The 2025 Election Might be Wisconsin’s New April “Normal”

Democrats across the country hailed yesterday’s victory of Susan Crawford over Brad Schimel as a decisive rejection of Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Certainly, Schimel embraced the connection between himself and the president throughout his campaign for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

As I look at the results, I am unconvinced that the April 2025 election represents a turn against Trump among voters who supported him in November. Instead, I think the real story might be something even worse for the Wisconsin GOP, if less thrilling for national Democrats. This might just be the new normal for April elections.

Crawford won 55.0% of the vote according to unofficial election-night data. In 2023, the Democratic-endorsed candidate won 55.4%, in 2020 55.2%, and in 2018 55.7%. The lone exception is 2019, when Brian Hagedorn (a swing vote, but supported by Republicans) won a narrow victory by holding the liberal candidate to 49.7%.

Doubtlessly, persuasion played some role in Crawford’s victory. As more data becomes available, we’ll be able to draw clearer conclusions about how much. But, at a high level, you don’t need a story about persuasion to explain this election. A ten-point victory for the liberal candidate has become the normal outcome in Wisconsin’s April elections. To understand why, we have to look at the two party’s changing relationship to voter turnout.

Voter Turnout has Never Been Higher

Half of Wisconsin adults voted in the April 2025 general election for the state supreme court. It is difficult to emphasize how unusually large this turnout was. In all likelihood, this is the greatest share of adults to ever vote in one of the state’s April elections. Two years ago, in April 2023, 40% of adults voted in the election of Janet Protasiewicz which flipped the ideological balance of the court.

That year’s turnout was itself extremely high for a spring election not featuring a presidential primary. Turnout is typically highest when the spring election coincides with contested presidential primaries for both parties, as last occurred in 2016. In that year, about 47% of adults voted. We have to go all the way back to the 1960s to find similarly high levels of turnout among the voting age population, which did not yet include 18-20 year olds.

In fact, Wisconsin’s 50% turnout rate in the formally nonpartisan April 2025 election was higher than the adult turnout rate of 38 states in the 2022 midterms.

The sky high turnout this April is part of a general trend in Wisconsin politics throughout the years since Trump’s first election. The only gubernatorial election with a higher adult turnout rate than 2022 was 2018. Among presidential elections, 2024 had the highest turnout on record (2020 was the third highest, following 2004).

Wisconsin’s electorate is just plain extremely engaged. Whether measured as a share of total or eligible adults, no state had a higher turnout that Wisconsin in 2024. Here’s another superlative: since 1856, when the modern party system began, no state has been as closely divided between Democrats and Republicans across three consecutive presidential elections as Wisconsin in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

Scour American history and you’ll struggle to find an example of state as hyper-engaged with, and narrowly divided by, electoral politics as Wisconsin in the present moment.

Most observers, myself included, think Wisconsin’s high turnout in 2024 helped push Trump to his narrow victory, thanks to his particular popularity among infrequent voters. In April 2025, high turnout pushed the Democratic-endorsed candidate Susan Crawford to a 10-point victory over Republican-endorsee Brad Schimel.

If this seems like a paradox, consider how different the two “high turnout” electorates were. Just over a million more people voted in November 2024 than April 2025. A majority of the million voters who stayed home are probably Republicans, or at least Trump supporters.

Here’s a crude, but useful, mental model. Imagining lining up all of Wisconsin’s roughly 3.4 million voters in order of likelihood to vote. The first million lean most strongly Democratic, the next million less so, and the final million tilt more Republican. In February 2025, about half a million voters showed up to vote in the State Superintendent primary and 65% of them voted for Democratic-aligned candidates. In April 2025, 2.4 million participated and 55% voted for the liberal. In November 2024, 3.4 million voted, and the electorate was evenly divided, giving both Trump and Tammy Baldwin 1-point victories.

When I was a college student, in the early 2010s, the mantra among Democrats was “If everyone votes, we win.” When 2.2 million people voted in Wisconsin’s 2010 gubernatorial election, Republican Scott Walker won by 7 points. When 3.1 million people voted in Wisconsin’s 2012 presidential election, Obama won by 6 points. Two years later, when 2.4 million voted, Walker won reelection by 6 points.

Republican strength in lower-turnout elections gave them a structural edge in the state Supreme Court, whose elections may only be held in April. Conservative candidates won 4 of 6 such races held from 2008 through 2016, and the 2017 reelection of a conservative justice wasn’t even contested by a liberal. In the years since 2017, however, Democratic-backed candidates have gone 4 for 5. If they win the next two races in 2026 and 2027, they could hold a 6-1 majority on the court.

I can’t tell if either party has fully internalized this shift yet. Musk’s high-profile shenanigans—offering voters cash to pose with photos of Schimel and advertising random drawings of $1 million prizes—struck me as the kind of thing a campaign might self-consciously do to appeal to low propensity voters.

On the other hand, both Trump and Musk celebrated the landslide passage of a referendum adding Wisconsin’s existing photo ID voting requirement to the state constitution. Trump wrote, “This is a BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS, MAYBE THE BIGGEST WIN OF THE NIGHT. IT SHOULD ALLOW US TO WIN WISCONSIN, LIKE I JUST DID IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, FOR MANY YEARS TO COME!”

Recently, I completed my own analysis of the photo ID requirement’s impact on voting access in Wisconsin. My conclusion was that almost everyone has such an ID, so the practical effect of the requirement is small. Its introduction in 2016 has not prevented the state from setting turnout records.

Still, certain populations are less likely to hold an ID. These include poor people and young people not enrolled in college—decreasingly core Democratic constituencies. All else being equal, poor Black adults in Wisconsin are actually more likely to have a photo ID than poor white adults. I suspect this reflects concerted efforts by Democrats and their allies to help Black residents get their needed identification documents.

Hurdles to convenient voting access once worked to the benefit of the Republican party in Wisconsin, whether deliberately or not. Now, the calculus appears reversed. The best chances for a GOP candidate will appear in an electorate of 3 million or more. As any Democrat working on campaigns in the Obama years could tell you, winning elections by maximizing turnout is possible, but hard.