Republicans think they have a winning argument to turn out voters in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court race: their majority in Congress.
It may seem odd that a state judicial race would have anything to do with Republicans’ razor-thin margins in the House, plus there’s currently no pending litigation concerning the state’s congressional maps that would impact how many members are sent to Washington.
But after the court flipped to liberals in 2023, it threw out the state’s Republican-drawn Assembly and Senate maps, and forced the governor and legislature to agree on new ones. Those maps are credited with giving Democrats solid wins down ballot last fall, and GOP lawmakers are now urgently framing the judicial race as the key to owning redistricting maps and keeping control of the lower chamber.
“Anyone that cares about Congress, they should be paying attention to this,” said Wisconsin GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany. “Conservatives need to understand what’s at stake. And that’s what we’ve all been talking about, ‘here’s what’s at stake.’ We could lose the majority here in the House of Representatives.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s April election pits liberal Judge Susan Crawford against conservative Judge Brad Schimel. Whoever wins will secure the ideological majority of the court — and will rule the purple state. With Wisconsin’s divided governance, the Democratic executive branch and Republican legislative branches frequently disagree, leaving the court to settle disputes.
That makes it a significant race for members of both political parties and will very likely be the most expensive state judicial contest in history.
“This is all about power. This is about having the majority [on the court] so that you can do what you want with legislation that’s passed, with lawsuits that come before you, if you want to overturn statute or keep it,” said Brandon Scholz, a strategist and former executive director of the Republican Party of Wisconsin.
In 2023, the court had a similar race for the ideological majority — one where conservatives were drowned out on the airwaves and lost by nearly 11 points in the most purple state in the country, giving liberals the majority for the first time in 15 years.
In a January memo to investors, first reported by the Washington Examiner, Republican State Leadership Committee President Edith Jorge-Tuñón said state supreme court races in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would “determine map-drawing at the federal and state level after our next redistricting cycle and for years to come” — nationalizing both of those races. That messaging is now central weeks out from the election.
A liberal majority “will redistrict the 3rd Congressional District through Iowa county into Madison, and then that district will turn blue forever. They will redistrict the 1st Congressional District in the state of Wisconsin, that’s Bryan Steil, into Milwaukee, and that district will be blue forever,” said Rep. Derrick Van Orden, the congressman from Wisconsin’s 3rd.
“We will de facto lose the Republican majority in the House of Representatives on April 1 if people don’t vote for Brad Schimel,” he told NOTUS of the conservative candidate.
As evidence for their claims, conservatives have been highlighting a complaint filing against Crawford with the Wisconsin Judicial Code for a “donor advisory briefing” she virtually attended with Focus for Democracy, a left-leaning nonprofit organization. The email notice for the event was titled “Chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026.”
“Winning this race could also result in Democrats being able to win two additional US House seats, half the seats needed to win control of the House in 2026,” the email reads, after pointing to “many important state issues that hinge on the outcome,” like an 1849 statute related to abortion.
The New York Times reported that aides to Democratic donor Reid Hoffman were among the event planners. Hoffman has also donated to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin for the race.
Crawford “has not publicly or privately commented on congressional redistricting at any time and was on this call briefly to share her background and why she’s running. While individuals can talk about any issue they’d like, Judge Crawford will never show favor or bias to any cause or organization,” Derrick Honeyman, a spokesperson for the Crawford campaign, said in a statement.
Asked if she would “welcome” a redistricting case on congressional maps at a Milwaukee Press Club event this week, Crawford said “I don’t think it’s appropriate for a candidate for the Supreme Court to say that you would welcome any one issue or another.”
“I have not even looked” at congressional maps, and “I literally have no opinion or position on them. I don’t know enough about them,” she said. “And I have never stated any opinion about those maps, publicly or privately, because it’s just not something I’ve delved into.”
Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan, who supported a prior effort to have congressional maps reviewed by the state Supreme Court, said he thinks conservatives “should be focused on who’s going to be the best Supreme Court justice” and correctly noted that there wasn’t a pending lawsuit on the maps. But he does think that Wisconsin’s Congressional House map is gerrymandered in favor of Republicans.
“If you look at a very, very purple state, we have six of one party and two of another” in the House, he told NOTUS. “That certainly shows that there’s a bias.”
For Van Orden, who’s “very thankful to have this job,” the concerns about the congressional maps aren’t “about me.” Van Orden hails from the most competitive House district in the state and won re-election by under three points in 2024, behind both President Donald Trump and GOP Senate candidate Eric Hovde.
The race is about the “millions of Americans [who] voted for President Trump for an agenda, and they want his agenda done,” an impossibility without a House majority, Van Orden said.
“With the narrow majority that we have, I mean, look at the votes that we’ve had 217-215. Flip two seats, those bills do not pass. So this has big national implications,” Tiffany said.
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Nuha Dolby is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.