Chris Taylor has campaigned for the Wisconsin Supreme Court as a “strong advocate for maintaining the independence of the judiciary.” But the judge’s long career in the Madison leftist bubble more than suggests that the former lawmaker known as “one of the most liberal members” of the Wisconsin State Assembly would bring her brand of extreme activism to the state’s highest court.
Swing state Wisconsin voters head to the polls on Tuesday for the second time in a year to elect a justice to the seven-member court. The candidates, Taylor — a judge on the Madison-based District IV Court of Appeals — and Maria Lazar — a judge on the state’s Third District Court of Appeals in Waukesha — couldn’t be more diametrically opposed.
Taylor served as public policy/political director for abortion factory Planned Parenthood for nearly a decade before being elected to the legislature, where she was an “outspoken supporter of abortion rights, gun control and unions.” Constitutional conservative Lazar, unlike her opponent (Taylor grew up in southern California), was born and raised in Wisconsin. She served as assistant attorney general and successfully defended the implementation of Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s signature Act 10, which has checked the outsized power of Wisconsin’s public labor unions and has saved taxpayers north of $35 billion over 15 years.
Big, Fat Liberal Money
Tuesday’s election comes a little more than a year after last year’s nationally-watched Supreme Court race. Liberals held serve in that election, the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, maintaining a 4-3 majority thanks to tens of millions of dollars in big outside money.
The 2025 court race was ridiculously painted as an early gauge of Trump 2.0 by a national press that, per usual, spent months cheerleading for another leftist candidate. The victor, Susan Crawford, another far-left Madison judge who had occupied a seat on the same liberal circuit court that Taylor called home, was promoted by some of the biggest Democratic Party sugar daddies in the land as the key to a mid-decade rewrite of Wisconsin’s congressional maps. Crawford’s win, they said, would give Democrats a shot at picking up two House seats this midterm.
While election spending in the Lazar-Taylor race is a pittance of the reported $115 million spent in the 2025 race, the Madison leftist judge’s campaign has raked in six times as much cash as Lazar — $5,597,188 to $904,538, according to the liberal Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Taylor has blown through most or her funds, the most recent finance reports show, with much of the money going to ads hammering the airwaves with her Planned Parenthood credentials and attacking Lazar early and often.
Taylor likes to paint herself as a fighter for the downtrodden, but some very wealthy liberals have funded her campaign.
Taylor’s top donor to date is the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, an old leftist friend that has pumped in lots of money into her political campaigns over the years. DPW, as of the most recent campaign finance reports, had dumped some $734,000 into Taylor’s bid for the “nonpartisan” Supreme Court seat. Leftist political action committee A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund had dropped nearly $350,000 on Taylor’s bid. Her pals at Planned Parenthood had kicked in more than $100,000.
Taylor’s individual donations include maximum $20,000 offerings from the heiress to the Park Communications and Duncan Hines fortunes, an heir to the Rockefeller family fortune, the daughter of an oil billionaire, and the billionaire heiress to the Stryker Corp., according to the Badger Project.
They can all count on Taylor to do their liberal bidding — if she is elected to Wisconsin’s high court. One of her campaign ads asserts that “Our courts are our last line of defense.” She means of course the far-left voters in Madison and Milwaukee that have shown up in significant numbers over the past several election Supreme Court elections while Republican voters and money have stayed home in the lower-turnout spring contests.
While the race will not change the left’s control of the court, Taylor’s victory would give liberals a 5-2 majority and make it an absolute rubber stamp for big government, far-left policies. One need only look at where Taylor’s been to know where she would be going.
Taylor’s ‘Values’
After nine long years in the state Assembly, the strident and shrill Democrat was appointed to the Dane County Circuit Court by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. She replaced fellow Madison leftist Jill Karofsky, who won a seat on and now serves as Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court.
Taylor likes to talk about her “values,” which align closely with the state’s far-left doofus governor. In the past few days, Evers has vetoed a bill that would have required local law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration law enforcers to remove violent illegal immigrants, legislation that would have stopped harmful sex change operations and procedures on children and kept men out of women’s sports, and a measure that would have ended the governor’s constitutionally suspect 400-year property tax hikes for public education. The latter was upheld by the liberal-led Supreme Court.
“I’d love to write ‘Hell no,’” the LGBTQ tool said at a private event surrounded by LGBTQ activists. “The actual thing I have to say is, ‘Not approved.’”
During her legislative tenure, Taylor pushed a trans-activist bill that would have required tampon and sanitary napkin dispensers in all state-owned restrooms, including in public schools and men’s bathrooms. The bill would have extended the woke policy at Wisconsin’s private school choice buildings as well.
Taylor authored another bill that would have created a state task force to study legislation that would establish a task force to study “The Legal And Societal Barriers To Equality For Transgender, Intersex, Nonbinary, And Gender Nonconforming Individuals.”
Another Taylor proposal would have forced Wisconsin to adopt “Gender Neutral Parentage Terminology.” Those bills died, too, but five years later Evers proposed as part of his budget plan that portions of state law refer to mothers as “inseminated persons” or “parent who gave birth to the child.”
‘Sanctuary’ Crusader
As a Madison state representative, Taylor joined a cadre of radical lawmakers in 2019 pushing bills banning Immigration & Customs Enforcement facilities in Wisconsin. The bills would have effectively made Wisconsin a “sanctuary state” for those who are “undocumented,” Urban Milwaukee reported at the time.
Taylor sought to include “immigration as a protected status” in fair housing laws and to make illegal aliens eligible for in-state tuition at Wisconsin taxpayer-funded universities, the liberal Wisconsin Examiner reported. And she wanted to “restore driver’s licenses to non-citizens.”
Taylor called the proposed taxpayer giveaways and the resistance movement against federal immigration law a moral, ethical and economic issue.
“I expect every single one of you to be ready, and not to allow ICE to come into our community and take our friends and neighbors,” then-Madison Ald. Shiva Bidar, standing with Taylor, prodded a crowd of about 200 gathered on the Capitol steps at the press conference announcing the far-left bills (The proposals failed to move in the Republican-controlled legislature). In other words, break the law to normalize law-breaking.
‘Radical Left Wing Agenda’
Taylor has throughout the campaign touted her bonafides as an advocate of the abortion industrial complex. The liberal majority delivered for Planned Parenthood by nuking Wisconsin’s abortion ban following the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
While there’s no doubt polls show a majority of voters have become more protective of the court-ordered right to murder the unborn, Taylor’s extreme positions may not sit well with a substantial portion of voters who don’t support abortion on demand.
When she was in the legislature, Taylor vehemently opposed a bill capping abortions at 20 weeks. She claimed the bill would limit a woman’s right to make private “reproductive health care” choices. The law remains on the books despite the state Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the wider abortion limitations. Taylor voted against bans on abortions based on the sex of the unborn and disability selective abortions. And she would not support a bill that would require doctors to save a baby born alive following an abortion procedure.
During Thursday’s debate (the only one this campaign season), Lazar said Taylor’s abortion-on-demand stance is out of step with most Wisconsin voters.
“Chris Taylor’s values are abortion up to birth, boys in girls sports, removing voter ID, and a radical left wing agenda she couldn’t get passed in the legislature, so now she’s running to legislate from the bench of our WI Supreme Court,” the conservative candidate charged in a Facebook post.
‘Wisconsin Values’?
“I am running on values that are American values, that are Wisconsin values,” Taylor asserts in a leftist organization’s social media post.
Is she?
Polls have found American resoundingly reject men in women’s sports. In the legislature, Taylor was opposed to Wisconsin’s voter ID law, an election-integrity protection supported by the vast majority of voters. A national survey earlier this year by Pew Research Center found 23 percent of respondents believe abortion should be “legal in all cases,” its lowest level since the Supreme Court ruling that ended Roe v. Wade.
While Taylor has been running for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, she’s been running away from her far-left record. In one blatant lie during the debate, she claimed she did not fight against the state’s voter ID law. She said she is not a Democrat, despite the fact she was listed as a party member on ad contracts at points during the “nonpartisan” judicial race. Her campaign said those instances were mistakes. But she ran and served as a Democrat in the state Assembly, and has a leftist resume that would make The Squad proud.
“I never have said I’m an activist, that I’m an advocate on the bench,” Taylor insisted during the debate. She hasn’t had to say it. It’s all a matter of public record.
The Democratic Party and the other big political donors to Taylor will buy another radical leftist vote on the court unless conservatives do what they haven’t done over the past several election cycles: Cast enough ballots to stop the liberal takeover of Wisconsin’s highest court.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
