Supreme Taylor win is especially impressive outside of Milwaukee and Dane County

Obviously, a 20-point win in a statewide election in Wisconsin is near-unprecedented over the last couple of decades. So let's look at a few facts and figures from Chris Taylor's epic blowout of Maria Lazar in last week's Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

First, Taylor nearly doubled up the blowout margins that Susan Crawford put up in April 2025's Supreme Court election. And not surprisingly, that boost in margin was widespread throughout the state, as shown by J. Miles Coleman of the Center for Politics of the University of Virginia. In addition to comparisons to last year's high-turnout race, Coleman also looked at the result vs another double-digit win in Supreme Court race with similar statewide vote totals, which was Jill Karofsky's win over Dan Keklly in 2020.

Coleman goes on to point out that the Dem-backed candidate continued to make gains in the Milwaukee suburbs, which used to give massive margins to Republican candidates until the Trump era.

Using 2020 as our baseline year, 3 of the 5 counties that swung most to Taylor from Karofsky were large urban or suburban counties in the Milwaukee area. The first was Milwaukee County itself, followed by Ozaukee while Waukesha came in fourth place. Ozaukee is the least Republican of the so-called “WOW” counties, the traditionally very Republican suburban counties located north and west of Milwaukee. Each of those three counties, Milwaukee, Waukesha, and Ozaukee, got at least 15 percentage points more “liberal” over the past 6 years. In absolute terms, it was notable that Ozaukee County finally changed sides this year after Democratic-aligned candidates have been getting closer to winning it, and that Waukesha County, which would reliably give Republicans and conservative candidates three-to-one margins before the Trump era, only backed Lazar by a 54%-46% margin. That continued suburban movement stands out as the clearest source of Democrats’ expanding coalition.

In fact, Taylor became the first Dem-supported candidate to win Ozaukee County for the first time since LBJ's landslide in 1964. And it continued the steady gains Dems have been making in the WOW Counties over the last 7 years of Supreme Court races.

As Coleman also mentions, the Dems kept increasing vote share in Milwaukee County on Tuesday as well. But it's worth adding that Taylor's gains were in the suburbs and not the City, as Taylor's 83.9% share wasn't much different than Crawford's 83.7% in April 2025, or Protasiewicz's 81.7% in April 2023. In addition, while Taylor got 2% more in Dane County than Dem-backed candidates in 2020, 2023, and 2025, it looks like there's a ceiling in Dane County in the low-80s.

But notice the one blip downward in Dane and the City of Milwaukee in the November 2024 election. That reflects the Trump campaign's gains among voters of color and younger, college-aged bros voters. And those gains have not held since then, especially on the UW-Madison campus. While turnout was down significantly on campus compared to November 2024, and Taylor had slightly less than half the votes Kamala Harris got in campus-area wards, it's nowhere near the falloff that has come for the GOP-supported candidates, as more than 6 out 7 Trump voters went away for Republicans in April 2026.

In addition to those deteriorations, an even worse sign for Republicans is that Taylor made major gains outstate, and outright won many areas that have voted GOP in the past. This includes the higher-population BOW Counties in the Fox Valley (Brown, Outagamie and Winnebago) as well as the combined total of Racine and Kenosha Counties in the southeast corner of the state. Both of those areas went for Trump in 2024, and Harris lost big in the aggregate over the other 63 counties of the state. Taylor won all of these areas of the state last week, including 58% in the BOW Counties.

Sure, I understand that April electorates aren't November ones, as more than twice as many Wisconsinites turned out for the 2024 presidential election compared to the lower-key Supreme Court blowout in April 2026. But midterm turnouts also aren't usually as high as we see in a presidential election, and that was certainly the case in 2022, despite hotly contested US Senate and Governor's races.

Total votes cast, Wisconsin
2022 US Senate 2,652,477
2024 Presidential 3,422,918
2026 Supreme Court (est) 1,506,442

If Trump and Johnson won those 2022 and 2024 races by approximately 1%, while Taylor won by more than 20% in 2026, I think it's not unreasonable to think that current conditions might be directly in between these areas for November 2026. That would be a shift to Dems of about 10 points compared to 2024, which likely means Dem trifecta at the state level, Bryan Steil in major trouble for Congressional District 1 (which Trump won by 4.5% in 2024), and Derrick Van Orden is likely to get Cooked in Distrrict 3 (he only beat Cooke by 2.8% in 2024). And it makes some other GOP districts within reach, given that the GOP will be running slugs like Glenn Grothman, Tony Wied, and whoever gets nominated to replace Tom Tiffany up North.

Long way between now and then, of course. But based on what we saw last Tuesday, you'd sure rather be the Dems than the Republicans in Wisconsin. Especially given how badly the GOP slipped in the parts of the state that they usually do best in.