Again and again, Republicans repeated their goal for the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on Tuesday: Get more than 60 percent of President Trump’s voters to back Judge Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate, and they would win, flipping the court’s majority back to the right.
Judge Schimel hit his mark: He won 62 percent of Mr. Trump’s November total in the state. He drew more votes even than Justice Janet Protasiewicz had received in Wisconsin’s 2023 contest for the court, when she delivered an 11-point thumping to the conservative candidate. That was the last judicial race that Democrats had turned into a national cause.
The problem for Republicans this time was that Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate on Tuesday, won 78 percent of Vice President Kamala Harris’s vote total in Wisconsin — an astonishing figure for a spring election in an off year, and one that made a mockery of the bar the G.O.P. had set for itself.
This was an across-the-map thrashing: Judge Crawford’s percentage of the Harris vote was higher than Judge Schimel’s percentage of the Trump vote in every one of Wisconsin’s 72 counties.
All told, Tuesday’s result was the inverse of what the state’s Democrats had faced in November, when the party turned out what it thought would be enough voters for Ms. Harris to win the state, only to get swamped by a far larger showing for Mr. Trump.
The turnout advantage for Judge Crawford was strongest in Wisconsin’s college towns and rural areas, where the Democratic Party’s organizational advantage is most pronounced.
Rural areas
In counties in the state’s rural southwest corner — a region known as the Driftless Area, where a spread-out population makes door-to-door canvassing extremely difficult — Judge Crawford received between 83 and 88 percent of Ms. Harris’s turnout, while Judge Schimel’s figure hovered just above or below 60 percent in each county.
That allowed Judge Crawford to pick up 15 to 17 percentage points per county.
In this part of the state, the political ground game relies on the sort of volunteer network that the state’s Democrats have built over years. Republicans, by contrast, have relied on a quadrennial surge of Trump voters.
College towns
Wisconsin’s college towns tell another story about a booming Democratic vote for Judge Crawford — and about her opponent’s apparent failure to reap dividends from his ties to Mr. Trump and Elon Musk among young people and the highly educated.
In Dane County, which includes Madison and the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin, Judge Crawford reaped 85 percent of Ms. Harris’s vote total there last November. But only 61 percent of the Trump vote came out for Judge Schimel.
And in Eau Claire and La Crosse counties, where there are smaller U.W. campuses, Judge Schimel failed to meet his target of 60 percent of the Trump total, showing that his efforts to tie himself to Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk had not worked as intended.
Suburbs
Judge Schimel did best compared with the 2024 results in the counties where Wisconsin Republicans are most organized and the state’s conservative media infrastructure is the strongest.
In suburban Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington counties, which ring Milwaukee, he turned out 70 percent of Mr. Trump’s November totals.
Waukesha County is Judge Schimel’s home and political base. Washington is a county where Republicans routinely win close to 70 percent of the vote, and it has an ambitious Republican county executive who is widely believed to be planning a run for governor next year.
And Mr. Musk’s paid canvassers were omnipresent in those areas: Some Waukesha County Republicans reported eight or more visits from door knockers reminding them to vote for Judge Schimel.
But the Republican focus on the suburbs, some party officials acknowledged on Wednesday, came at the expense of reaching many of the rural voters who had come out in droves to elect Mr. Trump last fall.
That pointed up the limitations of Mr. Musk’s attempt to organize the state for Republicans in just the last seven weeks of the campaign: To reach rural voters in off-year contests may require a longer-term G.O.P. effort to build an organization rivaling that of the Democrats.
