A Post-Mortem On Conservatives’ Costly Loss In Wisconsin

A day after a bruising defeat in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, Badger State conservatives were mired in the usual questions, second-guessing, what ifs and — in some corners — recriminations that come with big losses. And make no mistake, Tuesday’s loss was a big one for so many reasons. 

Far-left Dane County Judge Susan Crawford defeated conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel by 10 percentage points (55% to 45%). In historically high turnout for a spring election in which 2.3 million people voted, Crawford drew nearly 230,000 more votes than Schimel. 

And for conservatives across the country, the price of losing the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history is immense. The left will control the Wisconsin Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. That means a long line of Wisconsin’s conservative reforms are now in peril, and the leftist court — as advertised — is very likely to preside over redrawn congressional maps to give Democrats a much better chance of taking back the House next year and hamstringing President Trump’s agenda.  

As expected, Democrats and their corporate media mouthpieces are pounding the overheated narrative that swing state Wisconsin voters, serving as surrogates for the nation, have rejected Trump’s MAGA policies and doomed his efforts to drain the swamp and vanquish the Deep State. But there’s no doubt, the April Fool’s Day election emboldened the radical left and shook some of November’s common sense voters. 

‘It’s Really Sickening’

There’s a lot of blame to go around for this big and costly Wisconsin Supreme Court defeat, but two shortcomings in particular stand out: A failure of the Republican Party to meet the moment, and conservatives’ continuous sin of underestimating how nasty the left will get in the pursuit of power. 

“To me, it comes back to Politics 101. Whoever differentiates himself best in the race usually wins,” said Matt Batzel, executive director of conservative grassroots builder American Majority. “Susan Crawford defined the race and her opponent early and Schimel was never able to overcome that.” 

Crawford’s campaign and her leftist billionaire-funded allies attacked Schimel early and often with a string of twisted accusations. Batzel said the well-financed Democratic Party hit Schimel with a “full court press” and his campaign and backers were unable to effectively respond. 

“He couldn’t seem to push back. He was playing defense all the time,” said Batzel, whose organization ran a grassroots voter turnout effort that knocked on more than 260,000 doors across the state. 

Justice Rebecca Bradley, the leading conservative on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, told a reporter Tuesday evening that she thinks the way Crawford ran her race was “disgusting.” 

“She slandered a good man, Judge Schimel. We saw this last time against Justice Kelly,” Bradley said, referring to Daniel Kelly, the conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate who lost in 2023, when liberals took control of the court for the first time in 15 years. “It’s really sickening, and I hope next time the people will see through the lies that misportray good people in these ads. It’s a terrible thing to happen to the state.”

The Republican Party of Wisconsin and other conservative groups have seen this movie over and over again, and yet they always seem surprised by the left’s willingness to trudge through the mud. 

Not Nearly Enough

Complacency in the base played a role, too, Batzel said. After going all-in on Trump’s victory in November in what many conservatives saw as an existential election for the republic, a fatigue had set it for some. 

“They were wondering why they had to vote again,” the grassroots activist said. With less than five months between the November and April elections, the combatants and their camps had to be ready for another relentless fight. Not everyone was ready to jump back into the ring. 

Schimel did garner 1,063,000 votes, about 245,000 votes more than Kelly received in the 2023 spring election. But he trailed Trump’s November vote total in Wisconsin by more than 630,000 votes. Spring elections are generally low turnout affairs, particularly compared to midterm and presidential elections. But Crawford tallied north of 1.3 million votes, about 367,000 less than Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris. 

“Troublingly for the GOP, voting levels were actually close to a midterm, suggesting a favorable electorate for Democrats heading into 2026,” Politico crowed in a piece brimming with what the leftist outlet sees as pitfalls for Trump ahead. 

More than 2.36 million people voted in Tuesday’s spring election, compared to about 1.8 million votes cast in the 2023 contest. Wisconsin posted record high voter turnout in November’s presidential election, with some 3.4 million people voting. 

Former Republican lawmaker and election data cruncher Joe Handrick reported on election eve that there were 57 percent more early votes cast than in 2023. But the numbers were again concentrated in deep blue counties, which meant Schimel needed huge election day vote totals. He didn’t get nearly enough. 

Batzel said Republican voters continued the critical trend of casting more ballots early, but the left has been better at running “turnkey operations to mobilize” a set of voters in spring and midterm elections. In short, conservatives have to catch up. 

Joe Sanfelippo, a former Republican lawmaker who represented portions of southeast Wisconsin for a decade, said too many voters fail to take into account the importance of the state Supreme Court race and local elections in general. 

“They just don’t understand their civics,” Sanfelippo said in a phone interview with The Federalist. “They buy into all of this alarmist messaging without really stopping to think, ‘Hey, this is the way our system of government works.’” Interestingly, Wisconsin voters re-elected Jill Underly, Wisconsin’s teachers union-backed superintendent of the state Department of Public Instruction who has presided over the state’s woeful public school system in which less than one-third of students tested are considered proficient in reading. 

The left-led Supreme Court is poised to take up — and be the final authority — on everything from Wisconsin’s abortion law to public-sector collective bargaining and the state’s political lines. 

Not So WOW Now

Things have certainly changed since the 2010 Republican revolution when so-called suburban Milwaukee WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) served as dependable Republican checks against deep blue Milwaukee and Dane counties. The latter, home to far-left state capital Madison, has seen explosive growth dominated by liberal voters working in government and higher education in the state’s flagship university city. While Milwaukee saw its population shrink by 138,000 people between 1970 and and 2023, Dane County’s population climbed by more than 285,000 people, according to an analysis by the Badger Institute. At the same time, the WOW counties posted significant growth, adding nearly 300,000 people over the past 53 years. 

But at least two of the three conservative WOW counties aren’t as conservative as they used to be. Democrats have moved out of the high-crime and economically-challenged urban area, but they’ve brought their liberal political ideologies with them. In 2013, then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, signed into law a measure that prohibits residency requirements for most government employees, with the exception of police and firefighters. 

“Since then you’ve seen a mass exodus of voters out of Milwaukee into the suburbs, watering down the conservative vote, especially in Waukesha County,” Sanfelippo said. 

Schimel won 57.7 percent of the vote in Waukesha County compared to Crawford’s 42.3 percent. Schimel’s margin was even narrower in Ozaukee County, where he claimed just 51.6 percent of the vote. Nearly two-thirds of Washington County voters cast ballots for the conservative candidate. 

But the migration patterns out of Milwaukee don’t explain the “size of the slide” in Waukesha County, Handrick posted on X Tuesday evening. He noted that Schimel needed at least 63 percent support there in his pursuit of victory. 

“Clearly there are thousands of voters there who no longer vote the way they did in 2010 and 2014,” the political analyst said. “Perhaps it’s time the GOP asked why.”

Wisconsin GOP officials did not return The Federalist’s request for comment. 

The Musk Effect

There’s no doubt that TDS — Trump Derangement Syndrome — and MDS — Musk Derangement Syndrome — played a part in driving up Democrat turnout, although not as much as the accomplice media are attempting to spin it. Musk and political action committees tied to him spent nearly $20 million supporting Schimel and opposing “activist judge” Crawford, according to ABC News. Much of the Pravda Press coverage has cackled about how the billionaire Tesla owner lost, not so much about how the leftist billionaires that backed Crawford bought the seat and the Supreme Court majority.  

Batzel thinks Musk’s infusion of cash into the race would have been a lot more effective had it come sooner to help push back against Crawford’s early defining attacks. 

“I’m not saying more money, just a smarter money,” the conservative activist said. “You can’t just come in the last moment and overwhelm an already built-in-framework.”

As he often does, Musk shrugged off the setback, asserting that the “most important” victory Tuesday was the overwhelming passage of a ballot issue that will enshrine the state’s voter ID law into the Wisconsin constitution. 

“I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain,” Musk replied to an X user early Wednesday morning.

The voter ID ballot question passed with 63 percent of the vote, a puzzler for a lot of downhearted conservatives. 

“WI voted to constitutionalize voter ID but elected a Supreme Court Justice who challenged voter ID. Make this make sense!” one Wisconsin conservative mused Wednesday on Facebook. 

‘The Left Overreaches’ 

Republican pollster Robert Blizzard told Politico that Republicans have some lessons from Wisconsin that they need to take with them on the road to 2026. “[O]ne of the challenges Republicans face, and I don’t think this is shocking, is you’ve got to have the Trump base foaming at the mouth to get out and vote,” he told the publication. 

Wisconsin grassroots conservatives tell The Federalist that there wasn’t enough foam because too many voters didn’t understand the issues, what was at stake for Trump and the MAGA movement, or who the candidates were. 

“The message has to be clear and simple. I think people didn’t know who Brad Schimel was, that he was a conservative,” Batzel said, adding that a nebulous fight against “activist judges” didn’t seem to resonate. 

Sanfelippo said Trump earned his victory by going beyond Republicans and reaching out to “common-sense voters” tired of the leftist politics. The former lawmaker said Republicans need to get back to expanding the base and reaching into broader areas to defeat Democrat in next year’s midterms, which are often tough on incumbents. 

Grassroots conservatives say there were a lot of wins to take out of Tuesday night, including big victories in local races that will bode well for the future of Wisconsin’s conservative movement. More so, Democrats have a history of overplaying their hand, reading much too much into political wins. 

“We’ve had success in Wisconsin where the left overreaches,” Batzel said. “When the door is cracked open, they are going to abuse their political power on the Supreme Court and they’ll hurt themselves with that overreach.” 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.