With another statewide election in Wisconsin looming for Tuesday, I wanted to take my typical look back at the trends of recent April elections, so we know what to look for as the returns come in.
We will start from the last Supreme Court election that right-wingers won in Wisconsin - Brian Hagedorn's squeaker win over Lisa Neubauer in April 2019, and we'll take it through last April's big win by Susan Crawford over Brad Schimel in
the most expensive state court race in US history. A race that featured this absurdity on the Sunday before the election.
We haven't seen much of Elon or any other right-wing oligarchs trying to buy this April's Supreme Court election. But the huge stakes and large amount of money thrown around on the 2025 race likely was a big reason behind a record turnout of 2.365 million votes, nearly double the amount of votes cast in Hagedorn's 2019 victory.
For statewide elections, I like to split the state into 7 different segments.
1. The City of Milwaukee
2. The rest of Milwaukee County
3. Dane County
4. The Fox Valley counties of Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago (collectively known as the BOW Counties)
5. The three suburan Milwaukee counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington (aka the WOW Counties)
6. The combined totals of Racine and Kenosha Counties
Those 6 areas generally combine for slightly more than half of the votes in a statewide election. Then, we look at what happens in the rest of the state of Wisconsin, which you can translate into "rural Wisconsin", but also includes smaller urban areas like La Crosse, Eau Claire, Wausau, and Sheboygan.
What's interesting is that the increase in turnout in 2025 was largely across the board. In fact, the share of turnout from outstate Wisconsin was more in line with the last 2 November elections, exceeding 46% in 2025, which is something that outstate had not done in previous April elections.
You'll notice that the WOW Counties had a lower share of the electorate in April 2025 than the other April elections, and took up its largest share in 2019. And it was the WOW Counties that put Hagedorn over the top by 6,000 votes in 2019, not only because of the higher turnout in those Republican-leaning counties, but also because Hagedorn won big there, gathering more than 2/3 of the votes.
But the WOW Counties are also a place where Democrats have consistently made gains since that 2019 election, like Democrats have made gained in a lot of previously Republican suburbs in America in the Trump and post-Dobbs eras. So much so that Kamala Harris got 7% more of the vote in her under-1% loss in 2024 to Donald Trump than Neubauer got in her similarly-close loss in 2019, and Dem-backed candidates in the last 3 Supreme Court elections have continued to get a higher percentage there.
So on Tuesday, if we are seeing Chris Taylor pulling over 40% in the WOW Counties, she's extremely likely to win. And as you'll see, she may not even need that.
That's because the largest Dem-favoring parts of the state have become even bluer in the 2020s. The Dem-backed candidates have cleared 81% of the vote in each of the last 3 Supreme Court elections, and Dems have increased their share throughout Milwaukee County in neach of the last 2 April elections.
Then combine the higher turnouts throughout the 2020s, and that increased Dem share translates into a big growth in margins for the Dem-backed candidate.
Given that turnout is
predicted to be back toward 2020's levels, I wouldn't expect Taylor to get margins like Protasiewicz got in 2023 or Crawford in 2025. But if Taylor is pulling those types of margins on Tuesday, we are likely seeing an even bigger blowout than the 10-11% wins we saw Dem-backed candidates pull in the last 3 April SCOWIS races.
I also want to give a look at the other 3 areas of state and how they have voted in statewide elections. I wouldn't necessarily describe this as Battleground areas, because they lean a few points more Republican than the statewide totals. But the Dem-backed candidate has pulled either 51 or 52 percent in the BOW Counties and the combined totals of Racine/Kenosha in each of the last 3 Supreme Court elections, and have gotten at least 47.5% of the outstate vote in each of those races. That's a whole lot better than Kamala Harris did against Donald Trump in November 2024.
So if you're seeing BOW Counties and/or Racine/Kenosha going for Taylor, she's likely to win by a comfortable margin. But if that's not happening, and Maria Lazar is putting up Trumpian margins in the sticks, then things may get interesting.
One last item I personally care about as a 2-time graduate of UW-Madison is what the turnout and outcomes are around the UW campus. Let me reboot
an observation I made in the wake of the November 2024 and April 2025 elections. One of the ways that Republicans held down [the] margins in the 2024 presidential election in Dane County and the City of Milwaukee as well as other blue-voting areas was to get more votes from younger men, especially in college areas. But that "bro strategy" didn't work at all for Schimel in this election, especially in the wards in Madison near the UW campus, where Crawford kept [nearly] 5/6 of Harris's vote totals, but Schimel lost more 2/3 of Trump's votes in the same areas.
The "bro vote" also didn't seem to appear for the Schimel/Musk team in other college counties in Wisconsin, including the ones that included UW campuses in La Crosse, Eau Claire, Stevens Point, and Oshkosh.
Dem margins, 2024 Presidential election vs 2025 Supreme Court election
La Crosse (+9.3% in 2024, +26% in 2025)
Eau Claire (+10.6% in 2024, +25.6% in 2025)
Portage (+1.2% in 2024, +15.4% in 2025)
Winnebago (-4.7% in 2024, +7.0% in 2025)
As I may have mentioned before, when I worked the polls on campus in 2023 (one year after the
Dobbs decision) and saw a steady line of female college students coming in on Election Day, I had a strong indication that Janet Protasiewicz was going to win over her anti-choice opponent.
I'll be working the polls on campus again on Tuesday, and I'll see if the same trends as what happened in 2023 and 2025 are holding, where campus wards are trending strongly toward Taylor, or if Lazar is holding her own there. It also would be an area where we would likely see if the attacks on Lazar being an anti-choice extremist resonated
(and Lazar is ia absolutely an anti-choice extremist), or if college students aren't as panicked about reproductive rights as much as they clearly were 3 years ago.
So there's your quick guide to Tuesday's election. I'll guess turnout is somewhere around the 1.55 million we saw in 2020, which would put the "win total" around 780,000 for a candidate. Let's see if the Dems keep their April winning streak going.
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