Why State Supreme Court Elections Now Help Decide Congressional Maps

Spring elections in Wisconsin are usually the kind of thing that happens to other people. They fall on the first Tuesday in April, when there is often still snow on the ground in the north woods, and they fill offices most voters could not name: county board seats, school boards, municipal judges, and a single seat on the seven-member state supreme court. On April 4, 2023, that supreme court seat drew more money than any judicial race the country had ever seen. Spending by the candidates, parties and outside groups ran into the tens of millions of dollars, far past the previous record. Television ads ran in Green Bay and Wausau as if a Senate seat were on the line. Turnout for an April election was startling. The winner, Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Janet Protasiewicz, beat former Justice Daniel Kelly by about eleven points, and when she took her seat that August, the court had a liberal majority for the first time in roughly fifteen years. Everybody involved understood what the money was for. Two subjects dominated the campaign: abortion, and maps.

In short: Since the Supreme Court closed federal courts to partisan gerrymandering claims in 2019, state supreme courts have become the main referees of how districts are drawn, and in many states those justices are elected in low-turnout races. Wisconsin's 2023 contest showed what that means: record spending, a new majority, and new legislative maps within a year. I argue these elections deserve the same attention as any race for Congress.

How map fights moved to state courts

The short version is that a door closed in Washington and a different one opened in the states.

In June 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal judges could not decide whether a map was too partisan. Chief Justice John Roberts's majority opinion pointed to other remedies, among them state constitutions and state courts. That was not an empty gesture. Most state constitutions say things the federal one does not: that elections shall be "free and equal," that districts shall be compact or contiguous, that representation shall be fair. Those words are enforced by state judges, and the U.S. Supreme Court generally does not review how a state court reads its own constitution.

Four years later, in Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court rejected the argument that state legislatures have unchecked power over federal election rules, a claim that would have shut state courts out of congressional redistricting entirely. That 2023 decision confirmed that state judges could review congressional maps under state constitutions, within limits.

So the referee in a redistricting fight is now, in most states, the state supreme court. And unlike federal judges, who are appointed for life, most state supreme court justices in the United States face voters in some form, whether in contested elections, nonpartisan races or retention votes.

What happened in Wisconsin after the money was spent

Wisconsin is a closely divided state. Statewide races for president, governor and senator have repeatedly been decided by a point or less. Yet after the 2011 redistricting, drawn by a Republican legislature and governor, Republicans held large majorities in the state legislature year after year, including in elections where Democratic candidates won more votes statewide. The maps were challenged in federal court; that case, Gill v. Whitford, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 and was sent back on standing grounds. After Rucho, the federal route was gone.

After the 2020 census, the governor, a Democrat, and the Republican legislature deadlocked, and the state supreme court, then with a conservative majority, chose maps that made minimal changes to the existing lines. That kept the Republican advantage largely in place.

Then came April 2023. Within months of the new liberal majority's arrival, a challenge to the legislative maps was filed directly with the court. In December 2023, the court struck down the state legislative maps, not on a partisan gerrymandering theory but on a plainer one: many districts were not contiguous, containing detached pieces that the state constitution does not allow. The court invited new maps, and in early 2024 the legislature passed and the governor signed a new plan he had proposed. The new districts made the Wisconsin legislature far more competitive.

Note what the court did not do. It did not redraw the state's congressional map in that round, and it declined to take up a separate challenge to the congressional lines in 2024. Opponents of the decision had argued the new majority would remake everything; in practice it acted on one claim, and on the narrowest ground available.

In April 2025, another seat came up, and spending broke the 2023 record by a wide margin, with Elon Musk and groups tied to him spending heavily for the conservative candidate, former Attorney General Brad Schimel. The liberal candidate, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, won by about ten points, preserving the majority.

Other states, same pattern

Wisconsin is the loudest example, not the only one.

In Pennsylvania, the state supreme court struck down the Republican-drawn congressional map in 2018 under the state constitution's free and equal elections clause and adopted a new map in time for that year's elections. The court's majority was elected. In 2025, three justices from that majority faced retention votes, and both parties treated the low-profile yes-or-no questions as a major campaign. All three were retained.

In North Carolina, the state supreme court struck down the congressional map in 2022. Republicans then won two seats on the court in the November 2022 elections, flipping its majority, and in 2023 the new court reheard the case and reversed, holding that partisan gerrymandering claims cannot be brought under the state constitution. The legislature then drew a new congressional map that shifted several seats toward Republicans in 2024, and redrew again in 2025.

In Ohio, the state supreme court repeatedly struck down legislative and congressional maps in 2022 under anti-gerrymandering amendments voters had added to the state constitution, but the maps were used anyway when deadlines ran out. The chief justice who joined the court's liberal members in those rulings, a Republican, reached the court's age limit; her successor's election shifted the court's balance.

In Utah, a state judge in 2025 ruled that the legislature had violated a 2018 voter-approved redistricting initiative, and a new congressional map was adopted that created a district centred on Salt Lake County.

The lesson across these cases is simple: who sits on the state's highest court can decide whether a map stands. And that question is often settled in an election with a fraction of the turnout of a presidential year.

The strongest case against politicizing these races

There is a serious argument that what happened in Wisconsin is the problem, not the solution, and it should be stated fairly.

Judges are supposed to decide cases according to law, not according to campaign promises. When candidates for a court run on their views about abortion and maps, and when parties and billionaires pour money into the race, the public reasonably begins to see judges as politicians in robes. Critics of Protasiewicz's campaign said she had all but announced how she would rule on the maps, calling them "rigged" during the campaign; she said she was stating her values, not prejudging a case, and she declined to recuse. Critics of the conservative side pointed to spending by groups with business before the court. Each side's complaints about the other were, in part, accurate.

Many legal scholars and some judges have long argued for appointing state justices on merit, with retention votes, to take money and party out of the process. That is a respectable position. Its weakness is that appointment systems are political too, just less visibly, and that in states where justices are already elected, opting out of the elections does not depoliticize them. It only hands them to whoever is still paying attention.

My argument: these are some of the most important races on the ballot

Here is the case I want to make, clearly labelled as opinion.

If you care about fair maps, the state supreme court is now one of the most powerful offices you can vote for. A single seat can decide whether a legislative majority reflects the voters or locks them out for a decade. That majority, in turn, decides questions from school funding to voting rules to abortion law. The leverage is enormous, and the turnout is often small.

That combination is what attracts the money. Spending flows where a dollar can buy the most influence, and a low-turnout race for a seat that tips a seven-member court is a bargain. The best defence against money in these races is not complaining about it. It is turnout. A race where voters show up in large numbers is a race where advertising matters less and organizing matters more.

Progressives have sometimes been slow to see this. Campaigns pour volunteers and dollars into federal races while spring judicial elections, municipal contests and retention questions go by with little attention. The other side noticed the importance of courts earlier, and built decades-long networks to recruit, train and fund judicial candidates. The response is not to copy the worst of that, but to stop treating the bottom of the ballot as an afterthought.

None of this means judges should be partisans. It means voters should know who they are choosing, read about the candidates' records and approach, and vote in every race. A judge who believes the state constitution's guarantee of free and equal elections means something is worth electing whether you are a Democrat, an independent or a Republican who is tired of districts drawn to make your vote irrelevant.

What makes these races hard to follow

Part of the problem is practical. Judicial races are often nonpartisan on the ballot, so there is no party label to guide a voter. Candidates are restricted by codes of judicial conduct from promising how they will rule. Retention elections ask a simple yes or no about a name most people have never heard. And many of these elections are held at odd times, in spring or in off-years, when the local paper may no longer cover them in depth.

That is a recipe for drop-off. Many voters who fill in the top of the ballot leave the judicial lines blank. A few practical habits help: find your sample ballot ahead of time, read the nonpartisan voter guides that local organizations and newspapers publish, look at the candidates' prior rulings or legal careers, and note who is endorsing and funding them. You do not need a law degree to decide whether a candidate has been fair and careful, or whether they have spent a career on one side of every fight.

It also helps to look past the top line. In a retention election, your choice is a simple yes or no on a sitting justice, and organized campaigns sometimes target justices over a single ruling. In an open-seat contest, the field may include a former prosecutor, a trial judge and a law professor with very different temperaments. Reading a few of a candidate's past opinions, or the summaries in a local voter guide, takes less time than most people expect, and it beats leaving the line blank or choosing by name recognition alone.

Finally, notice the calendar. Several states hold judicial elections in spring or in odd-numbered years, separate from the November contests that draw the most attention. Put those dates on your calendar now, the same way you would a presidential election.

The people at the other end of the map

Think about who benefits when the referee is fair. In Wisconsin, a legislature drawn to be competitive has to compete for voters in small towns and suburbs, places like the Fox Valley where the margin is narrow and voters are neither red nor blue by habit. Those voters, farmers, factory workers, teachers, retirees, have more say when their district can actually change hands. That is not a partisan outcome. It is a democratic one, and it is the kind of reform that Republicans and Democrats in ordinary life tend to support when it is put to them as a question of fairness rather than party.

The spring election is easy to miss. It is also where much of the future of the map is now decided.

What you can do

• Find out when your state's next court election is. Many fall outside November. The voting page lists registration deadlines and mail and early voting rules for every state, linked to the state election office.
• Follow state courts alongside the federal ones. Our topic page on the courts follows state supreme court races and rulings, and the page on money in politics tracks who is spending on them.
• Read the Supreme Court's redistricting cases as they come. The court watch page lists this term's opinions with the Court's own summaries, plus the emergency docket where election cases often land.
• Talk to your state legislators about how judges are chosen. Find your representatives, including state legislators, and ask what they think of public financing or disclosure rules for judicial races.
• Join a voter guide effort. Nonpartisan voting groups in many states publish candidate questionnaires for judicial races. The organizations directory lists voting groups by state.