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June 4th Len’s Political Note #731 Chris Taylor Wisconsin Supreme Court
April 7, 2026 General Election
Wisconsin elects judges in April. Superintendent of Public Instruction, too. The intention was to make judicial and educational positions non-partisan even as they were elected.
In April, 2025, Wisconsin had a big election. The lesser part of that big election was for Superintendent of Public Instruction, a position which has a four year term. Jill Underly, the non-partisan Democrat was re-elected by a 53-47 margin. She can remember that Governor Tony Evers, up for election to a third term in his current office, was previously the Superintendent of Public Instruction.
The April 2025 Supreme Court election was a the big election that year, important nationally as well as state-wide. The electorate had given the Supreme Court a 4-3 Democratic majority in April, 2024. A Democrat was retiring from the Court in April, 2025. With consequences for issues that included the legality of abortion and the current legislative and Congressional districts, Republicans had hopes they could flip the Court back to a Republican 4-3 majority.
Supporters of the Democratic and Republican candidates spent about $100 million on this race. Elon Musk alone spent between $20 and $25 million in support of the Republican former Attorney General Brad Schimel. Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford was elected by a 57-43 margin. Some say that the substantial margin of victory was a reaction to Elon Musk’s spending. Whatever the reason, the Court remained 4-3.
In April, 2026, a Republican Justice, Rebecca Bradley is up for re-election. If she is elected again to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the balance in the Court would remain the same – 4 Democrats, 3 Republicans. If a Democrat is elected to replace her, the Court’s balance would become more heavily Democratic – 5-2.
Incumbent Supreme Court Justices are not defeated often in Wisconsin. Twice so far in the 21st century. Five sitting Justices were defeated in the 20th century. And one Justice who was defeated in the 19th century.
Should Rebecca Bradley be defeated?
Born in 1971 in Milwaukee, she is 55 years old. She went to a Catholic High School, the all-girls Divine Savior Holy Angels, a Catholic college, Marquette. Her law degree is from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Her Wikipedia profile describes her as having been critical of homosexuality and having compared abortion to the Holocaust and to slavery while in college. She was bitter about the health services AIDS patients received and was quoted as saying: “One will be better off contracting AIDS than developing cancer, because those afflicted with the politically correct disease will get all the funding.” She was searing about Bill Clinton’s election, describing him as a “tree-hugging, baby-killing, pot-smoking, flag-burning, queer-loving, draft-dodging, bull-spouting ‘60s radical socialist adulterer.”
In 2015, when her 1992 undergraduate comments were discovered and republished prior to the 2016 judicial election (Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices have a 10 year term), she expressed regrets and explained that her views had changed. She added: “These comments have nothing to do with who I am as a person or a judge, and they have nothing to do with the issues facing the voters of this state,…”
She overcame another scandal before her appointment and then election to the Supreme Court. In a divorce case she handled, the wife attempted to have her removed from the case because she had had an affair with the man she was representing – proof, someone might say, that her view of adultery had changed since her diatribe against Bill Clinton.
More important for forming a judgment about Rebecca Bradley’s candidacy for reelection is her judgment as a jurist.
Rebecca Bradley was the only dissenter from the majority opinion in one case. In her dissent, she argued that the second amendment prohibited convicting a drunk man from waving a handgun at and threatening his roommate with whom he was having an argument. The rest of the Court upheld the gun-waver’s conviction and four months sentence.
In 2020, Rebecca Bradley wrote a minority opinion in a 4-3 decision. She accepted allegations of public officials not complying with the law during the 2020 presidential election and complained the majority refused to act to remedy those violations. She had no suggestion for what the remedy might be if the majority had agreed that the law had been violated.
Rebecca Bradley was in the majority earlier in 2020 regarding several cases related to Covid restrictions. Her majority struck down Governor Evers decision to postpone the April election. She was also among the majority that struck down the city of Racine’s Health Department’s order to close schools, though the basis was procedure. The Court majority said they needed to hear arguments on the issue which were scheduled for another school distric in December. In another case, the motor vehicle authority complied with health department mandatory closings and allowed driver license candidates to obtain their license without a driving test. Rebecca Bradley compared the health department’s closure requirements to the order to mandate “Japanese internment camps during World War II.”
In similarly strong language, Rebecca Bradley wrote, in an elections case in 2022, that drop boxes for voting were illegal, that: “If elections are conducted outside of the law, the people have not conferred their consent on the government. Such elections are unlawful and their results are illegitimate.” Would she have required a new election without drop boxes and invalidated any laws passed by the legislature that was elected with the use of drop boxes?
Christine Taylor is the Democratic candidate to replace Rebecca Bradley. I will urge you to DONATE to and otherwise support her candidacy. Her political history is as a liberal – perhaps as liberal as Rebecca Bradley is conservative. She is, however, more judicious.
Chris Taylor is 57. She points to her record as an Appeals Court Judge. She suggests that her record demonstrates her ability and her inclination to be objective as a judge. She insists “there is no room for partisanship in the judiciary.” She has explained that she has reviewed laws that were passed when she was in the state legislature and has found she could be fair and impartial. She insists that her “writing very much contrasts to the writing of Justice Rebecca Bradley, who is very political and has a right-wing agenda in her writing that can be discerned.”
Like Rebecca Bradley, Chris Taylor graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison Law School. Chris Taylor came to Wisconsin from away and stayed. She had grown up in the Van Nuys section of Los Angeles and graduated from the local high school. She went east for college – to the University of Pennsylvania. Did she stay in Wisconsin because she met the man she would marry?
Chris Taylor recalled, in one interview, having asked her mother if there was ever an indication that she was interested in a career as anything other than being a lawyer. The response was never. She explained “Trying to make our community and our state and our nation better for people, trying to make it more fair, that’s what has motivated me since I was a little kid. I saw from a very early age that the law could be a powerful tool in remedying unfairness.”
Chris Taylor was an admirer of Ruth Bader Ginsburg from her youngest days. She had more direct mentors, too. After law school, she went to work for Lynn Adelman’s firm. Adelman is a former state senator who became a federal judge.
After six years in practice, Chris Taylor became the Policy Director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. She was an advocate for women’s rights and for an organization that was in the forefront of the effort to protect women’s right to an abortion.
In 2010, Scott Walker was elected governor with a political vision that reflected the most conservative Republican views about labor unions, women, education, and other matters. In 2011, having decided that Walker had to be opposed more directly, Chris Taylor ran for and was elected to an overwhelmingly Democratic district. Winning the primary had been the challenge.
In the State Assembly, Chris Taylor was a prolific provider of bills and proposals while demonstrating the detailed preparation of a serious attorney. This is not to say that the legislature adopted her vision. Governor Walker certainly did not. But when Tony Evers defeated Scott Walker’s attempt to achieve a third term, Wisconsin had a governor whose views resonated with Chris Taylor’s even if they did not always agree.
The US Supreme Court, in those days, did share her vision to some degree. In 2015, when the Obergefell decision was announced. Assemblywoman Chris Taylor said “I am absolutely elated by the Supreme Court’s decision to finally recognize the basic, fundamental right of same-sex couples to marry. Love is love, regardless of a person’s gender, sexual orientation, race, social or economic status. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision has been a long time coming for families and children throughout our country. Now, committed couples can marry regardless of what state they live in, and those who have married have the legal certainly their union will be recognized. This is a day of celebration for us all, but especially for the children whose parents now are legally recognized.”
In 2020, she announced she would not run for reelection to the legislature. Shortly afterwards, Governor Evers announced her appointment to the Dane County Circuit Court. In 2023, she ran for election to the Appeals Court and was elected without opposition.
Chris Taylor considered announcing for the 2025 election to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, but it was clear that one Democrat running was sufficient. She deferred to Susan Crawford. She was not deferring forever.. When she announced for the 2026 race against the sitting Justice Rebecca Bradley, all four of the liberal Justices joined together to announced their support for Chris Taylor’s candidacy.
This will not be as big a money race as the one in April 2025. Chris Taylor is well worth your investment. DONATE.
The Other Major State Supreme Court race in 2025 is in Pennsylvania.
The voting will happen in November, but the race has certainly begun. Pennsylvania has a seven member supreme court. Five justices are Democrats. Two are Republicans. Three of the five Democratic justices are up for a Retention Election in November 2025. A Retention Election means that only the incumbents run. The people of Pennsylvania vote “yes” or “no” on each of the three Justices, whether they stay in their seat for another term or not.
If Pennsylvanians vote not to retain a justice, the governor appoints a replacement with the approval of two-thirds of the state Senate. Currently, 28 of the 50 State Senators in Pennsylvania are Republicans. Traditionally in Pennsylvania, when a justice is appointed (if a justice retires or dies mid-term, for instance), the appointed justice does not run for election. In the next odd year, a partisan election is held. That would be 2027 in the case of these justices.
When nothing controversial is happening, retention elections go for the incumbent almost automatically. It is another matter if there is organized opposition. Republicans have been planning to oppose all three Democratic Justices so they can flip the State Supreme Court in 2027.
I urge you to support each of the three Supreme Court Justices. They are different enough so that it is almost impossible for them to join together in a united front. The three members of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court up for the retention election are:
The three Democratic Justices up for retention are. (See Len’s Political note #710}
Christine Donohue. DONATE
Kevin Dougherty DONATE
David Wecht. DONATE
Born in 1952, Christine Donahue is running to be retained as a justice for three years. Pennsylvania’s mandatory retirement from its Supreme Court is 75. Fundamentally apolitical, her major contributions to the Court have been in finding ways to connect the state Supreme Court to the public and in her leadership on issues of ethics.
From a blue collar family, Kevin Dougherty worked his way through Temple University to be the first in his family to graduate from college. He did the same in law school. The most conservative of the three Democrats up for retention, his first judicial appointment was by Governor Tom Ridge, a Republican who eventually became the first Secretary of Homeland Security.
David Wecht is from a prosperous Jewish family in Baltimore, with a grandfather who owned a grocery store in Pittsburgh. With a BA and JD from Yale, he returned to the Allegheny County he had come to love. He got involved in County Government, campaigned to be on the state Supreme Court with a promise to improve the ethics of the Court. An independent thinker, he became well known for his disbelief of the single bullet theory in the JFK assassination. In Pennsylvania, he became well known for frequent dissents. Do not dissent about his candidacy. DONATE.
It is possible that you could donate to support all three candidates, by donating to an organization called Defend Our Courts. Take a look. I prefer to donate to individual candidates. You know who you are giving money to. That is particularly an issue with Defend Our Courts. If you look at their website, you cannot find out who they are, who their Executive Director is, who their Board of Trustees are, who you are actually giving money to.
In this dangerous and divided world, we need state courts with integrity and will a commitment to the public. Different as these three Justices are from each other, they all fit that description. Support them the best way you can.
T
