The Wisconsin Supreme Court race is coming up, and polling shows a majority of you say you don't know enough about the candidates.

Let's fix that.

This is inside Wisconsin politics.

my colleagues Zac Schultz and Rich Kremer.

Hey, guys.

>> Hello.

Hey.

>> So this is not something we're just making up here.

There has been polling on this race, and the leading vote getter in that poll was a majority of people saying they don't know who they're going to support.

That is so different than in 2023 and 2025, when we in Wisconsin were the Super Bowls of election for our Supreme Court races.

So, Zac, what is the difference this year?

>> Well, the simple difference is this isn't for the majority.

The Liberals will have a four person majority for the next session no matter what.

If Chris Taylor wins, it goes to five two.

If Chris if Maria Lazar wins, it stays at 4 to 3.

But that simply is the difference between $100 million in campaign and the attention of the world on this very important swing state, and the court's decisions on election laws versus a snooze fest, even in the state for people that normally tune in for these elections, are still trying to figure out, oh, when is that coming up?

>> And that's not hyperbole either.

That $100 million is a real number from last election, when we shattered the 2023 record, not just for Wisconsin, but for national judicial races.

Rich.

The 2025 race was the first one you'd covered really closely.

What was a day in the life like on that one, and how does it compare to what you've observed in this Supreme Court race?

>> I mean, it's like night and day.

I covered a Republican, former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, spent a day with him on the campaign trail.

And, you know, first off, the bat, he took money directly from the Republican Party of Wisconsin.

Also, I was at a campaign event at the Republican Party in La Crosse, where Brad Schimel framed the race as a fight between good and evil.

And he also used an analogy of driving the serpent out of the Garden of Eden.

So the.

The language used by Schimel is very different than what we've seen from Judge Lazar.

She's promoting that she is the independent candidate compared to Chris Taylor, who she attacks as being an activist and former Democratic lawmaker.

But she just hasn't made the same kind of statements that I've heard that Schimel did last year.

>> It's almost like an old fashioned Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, Zac.

>> It harkens back to a day where things weren't as heated, that your your TV wasn't filled with ads nonstop in the lead up to it, where you really did have to pay attention to learn who these people were.

Now it's still Republican Democrat, you know, they may use the labels conservative, liberal, but Chris Taylor is a former legislative Democrat but now independent judge.

But her connections to the Wisconsin Democratic Party to the Republican Party covered go deep.

I've attended multiple events with her.

She's been speaking at GOP rallies with the next speaker's Eric Toney running for attorney general.

So it's not like either of these are running down independent lanes.

They're still following that traditional the new path.

If you want to become on the Supreme Court, you keep the political parties at arm's length in your name, but you take all the money under the table, you take all the effort for grassroots, because that really matters when when it comes to getting people out to vote, those turnout operations, those dollar operations still belong to the parties.

There is no independent structure for anyone to remain independent and actually win a campaign.

>> So let's talk about the candidates here.

Let's start with Chris Taylor.

She got into the race first.

Zac, what should people know about Chris Taylor's background and what led her to this point?

>> Well, the the clearest thing is she had worked for abortion rights groups before she became a member of the legislature.

She ran as a Democrat and Assembly race in the Dane County area.

I covered that race way back when she was here through a lot of tumultuous times in the Capitol, and then she left.

She was appointed Dane County judge by Governor Evers.

Then she ran for the appellate court and became a judge there, which is what she's doing today.

So she has followed the judicial pattern, but she's got heavy partizan activity in her background, and she doesn't deny that.

But like every judge or justice, she wouldn't be the first one.

I mean, former Justice Prosser served as the Assembly speaker for Republicans.

And back in the day when they could say, well, I'm a conservative justice, not a conservative politician with Chris Taylor in this modern environment, I don't know if it really matters because the candidates are so tied to the parties anyway that her background doesn't seem to have any baggage.

And we saw with Brad Schimel Rich, as you were talking about last year, he's a former Republican attorney general for Wisconsin, and he did not shy away from those Republican connections.

But you see a difference with Lazar and how she's handled herself.

Rich.

The so Lazar has been focusing on her career in the courtroom.

She's been a lawyer since 1989.

She worked for the Department of Justice under former Republican Attorney General J.B.

Van Hollen, and that was in the early years of Republican control of state governments.

So after 2011, when a lot of laws were passed that wound up in court, Democrats tried to sue to stop the voting maps passed by Republicans, abortion restrictions and act ten.

So Maria Lazar, as an assistant DOJ attorney, was representing the state and defending those, and she was elected to the Waukesha County Circuit Court.

But that was the both of her races.

There were unopposed.

And then in 2022, she became a judge on the second District Court of Appeals.

So but to your point, yes, she's she's leaning on her, you know, her experience in the courtroom, but also, you know, her political ads kind of let you know where she stands on certain things, or at least where her campaign does.

So there's plenty of signals out there.

>> You know, some of these candidates, when they run for Supreme Court, they come from the law, and maybe you're hearing about them for the first time or getting introduced to them for the first time.

But, you know, Chris Taylor and Maria Lazar, as you both mentioned, have been around for a little while.

I remember Maria Lazar defending Republican drawn legislative maps in 2012 alongside co-counsel Dan Kelly, who former Supreme Court justice and who ran in a couple races in lost.

I remember Chris Taylor very well for her role in the minority on the Legislature's Budget Committee, where if you have that position, you are expected to be able to talk and defend every position and and attack the majority's position aggressively.

And so she did that.

Well, she wasn't just a backbencher legislator.

She was the person who was on that front line of attack.

And, you know, since we've since she's become a judge, that's changed.

And she has indicated and her friends have indicated, look, she knows this is a different role in court, but it is striking a very big change for her to go from that, you know, attack, attack, attack.

Democratic legislator to a judge who sees things differently.

You mentioned those ads, Rich for Maria Lazar.

She is trying to go for this kind of above it all judge, you know, I don't want to get into politics.

The ads, they tell a different story, though.

I mean, she's definitely not going that way with her campaign.

>> Yeah, the ads have focused on basically attacking Taylor, things like abortion, lasers, campaign ads say that, you know, Taylor wants abortion up to the moment of birth, which is a line you've heard a lot of Republicans say over the years.

And the latest one that I think just came out this week, features a woman saying that she's afraid of her daughter having to compete against biological men in in school sports, which.

>> Republican themes pulled right from congressional races and state assembly races, governor races hitting the points that work for them.

>> Yeah.

So the ad lays out the the political part of it.

And then you've got a picture of Lazar saying that she'll uphold the law.

So it seems like she's still trying to walk that line.

But, you know, the ads do send a signal.

>> Well, so let me let me ask you you.

So we've seen low turnout elections in the past.

And that was at a time when conservatives really won a lot of these races, when there was lower turnout, when there consistent voters from the suburbs of Milwaukee came out to vote no matter what.

And the Liberal candidates really struggled to get the attention that they needed to win these races.

And then we saw things flip from Rebecca Dallet on in 2018.

So what do you see as the impact of less attention right now on this race?

>> I think we'll find out what a less attention race means here.

I think though, in the era of Donald Trump, for one, you know, since Donald Trump realigned the Republican Party and its base of voters, a base that reliably reelected conservative justices for many years up until around 2017, we don't know what that shift is going to mean in a lower turnout election, but we know that conservatives start out as kind of a structural disadvantage in these races.

And we also know that liberals have just found a pattern for what it takes to run, talk about their values.

They're not afraid to talk about cases that have happened.

They are not afraid to talk about women's health.

And it's just been a winning formula for them in, you know, really since 2018, with one exception in 2019 that has been the liberal path to victory year in and year out.

So there have been a couple cases that you have asked both candidates about where you actually got to hear them.

You gave them a chance anyway to weigh in on some very high profile races that came before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Let's look at those if we can.

There was one about the 2020 election, which we will be talking about forever as reporters, I think.

And this is a there were a lot of challenges to the election results and to Joe Biden's victory in Wisconsin that came before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

What did you ask the candidates?

ultimately decided, that election in Wisconsin was called Trump v Biden, and it was brought by Trump's lawyers, one of which was Jim Troupis, who is currently being prosecuted in Dane County Court for forgery related to the false electors thing tied in around the same time period.

in law.

>> Especially in political times.

But yes, that case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

And the question was the Trump administration or the Trump campaign wanted to throw out 200,000 votes in Wisconsin, specifically in Dane and Milwaukee counties regarding absentee ballots.

And the question before the Supreme Court was, should they even take the case?

So the question was standing in the legal sense of did Donald Trump and his campaign have a legal right to even file a lawsuit in the first place?

Ultimately, it was A43 decision.

And this is a time when conservatives controlled the court 4 to 3 that said, no, we won't take the case.

It was Bryan Hagedorn who ultimately sided with the three Liberals to throw out the case.

That solidified the win.

Biden won Wisconsin definitively, damned.

And it was the three conservatives who didn't necessarily say they would have thrown out the votes.

But they said we should at least hear the case.

When I asked both candidates about this, Chris Taylor was absolutely on the side of the Liberal candidates, saying, of course they made the right decision and they never should have thrown out those votes, should have never gotten that far.

It was Maria Lazar who really didn't want to take a position on it.

But she said the issue of standing is still going to come back before this court, which is true.

And she wouldn't even go the one step further.

I asked her point blank, like, are people going to hear this answer and say, well, what about the 200,000 votes that were going to get thrown out?

And she said, well, I don't want to weigh in on that.

I don't want to talk about that.

And that was just a place she wasn't willing to go.

And the Democratic Party and Taylor's campaign that, saying she's still connected to election deniers and conspiracy and this whole issue.

So, you know, the 2020 election will not go away.

It's still present.

And it's present in their answers, too.

things can be true.

That is a position that a lawyer can take that look, this has to deal with standing.

We're not going to get into it.

Another thing that is undeniably true is that there are people in Maria Lazaro's base, or the conservative base, who have strong feelings about the 2020 election.

>> Yeah, they absolutely do.

So in 2022, she was endorsed by people.

She was attacked for being endorsed by people like Michael Gableman and also for associating with Troupis.

Gableman is a former Supreme Court justice who led the 2020 election investigation.

That was kind of widely panned.

And also he was fired by Assembly Robin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who had hired him before.

I mean, it was a whole thing.

So she's still getting us hit for even associating with those two people.

But yeah, the standing issue, the other thing that comes to mind is I, you know, we've heard the president, President Donald Trump, say, well, you know, all those cases, they never looked at the cases.

They just found these technicalities and they tossed them out.

That's not true.

There was plenty of cases that were dismissed on the merits, lack of evidence, etc.

but it just kind of reminded me of that when I heard that answer from Lazar.

And I've seen that same answer from a lot of people who do believe that the 2020 election was stolen.

>> And Zak, I feel like we can't talk about a court race in Wisconsin these days without talking about the issue of abortion.

That's another one where you ask the candidates about their positions.

What was your question and how did they handle.

>> That specifically?

The question was, how would they have decided if they had been on the court when Kohl versus Urmanski was brought before the court?

To be clear, that was the case that looked to throw out the 1849 abortion ban from Wisconsin.

That was the attorney general suing Sheboygan.

That wasn't the point.

It was that was what the case was called for.

Three the Liberal majority throughout that law said it was annulled essentially by laws passed after that, specifically won by Scott Walker and the Republicans.

And Chris Taylor said it was absolutely the correct decision.

Maria Lazar once again didn't say how she would have voted, but she she kind of answered it in the end of her answer by saying, well, if I win, it'll still be A43 court.

So my.

I wouldn't have changed the outcome of that case, which sounds a lot like her saying she would have decided with the conservatives on the case, which really shouldn't be all that shocking.

Those are who her colleagues would be if she wins and then another conservative wins, then she would be in the majority.

And who knows that?

That is the question that Taylor and other people are saying was if the court flips again, will abortion rights come up before the court?

I will say Lazar finished her answer by saying, however, she views that Supreme Court decision as final and that the abortion issue is settled as far as the courts are determined.

Obviously, it's not settled when it comes to gubernatorial and legislative elections.

So those will still play out.

And we're going to be covering a lot of that coming up.

But their answers kind of fell into the camps that you might expect them to, especially given their messaging and ads.

another finding in the Marquette poll that we recently covered that, you know, it's hard to say where people stand on the candidates when more than half of voters say they don't know.

But what we did see, what you saw.

There's a lot of tells in there about which side is more enthusiastic right now at this moment in time.

>> Yeah.

Big time.

There was a big disparity in terms of who's excited to vote in the April 7th election.

So some numbers I'll run off here.

People saying that there are certain to vote on April 7th.

Democrats are up 18 points over Republicans.

How important the election is to the outcome or how important is the election outcome to you?

That was a 19 point spread in Democrats favor as well.

So there's all kinds of metrics.

And not to mention that President Trump had his lowest net negative approval rating in Marquette poll history.

So those are all some headwinds for conservative candidates.

>> Zack, I guess against that backdrop, what can Maria Lazar point to and say?

I got a good chance.

Nonetheless.

>> The quick answer is she's relying on Hagedorn's race from 2019.

Like her, he was another conservative candidate who was vastly outspent and written off towards the end of the race.

People thought that he was not going to win, so much so that the Liberal candidate at the time really took her foot off the pedal.

When it came to running through the finish line.

Lazar directly points to that race and says, that's the path to follow.

That's get out the vote.

That's grassroots advocacy.

If we can't win on ads, we have to make sure our voters get to the polls, especially in a lower turnout election.

Taylor said she's aware of it.

She's going to run through the tape, not letting off the pedal at all.

>> And she is running a different kind of race than the judge Neubauer, who ran in that year's race, you know, ran I mean, you mentioned it taking your feet off the pedal.

She ran more like a judge than a candidate, I guess, in that race.

So we'll see how that plays out in the closing days.

Thanks for joining us for this week's Inside Wisconsin Politics.

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