The Wisconsin supreme court played a pivotal role in the 2020 presidential election, declining to hear President Trump’s claims of fraud. Now, with a conservative justice retiring this year, liberals have a chance to cement a majority on the court through the next presidential election. 

The court currently has a four-to-three conservative majority, but one of the four conservatives recently announced her retirement. Justice Patience Roggensack has been a reliably conservative vote during her tenure, dissenting in a case that declared ballot drop boxes constitutional and authoring an opinion that ruled certain Covid measures illegal. 

Wisconsin supreme court justices are elected statewide for 10-year terms. As of today, there are four candidates running to replace Justice Roggensack — two conservatives and two liberals. All candidates are required to run as registered independents in the nonpartisan election. 

A former justice, Daniel Kelly, is one of the conservative candidates. The other is Jennifer Dorow, a county circuit judge who presided over the trial of Darrell Brooks — the perpetrator of the Waukesha Christmas parade attack in 2021. The two liberal candidates — Everett Mitchell and Janet Protasiewicz — are both county circuit court judges. 

After the 2020 presidential election, the Wisconsin supreme court heard arguments from Mr. Trump’s campaign that sought to invalidate President Biden’s victory. In a four-to-three decision, the court dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, with a conservative justice, Brian Hagedorn, joining the three liberals. 

Writing for the majority, Justice Hagedorn said that the then-president’s lawsuit claiming fraud came “long after the last play or even the last game,” adding that he was “challenging a rulebook adopted before the season began.”

The departing Justice Roggensack wrote the dissenting opinion, saying that the majority should have heard the president’s claims of fraud. Whoever replaces the justice will have an outsized role in the next presidential election — which is likely to be close in the Badger State. 

Another issue that could come before the new court is a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s legislative and congressional maps. 

Even though Wisconsin’s population is one of the most evenly divided in the nation politically, Republicans control a large majority of district-level offices. The GOP holds six of the state’s eight U.S. congressional districts, 22 of the state’s 33 senate seats, and 64 of the 99 seats in the state assembly.

In 2018, less than 45 percent of Wisconsinites voted for a Republican state assemblyman and 53 percent chose a Democrat. Despite this, Republicans won 63 assembly seats, an indication of the lopsided nature of the state’s political maps. 

In both 2021 and 2022, the four conservatives on the court sided with Republican state lawmakers in a redistricting case challenging a map that favored the GOP. The three liberal justices dissented, meaning that one more vote on their side would have made the Republicans’ map illegal. 

A senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin’s State Democracy Research Initiative, Dustin Brown, told the Sun that “replacing Justice Roggensack with a more progressive justice could open the door to revisiting the legislative districts if a new lawsuit is filed, which is highly anticipated.” 

Mr. Brown also said that a newly constituted liberal court is likely to strike down a state abortion ban from the 19th century. The state attorney general, Josh Kaul, filed a lawsuit in the Dane County Circuit Court last year calling for the 1849 law to be declared unconstitutional. 

The Sheboygan County district attorney, Joel Urmanski, a Republican, is one of the defendants, and has asked that the lawsuit be dismissed on the grounds that it’s a legislative issue, not a judicial one. 

The chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, Ben Wikler, said that the abortion ban will be a deciding factor in the coming court election.

“This affects people in their everyday lives, and there are other decisions like whether to sustain the 1849 abortion ban and many other issues that will come before the court as well,” Mr. Wikler told Spectrum News recently. 

A Dane County circuit judge, Diane Schlipper, ordered both parties to file briefs by February 6, meaning the case could reach the state supreme court after the new justice is seated in August. 

Justice Roggensack’s 20-year tenure has seen Wisconsin move from a Democratic-leaning state to a highly competitive one. Changing the state’s supreme court from majority conservative to majority liberal could have profound implications in the coming years.