Lessons From a Supremely Low Energy Night in Wisconsin

You didn’t hear much about the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin last night, did you? I’m here to fill you in.

As I completed The American War on Election Corruption, I had the opportunity to fill in the pages of Chapter 19, “Cleveland Returns,” with many key happenings from Trump’s first term. Those who have read the book are often surprised to see that it contains analysis of the 2025 Virginia fiasco, and a takedown of what went wrong with the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election, which was held in April of last year. Here is what I wrote about the latter:

The low point of that evening’s elections, however, was the landslide defeat of Brad Schimel, the GOP candidate in what was technically a non-partisan race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He was trounced by faux moderate Susan Crawford, a circuit court judge from uber-liberal Dane County, by a whopping 10.1 percent margin. Incredibly, Schimel exceeded the vote total of Janet Protasiewicz, the liberal judge elected in 2023 by 11.0 percent, by more than 40,000 votes.

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As recently as 2019, Wisconsin Supreme Court races could be won with as few as 600,000 votes. Schimel put up an elite vote total, yet lost in a landslide as his Democrat opponent nearly matched Hillary Clinton’s 2016 total from a presidential election.

This is, of course, because Democrats have mastered mail-in ballot collection. They knew Schimel would come in with a practically unbeatable haul of votes and secure the seat for the Republicans, along with the majority on the court. With weeks to collect absentee ballots, the result was not only what the Democrats needed (a narrow Crawford win), but an utter landslide when that shouldn’t have been possible - like scoring 23 runs in baseball when your opponent scores 21.

Now fast forward to last night. The Republican Party had all the enthusiasm of a wet fart. Receipt below:

Yep, 600,000 votes for the Republican (technically non-partisan, but you know what I mean) candidate. That means she trailed Brad Schimel, who lost his race by 10 points last year, by over 460,000 votes. The Democrat candidate, Chris Taylor, would have lost to Schimel by over 8 points with her paltry 905,155 total, which is nearly 400,000 below Susan Crawford’s winning total in last year’s race.

Now, here is what you need to understand about this outcome: