For the third state Supreme Court election in a row, the conservative supported candidate is running a campaign based largely on accusations that the liberal candidate will be a partisan actor on the bench. But this year, the target of that accusation, who is running to secure a 5-2 liberal majority on the Court, served as a Democrat in the Wisconsin Assembly for nine years and previously worked as the state policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
“I don’t come with a political agenda to the bench,” says Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, who, after serving in the Assembly, was appointed to the Dane County Circuit Court by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and then elected to the District IV Court of Appeals. “My agenda is to make sure every person has justice under the law, to make sure that everyone’s held accountable when they violate the law, regardless of how powerful or privileged they are and to be independent. And I saw in the Legislature how important it was to have an independent court. You don’t want a court to be a rubber stamp for any party or the Legislature or the federal government.”
Taylor’s opponent, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, has spent more time as a judge and throughout the campaign has accused Taylor of being a partisan actor.
Lazar’s initial race for the Court of Appeals and her race this year have involved the support of some of the state’s most prominent election deniers. Taylor said that support and Lazar’s ruling in favor of the Wisconsin Voter Alliance are important signals for a race whose winner will likely be involved in deciding election law challenges in the 2028 presidential race.
“I certainly don’t have confidence that she would act to protect our elections if it didn’t go the way that the right wing wants it to go,” she told the Examiner. “So yes, I would be very worried about that, and people should with her record, and they should have no such worry with me, because I will make sure that unmeritorious attacks on our elections are struck down or are rejected.”
After the 2023 and 2025 campaigns for the Court set national records for judicial campaign fundraising, the 2026 race between Taylor and Lazar is comparatively sleepy. Taylor said at a forum hosted by Marquette Law School Wednesday that it’s probably a good thing that the temperature has been brought down a bit on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
But with less money involved — and the ideological lean of the Court not at stake — less attention has been paid to the race. A Marquette Law poll released last month found that Taylor had a slight lead in the race, but that most people had not yet started paying attention or learned who either candidate was.
Taylor said she believes her campaign’s work over the past month has changed that, and that Wisconsin voters are “overwhelmed” by the state of the country.
“The people [of Wisconsin] are so engaged in government. They are hungry for a government that works for them. They are hungry for a court that stands up for them and protects their rights,” Taylor said at the Marquette event. “Now I will say I think people are overwhelmed. I really do. I think they’re overwhelmed because it’s hard right now. I think working families are struggling with high costs, gas prices have gone up so much. You know, there’s a lot going on in the world. Sometimes it feels very overwhelming. It’s very hard to see sometimes where you can make a difference and what you should be doing. But I tell people, this is a way to make a difference, is show up and vote.”
She said that if elected, she wants the Court to be better at engaging with regular Wisconsinites, pointing to oral arguments the Court held recently in Richland County rather than its Madison chambers as an example of something that should happen more. She also said that the Court needs to take more cases — a regular critique of the liberal-majority Court is that its caseload has dropped significantly.
Both candidates in this year’s race for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court have served as circuit and appeals court judges. But Taylor says the difference between them is that she’s “never been reversed” by a higher court.
But Taylor points to the instances in which Lazar’s decisions have been overturned as evidence that the former Waukesha County judge is more likely to tilt her rulings toward one side.
“The only person, though, who has brought politics to the bench is my opponent,” Taylor told the Wisconsin Examiner. “And you look at the cases she has decided and thankfully been reversed on and you can see it.”
Last year, the Supreme Court overturned Lazar’s decision in a lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Voter Alliance, a group that has been heavily involved in the effort to discredit Wisconsin’s election administration system since the 2020 election. The group had sued to force the release of voter registration files for people who had been declared incompetent to vote by a judge.
A previous appeals court decision had ruled the records weren’t able to be released, yet in a second lawsuit Lazar ruled otherwise — even though Wisconsin’s appeals courts don’t have the authority to overturn precedent.
“I have never seen that be done on the Court of Appeals. My colleagues, who’ve been there, some of them, over a decade, have never seen such a blatant disregard of precedent,” Taylor said. “Maria Lazar put her thumb on the scale. She didn’t like the result. She has brought politics to this bench.”
“People don’t care about what the ideology is on the court, they want justices who are going to protect their rights, who are going to stand up for our democracy and our elections, stand up to the federal government and make sure people get justice,” she said. “That’s what they want. That’s what my opponent does not understand. People want justices that are going to be fair and are going to protect them and have their back. My opponent has not ever done that in her life. That is not her priority like it is for me, it’s not ever been her priority.”
