Crawford, Schimel set to square off in another high-profile Wisconsin Supreme Court race

Two candidates have emerged as the contenders for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court after a filing deadline Tuesday evening.

Susan Crawford, a Dane County judge who formerly represented Democrats and Planned Parenthood as an attorney, and Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge and former Republican attorney general, are running to fill a seat that will be vacated after liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley retires.

Coming from opposing sides of the ideological spectrum, Crawford and Schimel’s candidacies will set the stage for a high-profile and high-cost election, two years after another Wisconsin Supreme Court race shattered spending records and drew national attention.

While Wisconsin’s highest court and the elections to fill its seats are officially nonpartisan, the 2023 election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz gave the court a 4-3 liberal majority for the first time in 15 years.

Now Crawford seeks to maintain that balance, while Schimel seeks to swing the court back to conservatives.

“The court continues to be a place in Wisconsin politics where big issues are decided,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist and elections expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The state still has a Democratic governor and Republican Legislature who don’t get along and don’t do much productive lawmaking together … so a lot of the disputes between the parties end up being settled in the courts and eventually in the state Supreme Court.”

Unlike in Protasiewicz’s election, in which she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, no primary challengers have emerged — a sign of unity in a race that both sides see as critical to achieving judicial victories on issues like abortion, voting, divisions of governmental power and labor union practices.

The election will take place April 1 and Bradley’s term expires July 31. Whoever wins in April will likely decide the shape of the court until 2026, when conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley will be up for reelection.

Both sides have already signaled that they’ll be investing heavily in the race as a means of protecting policy agendas. The conservative group Americans for Prosperity has endorsed Schimel, the state Republican Party has pledged its support, and after a lower court struck down his signature Act 10 collective bargaining law, former Gov. Scott Walker called on fellow Republicans to turn out for the race.

“Get ready for this spring,” he said in December. “Four activists on the state Supreme Court here in Wisconsin could ultimately throw this law out.”

And in November, the Wisconsin Democratic Party endorsed Crawford.

“Now more than ever, our democracy needs ardent defenders who will stand up for the rule of law and protect our constitutional rights from extreme special interests who seek to politicize our constitution and undermine our freedoms,” the party said in a statement.

The state Democratic Party spent $10 million in the last Supreme Court race, which ultimately saw at least $56 million spent by the candidates, parties and outside groups, according to a tally by WisPolitics.

The stakes of the race are high. Since liberals took control of the court, justices struck down Republican-drawn voting maps, and have begun hearing arguments in cases determining the legality of abortion in Wisconsin, the status of the state’s nonpartisan election administrator and the power of a governor’s veto pen. They’re also expected to hear a case about Act 10 and the future of public sector unions.

High-stakes court races are increasingly the norm

Such high-tension — and high-cost — judicial races are increasingly the norm as major political issues get kicked to state courts for final determination. Burden, the political scientist, said that Wisconsin’s 2023 court race illustrated a “perfect storm” of how divided government can lead to heated battle for court control.

“There was real stalemate between the two policy-making branches, especially during the 2020 period, when the state was going through the pandemic and the presidential election, and there was essentially no lawmaking happening despite those crises confronting the state government,” he said.

Coupled with the prospect of changing state abortion law after the overturning of federal abortion access, “it was a set of factors that came together, I think, to just make that election one of a kind,” he said.

Those kind of stakes can also draw national attention to off-season elections. Unlike a presidential race in November, Burden argued, fewer voters play close attention to elections in other times of year.

“So people who are interested in politics, who are tied into the parties or part of interest groups and movements, are looking for ways to spend their time and money,” he said. “And Wisconsin becomes a very appealing target, because this one seat on the court can really change the direction of policy in the state.”

A battleground state like Wisconsin can act as a kind of harbinger for policy projects that could take hold in other states or nationally, he added.

Both candidates have enjoyed an empty field for months

Schimel and Crawford have both been in the race for months, with Schimel an early arrival, announcing his candidacy in November of 2023 — a full 17 months out from the election. In his campaign announcement, he said that he would fight against the liberal hold on the court, and argued that the new liberal majority was putting their interests over the constitution.

“Are any of our rights safe from a high court that puts their own opinions above the law?” Schimel said at the time.

Schimel, a former Waukesha County district attorney, served as a Republican attorney general from 2015 to 2019. In that position, he appealed a Planned Parenthood lawsuit about hospital admission privileges for abortion providers, and joined with Republican attorneys general from other states in suing to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

Crawford announced her candidacy in June of 2024, and was immediately endorsed by the four sitting liberal justices on the court: Protasiewicz, Walsh Bradley, Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karofsky.

Crawford has served as a circuit court judge in Dane County since 2018. She was reelected this spring to a second six-year term.

Previously, she served as chief legal counsel to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and worked for the law firm Pines Bach in Madison, which has frequently represented Democrats in high-profile cases. As a private attorney, Crawford represented Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin during a case challenging a ban on medical abortions a decade ago.

As a judge two years ago, she sided with Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul’s lawsuit challenging Wisconsin “lame duck” laws that were passed by the GOP-held Legislature to strip powers from Kaul and Gov. Tony Evers before they took office. That case is still pending and likely to reach the state Supreme Court.