Wisconsin Supreme Court Race Polls
The Wisconsin Supreme Court has become a political battleground, with high-stakes judicial elections increasingly mirroring partisan campaigns.
In 2023, the race between Janet Protasiewicz and Daniel Kelly a contest that determined the court’s ideological balance highlighted the growing influence of money, polarization, and polling in judicial elections.
Yet, the reliability of pre-election polls in such races remains questionable, raising concerns about their accuracy, methodology, and potential to mislead voters.
While polls in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court races claim to provide an objective snapshot of voter sentiment, they often suffer from methodological flaws, partisan biases, and oversimplification of judicial elections factors that undermine their credibility and distort public perception.
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court races present unique polling challenges.
Unlike partisan elections, judicial candidates often downplay political affiliations, making voter preferences harder to gauge.
A 2022 study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that judicial election polls frequently underrepresent independent voters, who play a decisive role in swing states like Wisconsin (Brennan Center, 2022).
For example, the Marquette Law School Poll a key source for Wisconsin political data faced scrutiny in the 2023 race for its reliance on likely voter models that disproportionately sampled urban, Democratic-leaning respondents.
While Protasiewicz led in most polls, her eventual 11-point victory margin exceeded projections, suggesting systemic underestimation of conservative turnout (Marquette Law School Poll, 2023).
Not all polls are created equal.
Partisan-affiliated pollsters often release surveys designed to shape narratives rather than reflect reality.
In the 2023 race, a conservative-leaning group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), published a poll showing Kelly within 3 points of Protasiewicz a stark contrast to mainstream surveys (WILL, 2023).
Critics argued the poll oversampled rural conservatives, raising questions about its neutrality.
Similarly, progressive groups like A Better Wisconsin Together commissioned polls emphasizing Protasiewicz’s lead, potentially to discourage conservative donors.
Such tactics mirror national trends where polling is weaponized for fundraising and voter suppression (Pew Research Center, 2022).
Judicial elections often see a shy voter effect, where conservatives underreport support for right-leaning candidates due to social desirability bias.
A 2020 Stanford study found that in nonpartisan judicial races, Republican candidates underperformed polls by an average of 4 points a pattern seen in Wisconsin’s 2019 Supreme Court race, where Brian Hagedorn outperformed polls to win (Bonica & Woodruff, 2020).
The unreliability of judicial election polls has troubling consequences.
Misleading surveys can depress turnout, skew campaign strategies, and erode trust in electoral integrity.
As Wisconsin’s Supreme Court increasingly decides contentious issues from redistricting to abortion rights the accuracy of polling becomes not just a technical concern, but a democratic imperative.
Polls in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court races are far from infallible.
Flawed methodologies, partisan manipulation, and the unique nature of judicial elections render them unreliable predictors of outcomes.
Moving forward, media and voters must approach such polls with skepticism, demanding transparency in sampling and weighting.
The stakes are too high to let flawed data distort one of the last remaining checks on Wisconsin’s hyper-partisan governance.
- Brennan Center for Justice.
(2022).
- Marquette Law School Poll.
(2023).
- Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL).
(2023).
- Pew Research Center.
(2022).
- Bonica, A., & Woodruff, M.
(2020).
Stanford University.
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