By Evan Vorpahl and Wisdom Howell
On April 7, voters elected appeals court judge Chris Taylor to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, rejecting her right-wing opponent Maria Lazar in one of the most lopsided statewide races in years. Taylor will replace the far-right justice Rebecca Bradley on August 1, expanding the court’s liberal majority to 5–2.
After the candidates and outside groups spent a record-breaking $144.5 million on last year’s race — which included sizable spending by billionaires such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk — this year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race attracted dramatically less outside spending, and the candidates themselves only raised $6.5 million combined, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Despite checks for the maximum $20,000 allowed from uber wealthy individuals like billionaire Diane Hendricks, Liz Uihlein, and Tim Schmidt (founder of the United States Concealed Carry Association), and over $150,000 from the state GOP, Maria Lazar only raised approximately $900,000 — far below the $5.6 million Taylor brought in.
Millions from out-of-state special interests did not materialize for Lazar even though such funding had poured in for far-right Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel in 2025 and his counterpart Daniel Kelly in 2023. Still, some of the most fringe far-right extremists — from anti-abortion groups to election deniers — endorsed her.
As Trump appointees and other right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court continue to push issues such as abortion and gerrymandering to the states, ensuring the fairness of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is critically important. Following the 2020 election, the Wisconsin Supreme Court narrowly rejected President Trump’s illegitimate attempts to overturn the results. Since progressive-aligned justices gained a majority in 2023, the state’s highest court has preserved abortion rights, protected access to the ballot, stood up to far-right efforts to suppress the vote, and ensured the implementation of fairer state legislative maps.
The composition will likely matter even more in 2028, when Wisconsin may face multiple court battles over voting and the outcome of elections, and in the upcoming 2030 redistricting cycle.
Lazar unsuccessfully sought to brand herself as an independent jurist who is above the fray of partisan politics. “I like to say when I put on my black robe, I put my personal views behind it, because they don’t matter,” she often told voters while campaigning. But despite her claims of nonpartisanship, she is deeply tied to the Republican Party in Wisconsin and her right-wing allies in the state stood firmly behind her campaign.
Lazar’s Major Individual Donors
Despite the lack of major contributions, many right-wing billionaires and political figures backed Lazar’s campaign, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Diane Hendricks, a major Trump donor who owns the nation’s largest wholesale roofing and vinyl siding company, contributed $20,000 to Lazar in December 2025. Hendricks has long deployed her ABC Supply fortune to support far-right causes and candidates in Wisconsin and nationally, and was the top political contributor in Wisconsin during the 2024 election cycle, contributing $22.9 million.
Liz Uihlein, billionaire CEO of the shipping and packaging giant Uline, donated $20,000 to Lazar in January. Her husband Richard, cofounder of Uline, is a descendant of the family that founded Schlitz Brewing Company (once the country’s second largest brewery) in 1849 in Milwaukee. Although they live in Illinois, the Uihleins were the second largest political donors in Wisconsin in 2024, contributing $2.7 million. Last December, the couple also gave $1 million to Wisconsin College Republicans in an apparent workaround to political contribution limits to the state party and other campaigns like Lazar’s.
Fred M. Young, one of the top 10 donors to the Wisconsin GOP and a businessman in Racine who previously sued the state over campaign contribution limits, donated $10,000 to Lazar last October. Young is a longtime ally of Charles Koch who shares his pro-corporate, anti-government agenda.
Jack Shaffer, a commercial real estate investor from Chicago whose firm currently holds a $2.5-billion portfolio, contributed $10,000 to Lazar in January.
Pat Roggensack, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, donated to Lazar’s campaign three times, for a total of $7,000 in contributions. Roggensack famously wrote an opinion during the pandemic calling the state’s stay-at-home order unlawful, but declined to run for reelection in 2023 after 20 years on the court.
Richard L. Roehl, head of Roehl Transport with an annual revenue of roughly $500 million, contributed $10,000 to Lazar in March.
John Meier, an inventor and former Apple employee currently based in Hawaii, donated a total of $20,000.
Thea and Glenda Buholzer, co-owners of Buholzer Brothers Cheese company, contributed $40,000 combined.
Failed far-right U.S. Senate candidate Eric Hovde also added $10,000 to Lazar’s campaign.
Right-Wing Outside Spending and Support for Lazar
In addition to individual donations from the Uihlein family, Richard Uihlein’s Restoration of America PAC spent $60,000 on ads backing Lazar — $20,000 on texts sent out on March 30 and $40,000 on social media ads on February 21.
Launched in 2015, Restoration of America PAC is primarily funded by Uihlien’s fortune. Since then it has spent hundreds of millions backing Republicans including Donald Trump and U.S. Senator Ron Johnson, along with unsuccessful Senate candidates Herschel Walker, who lost in Georgia; Kari Lake, who lost in Arizona; Mehmet Oz, who lost in Pennsylvania; and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Kevin Nicholson.
Notably, Uihlein’s Restoration of America network has spread misinformation about elections, and through initiatives like VoteRef, continues to support efforts that make it harder for Americans to vote. Uihlein has also been behind efforts to oppose state ballot initiatives that would protect abortion access and contributes to a network of nonprofits and super PACs, including Fair Courts America, that spent $10 million in Wisconsin’s money-drenched races in 2023 and 2025 (Fair Courts America ran ads backing Lazar’s appeals court race in 2022). He is also a primary funder of the anti-abortion groups Susan B. Anthony’s Pro-Life America and American Principles Project, which have spent heavily in recent Wisconsin supreme court races.
A group calling itself the “Never Out of the Fight PAC” launched a $100,000 ad buy for Lazar during the final week of the campaign, claiming that she would protect right-wing “reforms” and “keep money in your pocket.”
Never Out of the Fight was launched in Wisconsin by former Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Berrien in April 2025. Once described as a “family values” candidate, he dropped out of the state’s GOP primary last September after news outlets reported that he had been following sexually explicit accounts on social media.
The Winklevoss twins, GOP megadonors who made their fortune through cryptocurrency investing, gave $1 million to the PAC in April 2025, providing the majority of the revenue it raised.
In November, Lazar also mentioned at a rally that she welcomed abortion talking points from the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum (IWF).
IWF and its sister organization Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) are pay-to-play groups “backed by billionaires and anti-abortion zealots” that leverage their ‘independent’ image to promote right-wing politicians and policies, according to Ms. Magazine. The leader of both groups, Vicks VapoRub heiress Heather Higgins, has told supporters: “We have worked hard to create a branded organization… that does not carry the partisan baggage,” adding, “being branded as neutral but actually having the people who know, know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position.” Following the Dobbs decision, IWV launched a project to downplay the reversal of Roe v. Wade to protect vulnerable Republicans against political backlash.
IWF and IWV have deep ties to the Koch family fortune and are funded by dark money groups linked to Leonard Leo, as well as industries like Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. Neither group discloses its donors, but they have been known to accept funding from big corporations like Amazon without publicly disclosing the support when writing about issues that advance their bottom line.
IWV also used its “independent” branding to target women in Wisconsin in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, claiming that it played a decisive role in moving women toward Trump and citing a double-digit shift in polling.
Wisconsin Family Action (WFA), the anti-abortion action arm of the Wisconsin Family Council, also endorsed Lazar.
WFA is a state partner of Focus on the Family, which was founded by the televangelist James Dobson in 1976, and has attacked reproductive choice and marriage equality for years. In 2006, WFA and the Family Research Institute of Wisconsin partnered on an expensive campaign to back a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage in the state, which ultimately passed but was then overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2014.
Other Major Players Sat Out the Race
Two of the state’s largest anti-abortion groups, Pro-Life Wisconsin (PLW) and Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL), endorsed Lazar in her 2022 election to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals. While neither group officially endorsed her 2026 campaign, Wisconsin Right to Life expressed support for Lazar on its website.
PLW opposes all abortions with no exceptions for the life and health of the mother, or for rape or incest. It has also opposed birth control and IVF. PLW previously endorsed Dan Kelly and Brian Hagedorn for the Wisconsin Supreme Court and backed Schimel in 2025.
WRTL has been a key vehicle for the right-wing attack on clean election/anti-corruption laws in Wisconsin through James Bopp, the attorney who orchestrated the Citizens United litigation used by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 to open the floodgates of corporate spending on elections in the U.S. Bopp is also the primary author of the national Right to Life “model bill” to ban abortion and abortion pills.
The Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) does not appear to have run ads in the race through its Judicial Fairness Initiative (JFI), which is notable as it has typically spent hundreds of thousands and even millions on Wisconsin supreme court races. As a project of RSLC (a 527 organization), JFI is fully funded via RSLC, which serves to cloak the identity of donors fueling judicial ads. But Leo’s groups focused on the courts have been major donors to RSLC ahead of judicial elections.
RSLC is perhaps best known for its REDMAP project, which was launched to secure state legislative majorities ahead of 2010 redistricting in order to control the map-making process and create heavily gerrymandered districts favoring Republicans.
Wisconsin was a REDMAP target state that delivered GOP majorities in both legislative chambers. The ensuing 2011 map ended up being among one of the most distorted in the country. As RSLC itself described in its REDMAP 2012 summary report, “the RSLC spent $1.1 million [in 2010] to successfully flip both chambers of the Wisconsin legislature…. the GOP gained control of the redistricting process and gave Wisconsinsinites and all of America a firsthand look at what bold conservative leadership looks like…. On a statewide level, in 2012, Wisconsin voters elected a Democratic U.S. Senator by nearly six points and reelected President Obama by nearly seven points, but still returned a 5–3 Republican majority to Congress.”
RSLC’s largest donor in recent years has been the Concord Fund, a core group in Leo’s network that recently filed articles of termination but is really just being rebranded under the auspices of another group named for a different Revolutionary War battle site: The Lexington Fund. For decades Leo has worked to impose his stance against abortion rights, gay rights, and regulating corporations as binding law through the courts. He played a central role in packing the Roberts Court and has spent decades working to stack state supreme courts.
While Leo does not appear to have invested in Lazar’s 2026 campaign, a Leo group called First Principles PAC, via First Principles Wisconsin, spent $67,000 backing Grant Scaife’s election to the Washington County Circuit Court. First Principles Wisconsin also spent over $600,000 backing Schimel in 2025 and its affiliated First Principles PAC contributed heavily to RSLC during that state supreme court election.
This article is published in partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy.
