MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Candidates in a race that will determine ideological control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court will square off Wednesday in their only scheduled debate before the April 1 election.

The contest, which has caught the attention of presidential adviser Elon Musk, will be a litmus test early in President Donald Trump’s term in a key presidential swing state. Control of the court is on the line as it faces cases over abortion and reproductive rights, the strength of public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.

The race pits Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general, against Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford, who is backed by Democrats and is running in her first statewide race.

Here is a look at some of the key issues:

Abortion rights

Crawford is backed by Planned Parenthood and represented the group in a pair of abortion-related cases when she was an attorney in private practice. She supports abortion rights and has said the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong to overturn Roe v. Wade. Much of her campaign against Schimel has focused on his past opposition to abortion, including when he was attorney general.

Schimel, who is supported by anti-abortion groups, has said he believes that an 1849 state law banning abortions is still “valid” and that there is no right to an abortion under the state constitution. He was also criticized by Crawford and current justices on the court after he said the liberal majority was ” driven by their emotions ” on a pending abortion case.

Both candidates have repeatedly said their personal views on abortion would not affect how they would rule.

Union rights and the state’s voter ID law

As an attorney, Crawford sued in an attempt to overturn the state’s law that effectively ended collective bargaining for public workers. That law, known as Act 10, was the centerpiece of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s tenure and made Wisconsin the center of the national debate over union rights.

A Dane County judge last year ruled that the bulk of the law was unconstitutional, and an appeal of that ruling is expected to come before the state Supreme Court.

When Schimel was attorney general, he said he would defend Act 10 and opposed having its restrictions also applied to police and firefighter unions, which were exempt from the law.

Crawford also sued to overturn the state’s voter ID law, but lost. A measure on the April 1 ballot would enshrine that law in the state constitution — an attempt by Republicans to make it more difficult to undo.

Testing of sexual assault evidence

Whether Schimel did enough as attorney general to clear the state’s backlog of untested sexual assault evidence has been a central attack from Crawford and her allies.

Schimel took more than two years to test about 4,000 kits sitting unanalyzed on police department and hospital shelves. He has said that the state Justice Department needed time to inventory the kits and struggled to find private labs to test them because labs were overwhelmed with untested kits from other states.

In 2014, the state Justice Department learned of about 6,800 sexual assault evidence kits that had not been tested. Wisconsin cleared its backlog of untested kits in 2019, the year after Schimel left office.

Both candidates say the other is weak on crime

Many of the television ads in the race have focused on specific cases Crawford and Schimel have handled as judges, with both sides claiming the other is weak on crime.

Schimel previously worked as the Waukesha County district attorney and has racked up endorsements from law enforcement officials, including a majority of the state’s county sheriffs, the Wisconsin Fraternal Order of Police and the Milwaukee Police Association.

Crawford worked as a prosecutor for the attorney general’s office under a Democrat and has the backing of the sheriffs of Milwaukee and Dane counties, as well as dozens of judges from around the state.

Control of the court attracts big donations

The winner will determine whether the court remains under majority control of liberal justices as it has since 2023, or whether it will flip back to conservative control as it had been for 15 years prior to that.

The race has become nationalized thanks to groups funded by Musk that have spent more than $8 million in support of Schimel. Crawford also has benefitted from donations from prominent national Democrats such as philanthropist George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, but they haven’t kept pace with Musk’s spending.

Donald Trump Jr. and political activist Charlie Kirk plan to co-host a town hall on Monday in Wisconsin that’s being billed as a get-out-the vote effort for Schimel.

“Last November, we won the trust of voters across the party spectrum and nearly sent a farm kid to Washington. We need more working class voices like ours who will fight like hell to build back the middle class,” Cooke said in a social media post announcing her candidacy Tuesday.

She is the first Democrat to enter the race, which is slated to be the most competitive House race in the Badger State next year. The district is a mixed bag encompassing the midsized cities of La Crosse, a historically blue and college city, and Eau Claire, as well as many rural communities and Wisconsin exurbs of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. 

Cooke, who grew up on a dairy farm and has touted her work as a waitress before becoming a small business owner, said in a statement she plans to focus on the working-class in her run for office.

“While Derrick Van Orden cowers and hides from the people of western Wisconsin, big drug companies are jacking up our medicine prices, out-of-touch elites are blocking pathways to homeownership and good jobs, and chaos continues to dominate Washington,” Cooke said. “It’s clear we need more working-class voices in Congress who have lived failed policy and will actually fight like hell to rebuild the middle class.”

Van Orden, in recent weeks, has caught flack from his constituents over his absence in the district and a harsh message he sent to a veteran who was fired from their role in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Constituents have said his office canceled a district meeting in Eau Claire last month. Van Orden said the event was canceled to avoid disruptive outsiders.

Tony Ruiz, a veteran who served two years overseas in Germany, reached out to Van Orden about his role being terminated. Van Orden responded by saying he was going to report him to DOGE.

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“I am a member of Congress on the VA Committee. I have absolutely no say in the employment status of any individual in the executive branch, however, I will be referring you to DOGE as it seems that at 13:46 on a Monday, you should have been working for veterans, not posting trash about your boss, President Trump. There needs to be accountability. Now,” Van Orden wrote back. 

Ruiz said he sent the message after he was fired and, therefore, was not working at the time.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul waded into the state’s Supreme Court race Monday, renewing an old feud with conservative candidate Brad Schimel over delays in testing sexual assault evidence kits almost a decade ago.

Kaul, a Democrat, ousted Schimel, then a Republican, from the attorney general post in the 2018 elections. Kaul hammered Schimel relentlessly during the campaign for taking more than two years to test about 4,000 kits sitting unanalyzed on police department and hospital shelves.

Schimel’s opponent in the Supreme Court race, Susan Crawford, has attacked Schimel over his handling of the kits in ads. Kaul brought up the delays again Monday during an afternoon news conference organized by the state Democratic Party. He accused Schimel of not paying close attention to the testing project and prematurely declaring he had completed the work when his administration left hundreds of kits for Kaul’s administration to test.

When asked what the testing delays have to do with being a state Supreme Court justice, Kaul said justices must be straightforward and Schimel isn’t candid about what went on with the kits.

Schimel defended himself in the days before the 2018 election by saying the state Justice Department needed time to inventory the kits and struggled to find private labs to test them because labs were overwhelmed with untested kits from other states. Jacob Fisher, Schimel’s Supreme Court campaign spokesperson, said in a statement Monday that Schimel voluntarily took the initiative to lead a first-of-its-kind effort to test the kits. He accused Kaul of playing politics and rewriting history.

Schimel and Crawford are vying for an open seat on the Supreme Court in an April 1 election. The race is officially nonpartisan, but Schimel was a Republican attorney general and has GOP backing while Democrats are rallying behind Crawford.

The race has enormous implications in swing state Wisconsin, with majority control of the state’s highest court on the line as it is expected to face issues that will affect abortion and reproductive rights, the strength of public sector unions, voting rules and congressional district boundaries.

Crawford and her allies are increasingly trying to nationalize the contest against Schimel by focusing on Elon Musk, a top adviser to President Donald Trump. America PAC, a group created by Musk, has spent $3.2 million on digital ads, mailers and canvassing to support Schimel in the Supreme Court race. Another Musk-funded group, Building America’s Future, has spent more than $2 million on TV ads attacking Crawford.

In 2014, the state Justice Department learned of some 6,800 sexual assault evidence kits that had not been tested. They went unanalyzed for various reasons. Prosecutors may have decided cases were too weak to pursue or been forced to drop cases because victims wouldn’t cooperate, according to Schimel’s administration.

The problem wasn’t unique to Wisconsin. A USA Today Network investigation in 2015 found at least 70,000 untested kits nationwide, leading to calls from victim advocacy groups to analyze them all in hopes of getting DNA hits that would identify serial offenders.

Schimel took over as attorney general in 2015. He secured a $4 million federal grant in September of that year to start testing Wisconsin’s kits, but the work didn’t begin until January 2017. He announced in September 2018, two months before the election, that his administration had finished testing 4,150 kits and declared the project finished. He chose not to test the rest because victims in those cases wouldn’t consent to analysis or prosecutors had already won a conviction in those cases, according to Schimel’s administration at the time.

Kaul announced in November 2019 that his administration finished the work after discovering Schimel had left about 300 kits untested.