How Democrats Plan To Use Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Election To Rig The 2026 Midterms
Little has enraged football fans quite like the most recent AFC Championship game, in which a pair of questionable calls propelled the Kansas City Chiefs to their third straight Super Bowl. Conspiracy theories and jokes about a rigged NFL abound after years of suspicion that the league orders its referees to give the Chiefs every call.
This is nonsense, of course, but imagine if an email inviting high-profile Chiefs fans to a secret meeting with head coach Andy Reid, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, his head of officiating, and Taylor Swift was uncovered. And imagine if the subject line of that email was “Chance to put the Super Bowl in play in 2025.”
Now imagine that email was real, and it wasn’t about rigging football games, but congressional elections. That’s exactly what’s going on in Wisconsin, where the state Democrat Party is brazenly using this April’s State Supreme Court race to gerrymander Republican Wisconsin Representatives Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden right out of their seats in the 2026 midterms.
With a razor-thin 218-215 GOP majority, this plot could hand Democrats the House and with it the ability to stop President Trump’s agenda and impeach him for a third time.
Last week, The New York Times inadvertently dropped a bombshell as it covered April’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race between conservative Brad Schimel and Susan Crawford — a race that will determine ideological control of the court in a pivotal swing state.
Crawford, a far-left circuit court judge, and Wisconsin Democrat Party Chairman Ben Wikler (who just finished second in the contest for national Dem chair) invited high-profile supporters to a “donor advisers briefing” with the subject line “Chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026.”
As if that weren’t clear enough, the email laid out their intentions clearly:
After Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the WI Supreme Court in an April 2023 election, the new pro-democracy majority struck down Wisconsin’s super-gerrymandered state legislative districts. Democrats then gained 14 state legislative seats in 2024, creating the potential to win chamber control in 2026. Now one of the judges who make up the pro-democracy majority is retiring, putting control of the WI Supreme Court up for grabs again. …
[W]inning this race could also result in Democrats being able to win two additional US House seats, half the seats needed to win control of the House in 2026.
In addition, the briefing was arranged by aides for megadonor Reid Hoffman, who has given nearly $15 million to Wisconsin Democrats in recent years. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, who now chairs the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, will also be campaigning for Crawford in Wisconsin.
If Crawford wins and replaces retiring leftist Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, then she will vote to strike down Wisconsin’s congressional maps and force the creation of new ones that will draw more Democrats into the two most hotly contested districts, resulting in Steil and Van Orden losses next year.
Those maps, drawn following the 2020 census and signed into law by Democrat Gov. Tony Evers, were approved by both the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court, but that doesn’t matter much to Democrats.
As they boasted in their email, they used 2023’s Supreme Court election, which gave leftists control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court for the first time in 15 years, to strike down the state’s legislative maps. The day after Protasiewicz was sworn in, leftist groups filed a lawsuit challenging those maps, and the new leftist majority dutifully struck them down that December.
The Republican-controlled legislature, fearing that the court would draw its own, reluctantly agreed to adopt Evers’ maps. The impact was immediate and devastating: Republicans lost 10 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly and four in the Senate in 2024 despite Donald Trump carrying the state.
Now Democrats are planning to do the same thing to Wisconsin’s GOP congressional coalition. Only two of the state’s eight districts are considered competitive, and both just happen to be represented by Republicans. Steil, the chairman of the House Administrative Committee, won reelection in both 2022 and 2024 with identical 54 percent vote shares. Van Orden, an outspoken firebrand who ended over 25 years of Democrat control of his district in 2022, received 51 percent of the vote in both of his reelection bids.
More than halfway through the decade, Democrats believe that they can strike down the current congressional maps and replace them with ones that will make it impossible for either Van Orden or Steil (or any other Republican in their districts) to win another race. All they need to do is get their big-money donors like Hoffman to buy another Supreme Court election and install a justice who will rubber-stamp gerrymandered maps drawn by Holder’s redistricting group.
This would give Democrats two of the four seats they need to retake control of the House in 2026, and it makes Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race the country’s most important by far in 2025.
Leftists won control two years ago by nationalizing the race as a referendum on abortion and bringing in so much out-of-state money that the election was by far the most expensive judicial contest in American history. This year, they are promising that a Crawford win would guarantee a House win in 2026.
This is as shameless as it is corrupt, and conservatives need to recognize it for what it is and stop it before it’s too late.
Dan O’Donnell is a talk show host with News/Talk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee, Wis. and 1310 WIBA in Madison, Wis., and a columnist for the John K. MacIver Institute.
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