By The Federalist (Politics) | Created at 2025-03-25 11:31:33 | Updated at 2025-03-28 03:56:34
2 days ago
“Time-sensitive: Chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026,” read the subject line of an email advertising a “donor advisors briefing” where liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford spoke. The email added that Crawford’s victory “could also result in Democrats” winning “half the seats needed to win control of the House in 2026.”
As unethically partisan as this appeal sounds for a “nonpartisan” judicial candidate, the email’s authors are not wrong.
If Crawford wins Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race on April 1, Republicans are almost guaranteed to lose two congressional seats in Wisconsin before the 2026 midterms — risking President Donald Trump’s mandate from the people and the America First agenda.
When asked about the email, Crawford pled ignorance. When pressed if she knew “the premise of the meeting before [she] entered it,” she said, “I don’t believe I did.”
As her conservative opponent Brad Schimel noted during their debate, we have to take her word that the group didn’t discuss anything about congressional maps with Crawford, because, apparently, no recording of the Zoom meeting exists.
Whether she knew the group viewed her potential victory as a Democrat House takeover is irrelevant to the fact that it most likely will lead to a Democrat House takeover.
In 2024, Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wis., won the 1st Congressional District by 40,000 votes. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis., won the 3rd Congressional District by just 11,000 votes. It would only take a slight reshuffling of District 1 into parts of Milwaukee and District 3 into part of Dane County to turn both into noncompetitive, safe Democrat districts.
Republicans hold a slim 218-213 House majority. The four vacancies requiring special elections are in evenly split safe districts, which could bring Republicans’ advantage to 220–215. However, if Democrats pull an upset victory in New York District 21’s special election after GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik vacates her seat, Republicans will hold a razor-thin 219-216 majority. Handing Wisconsin’s 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts to Democrats through redistricting will give them a near automatic one-seat majority before anyone even casts a ballot in 2026.
During her 2023 race, liberal Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz — who endorsed Crawford as soon as she announced her candidacy — often called the state district maps “rigged” and “unfair” (for Democrats, that is). The day after she took her seat on the court, the leftist group Law Forward filed a lawsuit challenging those bipartisan-approved maps. Predictably, with her giving the liberals a 4–3 majority, the court threw them out.
Crawford has said repeatedly she agrees with that decision. She tries to reassure voters the court did not actually draw new maps, but simply sent them back to the legislature because the previous maps weren’t “contiguous.”
But that’s disingenuous.
Republicans then had to accept Democrat Gov. Tony Evers’ maps because the court threatened to choose its own map from submissions from four liberals and two conservatives if the governor and legislature couldn’t agree. Republicans rightly feared the newly empowered liberal court would give them a worse deal than Evers if they left it to Protasiewicz and her liberal allies.
As state Senator Van Wanggaard described it: “Republicans were not stuck between a rock and hard place. It was a matter of choosing to be stabbed, shot, poisoned or led to the guillotine. We chose to be stabbed, so we can live to fight another day.”
As the organizers of the donor advisors briefing noted in their email, these new maps from Protasiewicz’s victory resulted in Democrats gaining 14 legislative seats in 2024, “creating the potential to win chamber control in 2026.”
Make no mistake, this is their gameplan for congressional redistricting: Stack the Wisconsin Supreme Court with liberals funded by California and New York billionaire donors, then hold the legislature hostage until Republicans are forced either to accept maps from Evers — helping Democrats — or accept maps from the court’s liberal majority … helping Democrats.
As Schimel remarked in his debate with Crawford, 90 percent of his donors can vote in Wisconsin, while nearly half of hers can’t because they don’t live there. Crawford didn’t dispute this. Instead, she argued this is due to people from all over the country being angered by Elon Musk getting involved for Schimel.
But Crawford’s out-of-state mega-donors donated before Musk’s super PAC joined in, and one could argue he only got involved to try to even the playing field in a race that perennial Democrat mega-donors were using to swing the U.S. House of Representatives.
Wisconsin’s liberals have shown they disregard the constitutional role of a neutral judiciary, instead, seeing it as a means to gain power statewide and in Congress. If Crawford wins, and the court’s liberal majority eliminates the state’s two Republican-held swing districts, it will make it extremely difficult for Republicans to defend their congressional majority.
If Democrats take the House in 2026, Americans would be forced to live through the same endless obstruction and impeachments they suffered from 2018 to 2020 under former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Jacob Grandstaff is an investigative researcher for Restoration News focused on election integrity.
