Just How Big Could Democrats Win In 2026?

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 in a small white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, a community that remained Republican for the vast majority of the 172 years that followed. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in Ripon in 2024 – even after Harris campaigned there – by a comfortable 55-45 margin.

But, like a growing number of historically Republican red areas that have begun to turn purple, or even blue, since the start of Trump’s disastrous second term, Ripon took a sharp turn last Tuesday — part of a now indisputable national shift toward progressive and Democratic candidates. The city voted about 58 percent to send Chris Taylor, a highly progressive former Democratic lawmaker and jurist, to the state Supreme Court. The rest of Wisconsin had a similar idea. Taylor was elected Tuesday in a landslide victory, flipping a previously conservative seat and giving progressives a 5-2 majority on a powerful state court that less than a decade ago was a bastion of right-wing judicial activism. This of course matters to the people of Wisconsin, but it also means something to the entire country.

Wisconsin is the ultimate presidential battleground state, having supported Donald Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Trump once again in 2024, all by margins less than 1%. Yet Taylor, a former attorney and policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin who currently serves as a state appeals court judge, won the seat by a 20-point margin over fellow appeals court judge Maria Lazar, a prominent and well-connected conservative who, as the state’s deputy attorney general, defended former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s attacks on unions, public employees and fair elections.

Taylor ran a significantly smarter and better financed campaign than Lazar. But that margin of victory was unprecedented in recent major elections in Wisconsin. In an election in which Democrats voted enthusiastically while many Republicans seemingly stayed home, Taylor carried urban, suburban and rural areas across the state.

The magnitude of Taylor’s victory attracted national attention, as observers at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics noted that she “became the first Democratic-aligned candidate since 2015 to win a majority of the state’s counties, 42 of 72.” Twenty-nine Wisconsin counties that supported Trump in the fall of 2024 supported Taylor in the spring of 2026. Historically, suburban Republican strongholds in Milwaukee and Madison have favored progressives in the officially nonpartisan contest, as have rural counties in western and northern Wisconsin, where many areas have seen shifts of 20 points or more from right to left.

So what does this tell us about this fall’s midterm elections, when control of the Republican-led House and U.S. Senate, as well as states in places like Wisconsin, will be at stake?

A spring election for a technically nonpartisan seat on the Supreme Court is different from a partisan race for a seat in the House of Representatives or governor. But just as big Democratic victories in the 2025 off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia were telling, and just as the overwhelming trend of Democratic victories in special elections for state legislative seats nationwide revealed Republicans’ vulnerabilities, Wisconsin’s results are relevant to the 2026 midterm elections, especially when it comes to races for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Currently, the Republicans have a very slim majority of 217 to 214 in the House (three seats are vacant). Democrats need to flip only a handful of districts nationwide to take control of the House. Although much attention has been paid to whether Democrats could win additional seats in states like California, New York and Virginia, their majorities could also come in Wisconsin and a handful of other Midwestern states, like Iowa.