The usual suspects—CNN panels, Blue Sky pettifoggers, and legacy media editorial boards—are spinning Brad Schimel’s loss in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race as a rebuke of Donald Trump and a harbinger of Republican doom in 2026.

It is neither.

The race was unquestionably important—critically so. However, it is not a reliable barometer of Trump’s standing in Wisconsin, nor a weather vane for national momentum.

Consider the recent past: in 2023, far-left Judge Janet Protasiewicz won a high-profile Supreme Court race despite openly embracing progressive politics and a sharply partisan past. Her victory—by a margin oddly identical to this week’s—was widely hailed as a warning shot for Republicans. And then, in 2024, Donald Trump carried Wisconsin.

That sequence tells you everything you need to know about the limits of extrapolating one-off, off-year judicial races. These contests are state-specific, irregular, and often shaped more by narrow interests than broad electoral sentiment.

Still, Schimel’s defeat is no small thing. It locks in a liberal majority until at least 2028, handing Democrats a judicial sledgehammer to demolish Wisconsin’s constitutional architecture. The danger is compounded by conservatives holding the next two seats up for election. The left is on offense; conservatives will play defense for the foreseeable future.

At the center: redistricting.

The left now has the votes to obliterate Republican-drawn legislative maps, manufacturing a new “fairness” standard that happens to engineer near-permanent Democrat control.

And once they’re done with Madison, they’ll move to Washington—targeting House districts that could flip the balance of power in Congress. Of course, this is notwithstanding a likely appeal on federal grounds to the United States Supreme Court.

Whether the high court takes it up is uncertain—but the fact that such an appeal is even plausible underscores how far Wisconsin’s judicial system has drifted from its constitutional moorings.

Then comes Act 10—Scott Walker’s legacy law that restored fiscal sanity and checked excess. Organized labor has lusted after its repeal for over a decade. Now, with a friendly court, they may finally get their pound of taxpayer-funded flesh.

But this is the playbook. When Democrats can’t win legislatively, they sue. When voters say no, they litigate until a judge says yes. It even has a name: Sue Until Blue. It’s just another front in the unrelenting lawfare that now defines the Democratic establishment’s modus operandi.

I saw it firsthand. As the former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission, I was sued by Governor Roy Cooper—who sought to yank the commission from my leadership despite clear, duly enacted legislation.

The reason? I was a conservative Republican, and the governor was a liberal Democrat. The state Supreme Court, controlled by liberals, sided with him. 

Wisconsin now faces the same fate.

To call this a referendum on Trump is poppycock—woefully dishonest or blissfully ignorant of the recent past. I tend to see it more as lazy soothsaying.

All the same, this was a progressive judicial coup of sorts. It didn’t flip the court’s balance—the liberal majority remains 4–3—but it certainly fortified it, with an enormous assist from Soros dollars—engineered, lo and behold, by the same cast of malcontents who hyperventilate about oligarchy. Doubly ironic, no?

The result: a high court in the Badger State poised to legislate from the bench for years to come. Raw power carefully concealed in black robes.

So let the pundits chirp. The real threat isn’t 2026—it’s 2028 and beyond.

If conservatives—in Wisconsin and beyond—don’t begin building constitutional guardrails, judicial reform, and legislative resilience now, they’ll keep losing—even when they win.

The robes may be black in Wisconsin, but the ink will run blue. This wasn’t a victory for democracy—it was its hostile rebranding into something else entirely.

Charlton Allen is an attorney, former chief executive officer, and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is the founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and the host of the Modern Federalist podcast. X: @CharltonAllenNC

Image from Grok.