Wisconsin’s spring election on Tuesday features races for a state Supreme Court justice and for Waukesha mayor, along with other nonpartisan offices decided outside the November election cycle. Wisconsin voters will cast ballots in a statewide contest that could affect the ideological balance of the Supreme Court, while Waukesha’s mayoral race opens a seat vacated by Mayor Shawn Reilly, an independent who endorsed a candidate in the contest.
In the Supreme Court contest, Appeals Court judges Chris Taylor and Maria Lazar are running to fill the seat of retiring Justice Rebecca Bradley, who has belonged to the court’s conservative bloc. Taylor is a former Democratic state representative, and he has 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.
AP described the race as lower-profile than some past Supreme Court elections because the ideological balance of the bench is not immediately “at stake.” However, the AP notes the winner will join a panel that could become central to political disputes tied to the 2028 presidential election or the next round of congressional redistricting in the early 2030s, since justices are elected to 10-year terms.
The liberal bloc on the Wisconsin Supreme Court expanded in 2023, when Justice Janet Protasiewicz won a seat previously held by a conservative, bringing the court to a 4-3 liberal majority for the first time in 15 years. 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, according to the AP decision notes.
The AP’s election-season context also contrasts voting patterns by geography: Democrats tend to win by large margins in Milwaukee and Dane counties, while Republicans tend to win by wide margins in smaller, more rural counties across most of the state. The AP says Republican candidates often rely on strong showings in the “WOW” counties—Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington—which can help counter Democratic advantages in urban areas.
In the 2024 presidential election, the AP notes, then-Vice President Kamala Harris won Milwaukee County with 68% of the vote and Dane County with 75%, while narrowly losing statewide. By comparison, the AP says Protasiewicz and Crawford received 73% and 75% of the vote in Milwaukee County and 82% in Dane County in their respective successful Supreme Court elections, winning statewide with double-digit margins. The AP also says both justices won more than 10 counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2024, including Brown County, which Trump carried in all three of his White House campaigns.
The Waukesha mayoral race features a different set of dynamics. Waukesha will hold its first open-seat mayoral race in 20 years because Mayor Shawn Reilly is not seeking a fourth term. The candidates are Common Council President Alicia Halvensleben and state Rep. Scott Allen, with Halvensleben described by the AP as the preferred candidate of the Waukesha County Democratic Party and Allen described as one of the state’s more conservative Republicans since his election in 2014.
The AP says Reilly is an independent who left the Republican Party after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and that he has endorsed Halvensleben. The AP also reiterates its approach to results calling, saying it does not project winners and will declare a winner only when it has determined there is no scenario that would allow a trailing candidate to close the gap, and it will continue coverage if a race has not been called.
For voting logistics, the AP decision notes say polls close at 8 p.m. local time (9 p.m. ET), and that any registered Wisconsin voter may participate in the spring election. The AP also includes turnout and early-vote data: as of April 1, about 3.6 million active registered voters were eligible in a state with about 4.5 million eligible voting-age adults, and voters do not register by party; nearly 2.4 million votes were cast in the 2025 spring election for state Supreme Court (about 62% of registered voters), with about 29% cast before election day.
The AP says that as of Friday, nearly 281,000 ballots had already been cast and that, in the 2025 spring election, the AP first reported results in the Supreme Court race at 9:09 p.m. ET—nine minutes after polls closed—while the last vote update came at 2:12 a.m. ET with about 99% of total votes counted; the race was called at 10:16 p.m. ET. The AP notes that recounts are not automatic in Wisconsin, but that a trailing candidate may request one if the winning margin is less than a percentage point, and the AP may declare a winner in a race eligible for a recount if it can determine the lead is too large for a recount or legal challenge to change the outcome.