But the Wisconsin Supreme Court race was not a low-turnout affair. Troublingly for the GOP, voting levels were actually close to a midterm, suggesting a favorable electorate for Democrats heading into 2026.
Nearly 70 percent as many ballots were cast in Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin as in November, and Crawford ran roughly 10 points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris’ performance in the state. Turnout in Tuesday’s election was closer to the 2022 midterm than the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which similarly took place in April and resulted in a 10-point win by the liberal candidate.
“Even though Republicans are losing on percentage terms, it does look like their mobilization did succeed, but it’s just that it turned out more Democratic voters,” said Charles Franklin, who leads the Marquette University Law School poll of the state. “Republicans did boost lower-propensity Republicans and got a higher turnout than normal, but those higher-propensity Democrats are turning out at a higher rate.”
There were some indicators of greater enthusiasm in Democratic strongholds, particularly among the party’s highly educated base: In Dane County, which includes Madison and the state’s flagship university, turnout reached 78 percent of 2024 levels. Crawford also improved on Harris’s vote share in the deep-blue county by roughly 7 points.
But Crawford largely outran Harris fairly uniformly across the state. In counties that Trump had won by at least 15 points last November, she improved on Harris’s vote share by roughly 5 points.
Tuesday night’s results are “a sign that the midterm environment is kicking in, which means it’s going to be challenging for the party in power,” said Brian Reisinger, a former GOP aide and rural policy expert.
Some Republicans downplayed the meaning of Wisconsin’s results. Democrats had overperformed in 2023 and 2024, for example, before their losses in November.
Republican pollster Robert Blizzard noted that their party saw similar success in the 2023 state Supreme Court election, with the liberal candidate winning by 10 points, only to watch Trump win the state the next year.
“It’s a reflection of the differences, now, in the education divide, who higher- and lower-information voters show up for,” Blizzard said, describing it as “a trend we’d expect” now.
Still, he said, Democrats’ victory Tuesday was “not a nothingburger” and a lesson ahead of 2026 that “one of the challenges Repulicans face, and I don’t think this is shocking, is you’ve got to have the Trump base foaming at the mouth to come out and vote.”
And Democrats compared Tuesday’s win not to 2023 but to 2017, when the party also over-performed, but didn’t win, in a handful of special congressional elections, including in Montana and the Atlanta suburbs. This feels more like that cycle, they said, when the grassroots energy, small-dollar fundraising surges and candidate recruitment helped to build their wave in the 2018 midterms.
“From the town halls, to protests, to candidates with records of service stepping up, there’s a ton of overlap with 2017 already,” said Meredith Kelly, a Democratic consultant who served as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s communications director during the 2018 cycle. “The Florida specials have shown that Democrats are already over-performing, and if these trends continue, which they did in 2018, we’ll be winning seats deeper into the House map than anyone expects right now.”
The geographic results do not necessarily indicate Democrats persuaded conservative or independent voters to support Crawford. Her overperformance in places Trump won may be attributable to liberal voters being more likely to turn out, even in red areas.
But the broad overperformance suggests a still-favorable electorate for Democrats as both parties begin to gear up for the midterms. And top Democrats were taking notice.
“That’s going to restore a lot of hope in folks back home who answered the call: What can we do? We don’t want to wait until the midterm elections. We want to have a say in these special elections, or in the upcoming Virginia or New Jersey governor races,” Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), a member of House Democratic leadership, said in an interview.
It’s “momentum that we’re going to build on,” she said.
Asked Wednesday about turnout in Tuesday’s elections, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said they were part of a pattern this year of Democratic overperformance in special elections.
“That’s the kind of energy that we’ve been seeing as House Democrats since the beginning of the Trump presidency, despite the efforts by some to project the notion that House Democrats, Senate Democrats, the Democratic Party is cowering,” he said. “We’re beating them over and over and over again.”
Lisa Kashinsky and Nicholas Wu contributed reporting.
