Wisconsin winning

An even bigger blowout than anticipated:

Voters in Wisconsin ensured on Tuesday that the supreme court in one of the nation’s premier swing states will be controlled by liberals through at least 2030. 

Chris Taylor, a former Democratic state lawmaker and current judge on the state Court of Appeals, easily beat her colleague on that court, conservative Maria Lazar. The Associated Press called the race less than 40 minutes after polls closed, and Taylor led by roughly 20 percentage points late Tuesday.

This result grows the court’s liberal majority from 4-3 to 5-2—the largest margin Wisconsin liberals have had in this venue since at least the 1970s. Importantly, that means the court is guaranteed to be under liberal control during the 2028 presidential election, barring an unforeseen death or resignation, even if conservatives win each of the two Wisconsin Supreme Court contests that will be held by then. 

Wisconsin’s high court has played a key role in matters of democracy in recent years, and is sure to continue doing so. Since flipping the court majority in 2023, liberal justices have forced new and fairer state legislative maps by striking down a Republican gerrymander, and rejected GOP efforts to limit access to mail voting by restoring the use of ballot dropboxes. 

This court may soon be asked to weigh in on congressional redistricting—Wisconsin’s congressional map remained heavily gerrymandered in Republicans’ favor, even as the statehouse maps have changed—and could see any number of lawsuits during the coming midterms and 2028 presidential election, as it did in 2020.

“We cannot be fatigued when it comes to democracy,” Taylor told Bolts in late February. “It’s just something we have to keep working on.” 

Taylor on Tuesday won a 10-year term that runs until 2036, coinciding with the next round of redistricting in the early 2030s. 

Taylor has praised the state supreme court’s 2023 decision to overturn the GOP’s legislative gerrymander. Democrats hope to take control of the state legislature this fall for the first time in 16 years thanks to the new, court-ordered maps. As an appeals court judge, Taylor also issued a ruling that made it easier for voters to cast mail ballots.

An end to the congressional gerrymander in Wisconsin would be far from trivial. And this is another Dem overperformance:

In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Democrat Chris Taylor just absolutely crushed it. And I don’t say that in a boosterish sense — that is the statistical word for winning an election by 20 percentage points. This map from the New York Times shows a 21 percentage point shift to the left since the 2024 presidential election, and in fact a 10-point shift to the left since another Wisconsin Supreme Court race last spring.

We do have a relatively apples-to-apples comparison here. That’s the Supreme Court race that Elon Musk was really invested in last year. And if we look at the shift map, all those counties shaded blue are counties that are fully reporting and that shifted to the left since the last election. Democrats are doing better pretty much everywhere, including some really Republican parts of the state.

Maybe Trump invading Cuba will help.