes would have defeated Taylor by roughly 177,000 votes. Even Dan Kelly’s 2023 losing total of approximately 866,600 votes would have come within 35,000 of Taylor’s winning number. Lazar received approximately 44% fewer votes than Schimel just one year ago.
“The conservative candidate did not lose because the electorate turned against her message,” the data shows clearly. “She lost because conservative voters did not show up.” (RELATED: Universal Child Care For Families Earning Up To $500k? Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rodriguez’s Vague Plan Raises More Questions Than Answers)
The spending disparity was enormous. Taylor’s campaign raised approximately $6.2 million to Lazar’s $1.2 million, with all-entity spending running roughly $8.0 million to $0.9 million in Taylor’s favor. Ad spending ran at a staggering 9-to-1 or 15-to-1 ratio in Taylor’s favor across TV and digital platforms.
Yet Lazar’s campaign told a remarkable efficiency story. Every dollar spent on the conservative side generated approximately 4-6 times more votes than dollars spent on the liberal side, with Lazar’s cost-per-vote coming in at just $1.98 compared to Taylor’s $6.88. The problem was never efficiency — it was scale.
Independent expenditure support was almost entirely one-sided. While 16 groups filed independent expenditures supporting Taylor — including the ACLU of Wisconsin spending $450,000 on radio, digital, and mail — conservative IE activity totaled just approximately $162,000 across three entities. In 2025, outside spending topped $49 million. This cycle it came in at roughly $1.2 million combined, with liberals accounting for most of that. Notably absent was the Elon Musk-linked infrastructure that spent $27 million on voter contact efforts in 2025 — none of which existed in 2026.
The result moves the Wisconsin Supreme Court from a 4-3 liberal majority to 5-2 — the largest liberal margin since the 1970s, locked in through 2030. It marks the fourth consecutive liberal win on the court and the fifth in the last six elections. The sole conservative win in that stretch was Brian Hagedorn’s razor-thin 0.5-point victory in 2019.
With Justice Annette Ziegler’s announced retirement creating another open seat in 2027, liberals now have a clear path to a 6-1 supermajority on Wisconsin’s highest court — a prospect that should alarm every conservative voter who stayed home Tuesday.
The geographic damage extended well beyond what conservatives had seen in previous cycles. Taylor won 24 or more counties that voted for Trump in 2024 — compared to just 10 for liberal Justice Susan Crawford in 2025. Ozaukee County flipped to Taylor after Crawford narrowly missed it by 3.5 points. The traditionally reliable Waukesha County margin compressed further — down from Kelly’s 16-point advantage in 2023. Fox Valley counties Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago all swung further left compared to 2025.
The statewide picture wasn’t entirely bleak for conservatives. In the Court of Appeals District II, WILL attorney Anthony LoCoco was elected unopposed after liberal opponent Hansen was disqualified by the Wisconsin Elections Commission over a notarization defect — flipping a Doyle-appointed liberal seat covering the WOW counties, Kenosha, Racine, and parts of the Fox Valley.
Republican Samantha Kerkman was re-elected Kenosha County Executive without opposition, holding a genuine swing county. Conservative-aligned candidates also posted wins in Oconomowoc, Brookfield, and Delafield — with Brookfield Mayor Ponto winning his fourth term by roughly 2,000 votes and Oconomowoc’s Rosek winning by nearly 12 points despite the difficult environment.
The one municipal warning sign: conservative state legislator Allen lost the Waukesha mayoral race by fewer than 500 votes to a candidate backed by a mayor who left the GOP — a reminder that the national Republican brand carries real liabilities in suburban municipal contests. (RELATED: Rebecca Cooke Fundraises With ‘Sanctuary City Architect’ Rahm Emanuel Amid Immigration Controversy)
With the 2027 Ziegler seat already on the horizon and a national environment showing Democrats outperforming their 2024 margins by double digits in special elections, Wisconsin conservatives face an urgent reckoning. The infrastructure, the funding, and the voter contact operation that powered Schimel’s 2025 race — however narrowly it lost — simply did not exist Tuesday. Until it does again, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will remain firmly out of conservative reach.
