The results from an important race in Wisconsin this week suggest the Republicans could be in very big trouble.
Wisconsin State Supreme Court Justice-elect Chris Taylor takes a picture with constituents after speaking on Tuesday, April 7, 2026, in Madison, Wisconsin.
(Owen Ziliak / Wisconsin State Journal via AP)
The Republican Party was founded in 1854 in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, a community that has remained Republican for the vast majority of the ensuing 172 years. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in Ripon in 2024—even after Harris campaigned there—by a comfortable 55–45 margin.
But, as in a growing number of historically Republican red areas that have begun turning purple or even blue since Trump’s disastrous second term began, Ripon took a sharp turn last Tuesday—as part of a now indisputable national shift toward progressive and Democratic candidates. The city voted by around 58 percent to send Chris Taylor, a very progressive former Democratic state legislator and jurist, to the state Supreme Court. The rest of Wisconsin had a similar idea. Taylor was elected Tuesday in a landslide, flipping a previously conservative seat and giving progressives a 5–2 majority on a powerful state court that, less than a decade ago, was a bastion of right-wing judicial activism. That matters for Wisconsinites, of course, but it also has significance for the whole country.
Wisconsin is the ultimate presidential battleground state, having backed Donald Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Trump once more in 2024, all by margins of under 1 percent. Yet Taylor, a former lawyer and policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin who currently serves as a state appeals court judge, won the seat by a 20-point margin over fellow Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, a prominent and well-connected conservative who, as an assistant state attorney general, defended former Republican Governor Scott Walker’s assaults on organized labor, public employees, and fair elections.
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Taylor ran a significantly smarter and better-funded campaign than Lazar. But this margin of victory was unprecedented in recent major elections in Wisconsin. In an election where Democrats voted enthusiastically while a lot of Republicans apparently stayed at home, Taylor carried urban, suburban, and rural regions across the state.
The scale of Taylor’s win drew national attention, as observers at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics noted that she “became the first Democratic-aligned candidate since 2015 to carry a majority of the state’s counties—42 of 72.” Twenty-nine Wisconsin counties that backed Trump in the fall of 2024 backed Taylor in the spring of 2026. Historically Republican strongholds in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison favored the progressive in the officially nonpartisan contest, as did rural counties across western Wisconsin and into the north, where many regions saw shifts of 20 points or more from right to left.
So, what does this tell us about the midterm elections this fall, when control of the Republican-led US House and Senate chambers, as well as statehouses in places like Wisconsin, will be up for grabs?
A spring election for a technically nonpartisan Supreme Court seat is different from a partisan contest for a US House seat or a governorship. But just as the big wins for Democrats in 2025 off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia were indicative, and just as the overwhelming pattern of Democratic wins in special elections for state legislative seats nationwide revealed Republican vulnerabilities, so the Wisconsin results are relevant for the 2026 midterms—especially when it comes to US House races.
Currently, Republicans have a razor-thin 217–214 majority in the House (three seats are vacant). Democrats need to flip just a handful of districts nationwide to take control of the chamber. While a great deal of attention has been paid to whether Democrats can win additional seats in states such as California, New York, and Virginia, their majority could also run through Wisconsin and a handful of other Midwestern states, like Iowa.
Because of the radical gerrymandering of state congressional district lines that was initiated by Walker and baked in by Republican legislators and cautious courts, six of Wisconsin’s eight House seats are currently held by the GOP.
The VoteHub election mapping website determined that Taylor won the most votes in seven of the eight districts—including those of Republican representatives Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Tony Weid, Glenn Grothman, and Tom Tiffany (the party’s hapless candidate for governor).
In Van Orden’s western Wisconsin third district, Taylor won by double digits—running up astronomical percentages of the vote in more urban counties such as La Crosse (69 percent) and Eau Claire (68 percent) but also gaining roughly 60 percent in largely rural Grant, Crawford and Vernon counties. As Democratic US Representative Mark Pocan, D–Town of Vermont, a longtime Van Orden critic, noted, the third “sure showed a beautiful shade of blue in Tuesday’s election.”
That’s bad news for the Republican incumbent, who was already looking vulnerable in what’s likely to be a repeat race this fall with Democrat Rebecca Cooke.
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Democrats also noted that Steil’s southeastern Wisconsin first district gave overwhelming support to Taylor. Racine and Kenosha counties, both of which backed Trump in 2024, went big for the progressive on April 7.
And what of Republican Glenn Grothman’s sixth district, where Ripon is located? Aaron Wojciechowski, a former local elected official from the university town of Oshkosh who is bidding for the Democratic nomination to take on Grothman, hailed Taylor’s win as a signal that “Wisconsin voters are fired up, rejecting extremism and demanding a court that protects our rights, our votes, and our democracy.”
Pointing to “double-digit blue swings across the board in Grothman’s home turf,” Wojciechowski said, “These are significant, district-wide blue shifts in every county that makes up the 6th. This is proof that the entire 6th District—from Sheboygan to Ozaukee to Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Green Lake, and beyond—is moving our way. Voters are done with the chaos, the divisive rhetoric, and a do-nothing Congress. The same energy that flipped the Supreme Court can flip this congressional seat in November. The momentum is here, and the data proves we can win.”
That’s an ambitious claim. Grothman’s district hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1964, when a union machinist from Fond du Lac named John Abner Race upset longtime Republican incumbent William Van Pelt, an absurdly conservative Republican—in a result that surprised Race himself. Of course, 1964 was the ultimate “blue wave” year—as a ticket headed by President Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent of the national vote, carried 44 states, and swept Democrats into office even in historically Republican districts.
Could 2026 really see a big enough blue wave to unseat not just vulnerable Republican incumbents like Van Orden but entrenched ones like Grothman? That’s a very tall order. But, then again, Chris Taylor just carried the birthplace of the Republican Party. So, perhaps, everything is up for grabs.
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