Remember Elon Musk in a foam cheesehead hat?
Last spring, on the eve of a heated Wisconsin Supreme Court election, Mr. Musk stood grinning onstage at a rally in Green Bay, urging the crowd to support the conservative judge in the race.
On Tuesday, voters in Wisconsin will choose another justice to join the State Supreme Court. Except this time, the race looks quite different.
This election has arrived with little of the fanfare that Wisconsin voters have come to expect from these court races: the national frenzy, a cameo from a tech billionaire, incessant television ads, partisan debates and a deluge of campaign cash.
Many people in Wisconsin are barely aware that this State Supreme Court election, the third in four years, is happening at all. Several factors account for the muted nature of this year’s race: It is not defined by a pivotal policy issue, partisan control of the court is not at stake and, after two losses in a row, conservatives have spent less energy on this campaign than usual.
“The circus has left the town square, that’s for sure,” said Brian Reisinger, a former Republican strategist in Wisconsin.
Two little-known appeals court judges are vying to replace Justice Rebecca Bradley, a conservative who is retiring: Chris Taylor, a liberal who previously served in the State Assembly and worked as a director at Planned Parenthood, and Maria Lazar, a conservative former litigator and assistant state attorney general. The state Supreme Court is officially nonpartisan, but the ideological bent of its justices is no secret and has become increasingly apparent in recent decades.
Both candidates have crisscrossed Wisconsin for months, meeting potential voters and making the case for why they should be elected to a 10-year term on perhaps the state’s most influential body. But on Thursday, before a televised debate between the candidates, the moderator said that many voters still didn’t know much about the race or who they would vote for. (The debate was postponed for an hour to allow the news station to adequately warn viewers of tornado warnings in the Milwaukee area.)
“Well, people should care, and I think they do care about this race,” Judge Taylor said, adding that voters are looking for a justice who will defend democracy and basic rights.
Judge Lazar said that she was running to “stop the erosion of faith” in the state’s highest court.
Other signs have suggested a lack of interest in the race. Early voting in Wisconsin is lagging far behind last year’s race for a different seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. About 112,000 fewer absentee ballots have been cast this year compared with the same point last year, the Wisconsin Elections Commission said.
Turnout is expected to dip far below last year’s levels. In the 2025 spring election, 61 percent of registered voters turned out, but this year, political analysts said they were expecting the number to drop into the 40s, or lower.
A poll by Marquette Law School from March 24 showed a slight advantage for the liberal candidate: Among likely voters who said they were sure they would vote, 30 percent said they supported Judge Taylor and 22 percent support favored Judge Lazar. Forty-six percent of the people polled said they were still undecided.
Judge Taylor has vastly out-raised Judge Lazar, and the state Democratic Party has given $775,000 to the Taylor campaign. Judge Lazar has received $64,000 from the Republican Party of Wisconsin.
Many Republicans have seen the State Supreme Court elections as increasingly difficult to win, since Democrats tend to have stronger voter turnout in spring elections in Wisconsin.
“Conservatives have lost four of the five last Wisconsin Supreme Court elections,” said Charles Franklin, a pollster for Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee. “In public discussion now this year, there seems to be a bit of discouragement among Republicans that it’s hard for conservatives to win the spring elections.”
Some voters have shrugged off this election because weighty policy questions on abortion and labor rights are not in front of the court at the moment, as they were in the last two Supreme Court races.
This race also will not decide ideological control of the court. Liberals currently hold four seats while conservatives hold three. Even if a fellow conservative wins, the liberals will still outnumber them.
A win by Judge Taylor would give liberals a 5-to-2 majority on the court, likely cementing liberal control for a decade.
In the 2025 State Supreme Court election, then-Judge Susan Crawford, a liberal, handily beat Brad Schimel, a conservative, despite Mr. Musk, partly though his super PAC, pouring $25 million into the race.
Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, said that she had mixed feelings about the contrast between the recent, attention-grabbing races that brought people like Mr. Musk into the state — and this year.
Nonpartisan groups like hers that focus on get-out-the-vote efforts, she said, were boosted by all of the national attention in 2025.
“We benefited last year from the huge amount of money that flowed into Wisconsin,” she said. “You’d have to have lived under a rock to not know that there was a Supreme Court election.”
The potential for lower turnout on Tuesday, Ms. Cronmiller said, also may mean that local races for school board members, mayors and referendums about taxes could get forgotten this time around.
“All of the local races are being swept under the rug,” she said.
Ruth Igielnik contributed to this story.
Julie Bosman is the Chicago bureau chief for The Times, writing and reporting stories from around the Midwest.
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