Striking deep into the heart of Republican territory, liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford carried the city of Waukesha and five other traditionally red Milwaukee-area communities in her Wisconsin Supreme Court victory last week, the latest sign of a suburban backlash against GOP President Donald Trump and far-right billionaire Elon Musk.
Elm Grove, Franklin, Hales Corners, Mequon and Oak Creek also swung into the liberal column Tuesday, just five months after they and Waukesha voted for Trump’s return to the White House. They joined the previously red suburbs of Cedarburg, Greendale and Greenfield, all of which turned Democratic for President Joe Biden in 2020, and Thiensville, which flipped blue to support then-Vice President Kamala Harris in November.
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Most of those communities are first- or second-ring Milwaukee suburbs, an area that has grown increasingly purple in the Trump era.
But Waukesha carries symbolic importance as the county seat of Wisconsin’s top Republican stronghold, the largest predominantly red city in the state and the home of the courthouse where the conservative court candidate in last week’s election, Brad Schimel, sits as a judge and previously served as district attorney. Schimel still handily won Waukesha County, 57.6% to Crawford’s 42.3%.
Statewide, Crawford defeated Schimel, 55% to 45%, in the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history and the highest-turnout spring election in state history. Both campaign spending and voter turnout vaporized records set just two years earlier, in the 2023 race that gave liberals control of the seven-member court for the first time since 2007. Crawford’s victory cements the current majority until at least 2028.
Although final figures won’t be known until July, some estimates suggest total spending by candidates and outside groups could hit $100 million – double the $50.3 million that the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign calculates was spent when liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative former Justice Dan Kelly two years ago.
Tuesday’s officially nonpartisan race drew heavy involvement from both major parties and their backers, who cast it as a referendum on Trump’s rapid-fire barrage of controversial and chaotic moves, including eliminating long-standing federal programs, chopping the federal workforce and rolling back diversity and environmental initiatives, often on questionable legal grounds. Organized protests packed streets across the country on Sunday, including thousands of people across Wisconsin in cities large and small.
Although high court campaigns have featured liberal-vs.-conservative battles for decades, they have become more blatantly partisan in the Trump era. Marquette University political scientist Charles Franklin has calculated that the correlation between how Wisconsin counties vote in presidential races and how they vote in Supreme Court races has grown from virtually zero in 1978 to 87% in 2016 to 96% in 2023.
Schimel’s outside backing included more than $20 million from Musk, the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X, and the chief engineer of Trump’s government-slashing DOGE effort. Musk’s contributions alone exceeded the then-record total spending on behalf of all candidates in the 2019 and 2020 Supreme Court elections combined, far outpacing Crawford’s backing from such liberal billionaires as philanthropist George Soros and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker.
Before the election, Musk told a Green Bay crowd that “the entire destiny of humanity” rested on the outcome of the high court race. But after Schimel lost, Musk said the Republican-backed referendum on voter photo identification “was the most important thing.” The constitutional amendment passed easily, as expected.
Half of the state’s voting-age population turned out for the high court race, exceeding even spring elections when presidential primaries are on the ballot. The previous record turnout for an election with a Supreme Court race but no presidential primary was 40% in 2023. “In fact, Wisconsin’s 50% turnout rate in the formally nonpartisan April 2025 election was higher than the adult turnout rate of 38 states in the 2022 midterms,” wrote John D. Johnson, research fellow at the Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education.
Crawford ran particularly strong in the blue bastions of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County. Both her 75%-25% countywide margin and her 84%-16% city margin outperformed Protasiewicz and the Democratic standard-bearers in the last three presidential elections.
In the Milwaukee County suburbs, Crawford racked up a 60%-39% margin, trailing Protasiewicz, a Franklin resident, but surpassing Biden, Harris and Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee. And unlike any of those four, she carried every municipality in the county.
By contrast, Schimel ran behind Kelly’s 2023 performance in Ozaukee County and about even with him in both Waukesha and Washington counties – even though Schimel has won four countywide elections in Waukesha County and Kelly just lives there. Schimel also ran behind Trump’s November performance in all three of those red counties.
The southeastern Wisconsin vote for Supreme Court didn’t entirely line up with the other statewide race on the ballot, in which liberal incumbent Jill Underly defeated charter-school proponent Brittany Kinser for state superintendent of public instruction. That race also set a campaign spending record of $4.5 million for education contests, up 50% from the $3 million record set in Underly’s first campaign in 2021.
Underly ran behind Crawford and behind her own 2021 performance in Milwaukee, Milwaukee County and the Milwaukee County suburbs, while first-time candidate Kinser outperformed Schimel, the state’s former attorney general, in Waukesha and Ozaukee counties and ran about even with him in Washington County. Unlike Schimel, Kinser carried Cedarburg, Franklin, Hales Corners, Mequon, Oak Creek and every Waukesha County community.
Still, for all the big money and packed polling places, Tuesday’s Supreme Court result was in many ways predictable, as the triumph of a liberal female judge by a double-digit margin.
Liberals have now won four of the last five Supreme Court races: Crawford by 10 percentage points, Protasiewicz by 11 points, Justice Jill Karofsky by 10.5 points in 2020 and Justice Rebecca Dallet by 11.5 points in 2018. And women have defeated men in 11 of 13 male-female matchups since 1994.
Justice Brian Hagedorn was the last conservative elected to the court, in 2019. Hagedorn and former conservative Justice David Prosser, in 2011, were the only male jurists in the past 31 years to triumph over female opponents, in two of the four closest races in Supreme Court history.
“This might just be the new normal for April elections … a 10-point victory for the liberal candidate,” Johnson wrote.
