The Republican Party of Wisconsin, with Chairman Brian Schimming at its helm, is on “war footing,” to see conservative state Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel secure a victory over Democrat Susan Crawford in the extremely high-stakes April 1 election.
“We have made a conscious decision here to keep our foot on the gas, and it costs money to do that,” Schimming told Breitbart News in an exclusive phone interview, referring to the Wisconsin GOP’s continued momentum following President Donald Trump’s narrow November victory in the battleground state.
The race also follows a blowout Wisconsin Supreme Court election in 2023, in which liberal-leaning Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative candidate Dan Kelly and flipped the balance of the court 4-3 majority liberal. While conservatives have the chance to take back the majority once more with the retirement of liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, Democrats view the battle as a chance to push policy and redraw legislative maps that could ultimately lose Republicans two U.S. House seats and help them close in on the Republican’s slim majority.
“To say that what happens in Wisconsin will not stay in Wisconsin is putting it really mildly,” Schimming said.
The fight is between former conservative Wisconsin Attorney General and Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel and Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford, who previously represented left-wing groups like Planned Parenthood as an attorney. In Wisconsin, state Supreme Court justices serve ten-year terms. While the judicial race is nonpartisan, both sides of the political aisle are heavily invested in the results of the election.
“This is the last chance we have until 2028 to take a majority,” Schimming said.
“It could literally mean the success of President Trump’s term. It could literally mean them having the votes to bring impeachment articles against him,” he added. “The implications of what happens in Wisconsin would be a political earthquake for the House of Representatives.”
Schimming detailed how the state Republican Party has maintained much of its election integrity apparatus going into the spring election, and how the participation of galvanized Trump voters could deliver back a conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court majority.
“We did a lot of things in the last two years that we had not done before. On the election integrity side, we had over 5,800 volunteers to either be poll workers or poll watchers [in November], and that is by far a record here,” he said. “That was a huge emphasis of the Trump campaign and the RNC — election integrity. So, we had full-time multiple election integrity staff. We had thousands and thousands of poll working shifts across the state.”
Schimming said following the presidential election and in anticipation of the April election, he has kept more than half a dozen of the Wisconsin GOP’s “best field people,” some coalition staff, and kept several field offices open, including newer offices in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
“I’ve got full-time research. I added on…a rapid response person on staff here who’s quite good actually,” he said. “We said we have to stay kind of on a war footing around here.”
“We don’t run the campaign out of here. We do what we can, but we are certainly at a better level than we were two years ago,” he added.
Schimming noted how Trump’s 2024 victory is only the second time a Republican presidential candidate has won the state in nearly 40 years — with Trump securing the first win during his 2016 run. Both times, Trump saw a narrow margin of victory, although Trump has received increasingly more votes during all three of his presidential runs in the swing state. In 2016, Trump beat out Hillary Clinton 47.8 percent to 47 percent, 1,405,284 votes to 1,382,536. In 2020, Biden won the state by a slim margin, 49.4 percent to 48.8 percent, but Trump pulled in more votes for himself than in 2016 at 1,610,184. In 2024, Trump won Wisconsin over Kamala Harris, 49.6 percent to 48.7 percent, and secured more votes than in 2020 at 1,697,626.
“Trump got about 1.7 million here in Wisconsin…[If] we get 60 percent of those voters, which is just a little over a million, if we get six out of ten Trump voters to go vote for Schimel, we’re going to win the Supreme Court,” he said.
The race is expected to be even more expensive than the 2023 election, which shattered national spending records for a judicial contest at $56 million and brought in massive out-of-state spending.
Recent campaign filings show that left-wing billionaires are dumping large sums of cash into the race.
Money from left-wing billionaire George Soros, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), and Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman accounted for more than 40 percent of the $4.2 million in individual contributions the Democratic Party of Wisconsin received over the past month. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin then promptly transferred $2 million to the campaign of Democrat Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford, records show.
Hoffman, a past visitor to Epstein Island, contributed $250,000, while Pritzker, a rabid supporter of abortions and transgenderism, contributed $500,000. Soros — who has backed dozens of soft-on-crime prosecutors and has been linked to defund-the-police groups, contributed $1 million to the party, the report reveals.
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“I would say this ought to be a national lesson for conservatives,” Schimming said. “If we value the importance of court seats and what happens in the courts — I mean, everyone talks all the time…about lawfare — well, it’s time for conservatives to do something about it.”
“They have in a lot of states, and we have done work here, but when these big [races] come along, people need to pay attention,” he added.
As for Republicans, the Wisconsin GOP reported a fundraising haul 40 times larger than what they raised for the 2023 spring election. Campaign finance reports show the Wisconsin GOP brought in $2.3 million over the past month and disbursed $1.7 million to Schimel’s campaign.
Schimming said Schimel has been “working the state for months” campaigning in all 72 counties and has not had to “burn resources trying to fend someone off in the primary,” referencing “messy statewide primaries” in the 2023 election.
“I ask everywhere whether people have lost any energy from November 5, and the answer is a resounding no,” Schimel told Breitbart News in a phone interview. “They’ve got every ounce of energy they had going into November 5. They’re fired up ready to do this again.”
Democrats’ view of the race as a pathway to power in D.C. is not mere speculation and has been touted openly. An email invitation obtained by Breitbart News to a briefing on Jan.13 with Democrat donors, Crawford, and Wisconsin Democrat Chairman Ben Wikler has a subject line that reads, “Chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026.” Aides of Reid Hoffman notably helped to organize the event, the New York Times reported.
“They got caught saying the quiet thing out loud, and they revealed what they’re up to. This is, as it was in 2023, a power play to attract enormous amounts of money from partisan donors and turn that into results on the court,” Schimel said, referring to the email. Breitbart News previously reached out to Crawford’s campaign for comment about the email but did not receive a response.
“This is going to affect not just Wisconsin, this will affect the nation,” Schimel continued. “When people talk about the timeline that President Trump has to push his goals, that timeline will be cut short or even shorter if they use the Wisconsin Supreme Court to gerrymander the maps as a court and change our representation in the House of Representatives.”
The two seats are currently held by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) in the 1st Congressional District in southeast Wisconsin and Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) in the 3rd Congressional District in the western part of the battleground state.
Van Orden won his 2024 election by roughly 11,000 votes in a competitive race against boutique owner Rebecca Cooke (D), 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent. Steil has a “difficult seat” and “he works hard to keep it,” Schimming said. Steil secured his seat in 2024, 54.1 percent to 43.9 percent against Democrat Peter Barca.
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On the state level, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is expected to hear several high-profile cases, including a challenge to an 1849 abortion restriction (which is currently on hold by the courts), and a lawsuit against Wisconsin Act 10, a law limiting collective bargaining for public sector employees passed in 2011 by Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
Election integrity is also of concern among conservatives. Soon after the election of Protasiewicz in 2023, the Wisconsin Supreme Court liberal majority notably undid a prohibition on ballot drop boxes in the state and prompted the Republican-controlled state legislature to redraw State Assembly and State Senate maps. The April ballot also includes a proposed amendment seeking to enshrine voter ID requirements into the state constitution.
Last week, the liberal-leaning Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that a Republican Party official lacked standing to bring a lawsuit challenging the use of a mobile voting van in Racine in 2022 and dismissed the case. Republicans had argued that the van, which was purchased using grant money from a nonprofit backed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, was used to boost turnout in a heavily Democratic area in violation state law, and that future use could lead to voter fraud.
The court did not rule on the merits of the case, meaning voting vans could be used again — and some city officials said they plan to use the van in April in light of the state Supreme Court’s decision.
“[Schimel] is a sitting judge and doesn’t prejudge things and all that other good stuff, but I can, and the truth of it is, if the liberals maintain a hold on the Supreme Court, Act 10 is gone, all the reforms we got out of Scott Walker’s Act 10 are toast; school choice, gone,” Schimming contended.
“This court has acted as a super legislature… if you believe in federalism or you believe in the rule of law at all, you don’t want an activist court,” he said.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Twitter @thekat_hamilton.