Get ready for 6 years of Supreme Court races

Wisconsin has held just 1 Supreme Court race in the past four years, but that is about to change. The 2025 SCOWIS race kicks off a six-year streak of annual elections. Six out of seven seats will be elected before the next redistricting cycle.

The rest of this post will briefly recap how the current 7 justices were elected. These races cover a wide variety of circumstances and likely give a good preview of things to come. If the past few years are any guide, these races will feature high turnout and extreme partisanship.

Appointment calculus

All of the current justices are serving a ten-year term to which they were elected. It’s fairly common, however, for justices to end their terms early, whether due to death or retirement.

When this happens, the governor independently appoints a successor, with no involvement from the legislature. That appointed justice then stands for election in the first year “when no other justice is to be elected,” per Wisc. Stat. 8.50(4)(f)1.

Consequently, if Janet Protasiewicz (elected in 2023) were to resign (or otherwise leave office), the governor’s appointed replacement would serve until an election in 2031. If another of the current justices vacates before their term ends, their appointed successor will serve until the year when their election was already scheduled.

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The stakes

Voters this April will choose whether liberal candidate Susan Crawford or former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel will replace retiring justice Anne Walsh Bradley on the bench.

Bradley is part of the 4-justice liberal majority, so a victory by Schimel would flip control of the court for at least another year. Liberals would have a chance to win it back in 2026 or 2027, when the terms of Rebecca Bradley and Annette Ziegler, respectively, end.

If Crawford wins, conservatives will have to wait until at least 2028 for another shot at the majority. Also, the liberals could double their 1-justice majority by flipping either of the next two races.

How this court got here

Spring elections in Wisconsin can feature an eclectic mix of offices including judicial races, school boards, the state superintendent, constitutional referendums, and presidential primaries. The specific set of races on the ballot varies each year.

Even with this variation, there is a clear trend of growing participation in SCOWIS elections.

The following table shows the results of the races that elected each of the current seven justices.

table showing statistics from the past 7 SCOWIS races
  • Just 18% of adults voted in 2015, when Anne Walsh Bradley was last reelected.
  • The next SCOWIS race coincided with the 2016 presidential primary. 47% of adults participated and the court result almost perfectly matched partisan primary participation. 52% of voters participated in the GOP primary and 52% voted for the conservative judicial candidate, Rebecca Bradley.
  • In a sign of their general disarray following Trump’s first victory, liberals in Wisconsin failed to field a candidate in the 2017 SCOWIS race. Annette Ziegler was reelected by the 18% of adults who participated. The other statewide race on the ballot was for school superintendent, which the future Democratic governor Tony Evers won with 70% of the vote. To me, this is the last spring election in Wisconsin to have actually felt relatively nonpartisan.
  • 22% of adults voted in 2018, when liberal Rebecca Dallet defeated conservative Michael Screnock by 11.5 points in an open race to replace retiring conservative Michael Gableman.
  • The 2019 race was also open, after longtime liberal justice Shirley Abrahamson retired. Conservative Brian Hagedorn narrowly defeated liberal Lisa Neubauer by 0.5 points in a race with 27% participation.
  • The 2020 SCOWIS race coincided with the presidential primary, but unlike 2016, there was no Republican primary and the Democratic primary was nearly over, (Biden’s last opponent dropped out a few days later). Turnout was 35% and liberal Jill Karofsky defeated conservative Dan Kelly by about 11 points.
  • In 2023, the SCOWIS race was the most prominent contest on the statewide ballot, and its consequences were widely understood: namely, majority control of the court. Turnout was 40%, higher than in any previous spring election not corresponding to a presidential primary. Conservatives once again ran Dan Kelly. He lost to liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz by slightly more than his defeat to Karofsky in 2020.

Just as turnout in SCOWIS races has gradually risen over the past decade, so has the degree to which partisanship shapes the outcomes. This graph, from my colleague Charles Franklin, shows the correlation between judicial votes and presidential votes in each county.

In 1978, the correlation between how a county voted for state Supreme Court and how it voted in the previous presidential election was 0.002. In 2016, it was 0.869. And in 2023, it was 0.964.

graph showing the correlation between SCOWIS and presidential races

What to expect in 2025

In April 2025, I anticipate continued high turnout. The last time a state superintendent race overlapped with a contested SCOWIS race was 2013, but the stakes in this election seem more similar to 2023, when the outcome of the race would determine majority control of the court. Also like 2023, this race features candidates who voters can easily connect to policy positions on hot topics like abortion access and redistricting.

Beyond its policy consequences for Wisconsin, this race will be a test of a leading theory about the 2024 election—that Democrats are the off-year party now. Republicans, the theory goes, win with voters who are less likely to participate in non-presidential contests. The reverse used to be true, with Republicans more often winning low turnout elections.

If Crawford wins, it will bode well for Democrats hoping to win a trifecta in Wisconsin in the 2026 midterms. A Schimel victory would suggest that conservative support is more vigorous and reliable than the Trump-specific low propensity voter narrative suggests.

Continue ReadingGet ready for 6 years of Supreme Court races

How Much of the Republican Assembly Victory was Thanks to Incumbency?

Democratic state assembly candidates were less popular than either Kamala Harris or Tammy Baldwin this past November. Of the 99 Assembly seats, Baldwin won 50, Harris 49, and actual Democratic candidates 45.

This, in itself, was not a surprise. We know that incumbents usually enjoy a slight popularity boost, and there are more incumbent Republicans than Democrats. The 2024 assembly races featured 57 incumbent Republicans and 27 Democrats in contested races.

But does incumbency advantage explain all of the Republican assembly majority? A careful accounting of the evidence suggests not.

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Measuring two kinds of incumbency advantage

The 2024 election is the first to use maps drawn by Democratic Governor Tony Evers, rather than previous maps drawn by Republican legislators. When the new state assembly maps were first released, I estimated that the 2022 assembly elections would’ve resulted in 46 Democratic seats, had the election taken place under the new maps. This, despite the fact that Governor Evers won reelection in that year by 3 percentage points.

Incumbency advantage comes from at least two sources. In places where they’ve run before, incumbents likely enjoy higher name recognition than an opponent. Apart from that, they might still run better campaigns simply by dint of greater experience.

Redistricting offers a unique opportunity to decompose these two sources of incumbent strength. Most incumbents ran in new districts which only partially overlapped with their previous seat. The benefits of name recognition should primarily exist just in those overlapping areas, while the benefits of experience should appear everywhere.

To measure this, I created a statistical model predicting the assembly vote in each ward based on the following variables:

Continue ReadingHow Much of the Republican Assembly Victory was Thanks to Incumbency?

What do voters and non-voters really think about Donald Trump?

Donald Trump is the most famous person in, arguably, the world. His name was googled more than any other in 2024, 2023, 2021, and 2019. To better understand how American adults feel about this ubiquitous figure, we asked each of the 1,063 respondents in the Marquette Law School Poll national survey of adults, December 2-11, 2024, to answer two questions in their own words.

  • What do you like about Donald Trump?
  • What do you dislike about Donald Trump?

The order of the two questions was randomized. Since the survey was conducted online, respondents could write as much as they wished. (These “open-ended questions” were part of a more traditional survey, the subject of separate news releases.)

In the 2024 election, 36% of our sample voted for Kamala Harris, 38% for Donald Trump, 3% for a third-party candidate, and 23% didn’t vote. The sample gets the mix of Harris and Trump supporters right, though it overrepresents voters as a whole. Early estimates suggest that about 36% of eligible voters didn’t participate in the 2024 election.

We classified each of the respondents by whether or not they answered both questions. A majority—51% of respondents—listed at least one thing they liked and disliked about Trump. (We classified clearly sarcastic responses as non-answers.) Listing things they dislike about Trump but including nothing positive were 35%. Fewer adults, 12%, listed positive things about Trump but nothing negative.

Perceptions of Trump and vote choice

The table below shows how each of those groups voted in 2024. Trump and Harris each won equal shares of the adults (76%) with, respectively, only positive or only negative views of the former president. Among those listing both likes and dislikes of Trump, 55% voted for Trump, 17% for Harris, 4% for a third party, and 24% did not vote.

In other words, just over a third of adults held wholly negative views of Trump and just over 10% held wholly positive views. Their votes reflect those views. But Trump won the lion’s share of the vote among people with mixed views of him.

2024 vote of U.S. adults by their view of Trump
About Donald J. Trumpnpct of totalHarrisTrumpThird partyNonvoter
Can name likes and dislikes54551%17%55%4%24%
Doesn’t dislike anything12612%1%76%3%20%
Doesn’t like anything37335%76%1%1%22%
no answer192%31%18%6%46%
Total1,063100%36%38%3%23%

These data also shed some light on how Trump managed to defeat Harris after losing to Joe Biden in 2020. We asked respondents about their participation in the 2020 presidential election. Thirty-five percent remembered voting for Biden, 31% for Trump, 3% for third parties, and 31% said they didn’t vote. Recalled vote may be error-prone, but in this case it closely matches Joe Biden’s 4.5-point margin of victory in 2020.

Harris won about the same share as Biden had among the 35% of adults who couldn’t name anything they like about Trump. Like Biden, she won practically none of the vote among those who dislike nothing about Trump. And Harris won about the same fraction of the vote as Biden among those naming both likes and dislikes about Trump.

While Harris’ vote share changed little from Biden’s in each group, Trump’s vote share grew among those with mixed feelings. Trump won 55% of adults with mixed feelings, up from 46% in 2020. This was possible because the share that did not vote in this group fell from 33% in 2020 to 24% in 2024. Likewise, Trump in 2024 won 76% of the vote among those expressing no negative views of him, up from 59% among these same adults in 2020. And only 20% of these adults didn’t vote in 2024, down from 38% in 2020.

2020 vote of U.S. adults by their view of Trump in Dec. 2024
among adults surveyed Dec. 2-11, 2024
About Donald J. Trumpnpct of totalBidenTrumpThird partyNonvoter
Can name likes and dislikes54551%18%46%3%33%
Doesn’t dislike anything12612%2%59%1%38%
Doesn’t like anything37335%71%1%2%25%
no answer192%23%18%6%54%
Total1,063100%35%31%3%31%

In our December 2024 sample, Harris defeated Trump by 3 percentage points among 2024 voters who also voted in 2020. Among 2024 voters who didn’t vote in 2020, she lost by 12 points.

Our survey is just one data point in a sense, but it adds to the emerging body of evidence that Trump’s campaign successfully turned out infrequent, “low-propensity” voters who like Trump but often stay home.

Explore the data

There is no substitute for reading the words of voters themselves. Click here to access our web app for viewing responses. The tool allows you to see 5 randomly* selected responses with each click of the button. Some of these responses contain profane language and many contain typos. We present them in unedited form.

RespondentSample random responses
Vote in 2024Vote in 2020What do you like about Donald Trump?What do you dislike about Donald Trump?
Male, 34, HispanicDonald TrumpDonald TrumpBusiness plans to bring back production to America, and border controlGrandiose attitude and speaking without thinking about the consequences.
Male, 27, Other/MultipleDid not voteDid not voteGood president for economic purposes. In my opinion, prefer trump over kamalaTariffs for other countries are too much
Female, 50, WhiteDonald TrumpDonald TrumpHis policies of smaller gov’t and less regulations which will open America up to less restrictions on oil and gas. Also his policies on immigration and closing the border align with my views.His mouth and some of the unprofessional things he says
Female, 44, BlackKamala HarrisJoe BidenHe doesn’t care at allHim personally
Male, 49, WhiteDonald TrumpDid not votePolicies, strength globally, strong economy. Strong border security.Nothing. Donald Trump was an excellent president before and will be excellent again.
Female, 51, Other/MultipleDid not voteJoe BidenI feel like when Donald Trump was president we had peace with other countries and the fact it was no inflation and the crime was more controlledN/A
Continue ReadingWhat do voters and non-voters really think about Donald Trump?