Wisconsin voters weigh Supreme Court seat and Waukesha mayor’s race

Wisconsin spring election puts court, Waukesha mayor race in focus

Wisconsin’s spring election on Tuesday will decide two contests that typically draw less attention than November races: a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and Waukesha’s mayoral race. The Supreme Court contest features state Appeals Court judges Chris Taylor and Maria Lazar seeking to fill a seat left open by retiring Justice Rebecca Bradley, while the Waukesha mayoral election replaces Mayor Shawn Reilly, who is not seeking a fourth term.

The state Supreme Court race is framed as a contest over the ideological balance of the bench, because whichever candidate wins will join a panel that could later become central in politically charged disputes involving elections and congressional redistricting. Justices in Wisconsin are elected to 10-year terms, and the outcome can influence how future challenges are handled.

Taylor, a former Democratic state representative, is running for the seat with endorsements from the court’s four sitting liberal justices. Lazar served as assistant state attorney general under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, and she is endorsed by conservative Justice Annette Ziegler, who announced in March that she will not seek a third term in 2027.

The race is not generating the same level of attention as some past Supreme Court elections, because the ideological balance of the court is not described as being at stake in the same way. Still, the winner will affect the composition of a court that has moved over the past several election cycles, including 2023 when liberals gained a 4-3 majority for the first time in 15 years after Justice Janet Protasiewicz won a seat previously held by a conservative.

In 2025, Justice Susan Crawford joined the court and preserved the liberal majority after a campaign in which Elon Musk and groups associated with him spent millions in support of a conservative candidate. The AP notes that Democrats have tended to win by large margins in Wisconsin’s populous counties of Milwaukee and Dane, while Republicans have tended to win by wide margins in smaller, more rural counties, with suburban “WOW” counties—Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington—helping offset Democratic advantages in the urban areas.

Election results can also provide a guide to how statewide races translate across counties. The AP reported that in the 2024 presidential election, then-Vice President Kamala Harris won Milwaukee County with 68% of the vote and Dane County with 75%, while narrowly losing statewide. In comparison, the successful Supreme Court campaigns for Protasiewicz and Crawford received 73% and 75% in Milwaukee County and 82% in Dane County, and both won statewide with double-digit margins.

In addition to those urban strongholds, the AP reported that Protasiewicz and Crawford also won more than 10 swing counties that voted for former President Donald Trump in 2024, including Brown County—home to Green Bay—which Trump carried in all three of his White House campaigns.

Waukesha’s mayoral election, meanwhile, offers a different kind of matchup as the city holds its first open-seat mayoral race in 20 years. Alicia Halvensleben, the city’s Common Council president, is the preferred candidate of the Waukesha County Democratic Party, and state Rep. Scott Allen is running to succeed Mayor Shawn Reilly, who is an independent who left the Republican Party after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and has endorsed Halvensleben.

Reilly’s endorsement reflects the way the contest differs from strictly party-aligned races, even though Republicans and Democrats typically have identifiable strengths across Wisconsin’s regions. In this matchup, Halvensleben and Allen are both seeking to manage the political and administrative expectations that come with replacing an incumbent who is not seeking another term.

As polls close at 8 p.m. local time (9 p.m. ET), Wisconsin will become a focus for vote-counting updates beyond election night. The AP said it does not make projections and will declare a winner only when it determines there is no scenario that would allow a trailing candidate to close the gap, while continuing to cover newsworthy developments like candidate concessions.

The AP also outlined general rules for possible recounts in Wisconsin, where recounts are not automatic. A trailing candidate may request a recount if the margin is less than a percentage point, and the AP may still declare a winner if it can determine that the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.

For turnout context, the AP said that as of April 1 there were about 3.6 million active registered voters in Wisconsin out of about 4.5 million eligible voting-age adults, and voters do not register by party. It also reported that nearly 2.4 million votes were cast in the 2025 spring election for state Supreme Court, about 62% of registered voters, with about 29% of voters casting ballots before election day, and that as of Friday nearly 281,000 ballots had already been cast.