>> The morning before, the only statewide debate
between candidates for Wisconsin Supreme Court
this week, one of them had to pull out. Liberal
candidate Chris Taylor went to the hospital for kidney
stones, according to her campaign. Conservative
Maria Lazar wished her a speedy recovery. Now the
debate has been rescheduled for next Thursday night,
which puts it just five days before the April 7th
spring election. Meanwhile, the latest Marquette Law
School poll found voters still don't know who
they'll vote for. Among registered voters, 53%
remain undecided, with 23% supporting Chris Taylor and
17% choosing Maria Lazar and 7% saying they won't
vote. The state Supreme Court election is the focus
of this week's new Inside Wisconsin Politics, with
Wisconsin Public Radio reporter Shawn Johnson and
Rich Kremer and PBS Wisconsin “Here& Now”
reporter Zac Schultz. >> 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. I'm Shawn Johnson here with
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 their 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.
>> Zac, what should people know about Chris Taylor's
background and what led her to this point?
>> 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 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.
>> 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 on the 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 going to see things differently.
Rich, there was 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