In mid-January, Brad Schimel, a Wisconsin circuit-court judge running for an open seat on the state Supreme Court, flew to Washington to attend Donald Trump’s Inauguration. Schimel, a former attorney general under Republican Governor Scott Walker, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he wanted to spend “quality time with a ton of Wisconsin voters.” Three days later, Elon Musk wrote on X that, because the liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court had reversed a ban on absentee-ballot drop boxes last year, it was “very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud.” (There is no evidence that drop boxes lead to voter fraud.) Schimel, who, if elected, would give conservatives a majority on the court, began dropping hints that he could use more of Musk’s help. “Elon Musk noticed this race a week and a half ago or so,” he said during a G.O.P. event in early February. “I don’t know if he’s found his checkbook, though.”
Since then, Musk has given more than twenty million dollars to organizations supporting Schimel’s election. The race, already the most expensive judicial election in American history, is likely to cost a hundred million dollars, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan campaign-finance watchdog. The previous record—fifty-one million dollars—was set in 2023, when Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, giving liberals a majority for the first time in living memory. Schimel’s opponent is Susan Crawford, a Dane County circuit judge who served as the chief legal counsel for Democratic Governor Jim Doyle, Walker’s predecessor. After Doyle left office, Crawford entered private practice, taking on a variety of progressive clients, including Planned Parenthood and the Madison teachers’ union. Both candidates are taking money from prominent billionaires, including George Soros (who has donated two million dollars to groups supporting Crawford) and Richard Uihlein, the right-wing shipping magnate (who has given nearly six million dollars to groups trying to elect Schimel). Musk’s contributions, however, have exceeded those of all the other billionaire contributors combined.
The state’s Supreme Court elections are only nominally nonpartisan—the outcome, after all, will decide the future of abortion rights, labor rights, and voting rights in the state—but there is still an expectation that candidates avoid blatant political bias. During the campaign, Schimel has said that, if elected, he would treat Trump as any other litigant. But his political loyalties have been clear for years. As attorney general, Schimel aggressively defended Walker’s attacks on labor rights, voting rights, and abortion, and the 2011 redistricting maps, which were drafted in secret at the behest of Republican legislative leaders and produced one of the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in the country. (Schimel once described himself as Walker’s “bag man.”) Last Halloween, he dressed up as Trump and, more recently, he posed below a giant Trump inflatable at a Mega MAGA rally in Waukesha County. Earlier this month, he spoke at an event headlined by Donald Trump, Jr., and Charlie Kirk, whose super PAC, Turning Point USA, is actively supporting Schimel’s campaign. Schimel has also said that Trump was “screwed over” by the Wisconsin Supreme Court after the 2020 election. (By a single vote, the court rejected Trump’s lawsuit to throw out more than two hundred thousand ballots from the two largest and most Democratic counties in the state.) This month, Trump officially endorsed Schimel and held a “tele-town-hall” for him. (Schimel did not respond to requests to be interviewed.)
The election, in a pivotal swing state and the only statewide race in the country before November, is widely seen as a crucial test for the growing backlash against Trump and Musk’s agenda, which has so far included dismantling the federal government, threatening judges, and abducting legal residents. “This race is now a proxy battle for whether the American government at every level can be bought by oligarchs,” Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “Either Democrats are back and the fight is on, or the Republican Musk-Trump colossus can come in and just flick people out of their way when they decide to put down their big bucks.”
Musk has a personal stake in the outcome, too. Last year, his car company, Tesla, filed an application with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to open four dealerships in the state. The request was denied owing to a state law that bars car manufacturers from selling directly to consumers. A week before Musk first posted about the race, Tesla filed a suit challenging the law. If the case reaches the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Schimel would not be required to recuse himself. In 2009, the state’s largest business lobby, along with the Wisconsin Realtors Association, drafted the court’s recusal rules, which were adopted, verbatim, by the conservative-controlled court. They explicitly state that judges are not obligated to recuse themselves from cases involving a campaign contributor.
In support of Crawford’s campaign, Wikler has launched a multi-platform effort called the People v. Musk, which has included TV ads, billboards, and town halls where citizens are invited to air their grievances about the world’s richest man, who, as the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is aggressively gutting the federal workforce. At the first event, in Waukesha, a woman held back tears as she described the prospect of losing her job at the Department of Veterans Affairs; a postal worker with twenty-eight years on the job worried that, if Trump and Musk succeed in their plans to privatize the agency, he would lose his retirement.
“Eighty per cent of our canvassing interactions are about Musk,” Matt Mareno, the chair of the Waukesha County Democratic Party, told me. The county is heavily Republican, but Mareno said that many people have expressed frustration that Musk is unelected and not accountable to anyone. Recently, a canvasser for Schimel carrying literature from Musk’s America PAC showed up at Mareno’s door. Mareno has a large Susan Crawford campaign sign in his yard. “He had no idea who Susan Crawford was,” Mareno told me. “I said, ‘So, like, you don’t know who’s running against your boy Brad?’ ” The canvasser didn’t. He had been flown in from Texas and was being put up at a hotel and paid twenty-five dollars an hour. (Turning Point USA is paying canvassers for Schimel even more—two hundred and fifty dollars a day.) “They’re using the sledgehammer approach,” Mareno said. “If you can write a twenty-million-dollar check and bring people in to hit every door, then you can do whatever you want, and it works because of scale.” (Neither America PAC nor Turning Point USA returned requests for comment.)
Mareno, who helps organize the Democratic canvassing operations for the county, expects to deploy about six hundred canvassers—all of them unpaid volunteers—during the final weekend of the campaign, about ten times the normal amount for a spring election. “The thing that makes me feel good is our energy,” he said. “I’ve never seen it this high for a spring race before. At the same time, we’ve never seen this level of money coming on the other side.”
The flow of money into Schimel’s campaign was made possible by the destruction of Wisconsin’s once robust campaign-finance laws. Those laws grew out of the state’s progressive tradition, which sought to restrain the power of wealth in the political system. The movement was spearheaded by Robert (Fighting Bob) La Follette, who served, at various times, as Wisconsin’s governor, a U.S. senator, and a third-party candidate for President. Under La Follette, Wisconsin became the country’s premier “laboratory of democracy,” passing major reforms to protect labor and the environment and to promote clean and transparent government. By 1911, Wisconsin had banned corporations from donating to candidates, set strict limits on spending, and barred politicians from trading favors for donations. The state’s reputation for clean government deepened in the nineteen-seventies, when it passed further reforms that included public financing of elections.
But in 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court issued Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a sweeping decision that struck down limits on independent election spending by corporations and ushered in the era of the super PAC. Wisconsin Republicans took it upon themselves to dismantle state-level campaign-finance restrictions. Schimel, as the state’s attorney general, supported the effort. A criminal investigation led by the Milwaukee district attorney had allegedly found, among other things, that Walker’s campaign illegally coördinated with dark-money groups in the run-up to a 2012 recall election, which Walker narrowly won. Individuals involved in the dark-money groups, who were later supported by the attorney general’s office, brought a lawsuit challenging the investigation, and arguing that such coördination should be permitted on First Amendment grounds. In 2015, the court agreed with the plaintiffs, in a 4–2 decision, and killed the investigation, retroactively legalizing coördination. Schimel applauded the ruling. “The assertive recognition of First Amendment rights by the Wisconsin Supreme Court protects free speech for all Wisconsinites,” he said.
In an unusual move, the court also ordered the prosecutors to destroy more than a thousand documents that they had gathered as evidence. But some of them were first leaked to the Guardian, showing what appeared to be quid-pro-quo payments to dark-money groups, including seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars paid by the owner of a company that had manufactured lead paint in exchange for legislation granting legal immunity from lead-poisoning claims. Schimel ordered an investigation to find out who leaked the documents. Meanwhile, he declined to investigate a conservative plaintiff who intentionally violated a gag order by speaking to the Wall Street Journal.
The court’s ruling prompted the Wisconsin legislature to gut the state’s campaign-finance laws. Permissible donations for statewide offices doubled, from ten thousand to twenty thousand. More significantly, the legislature removed limits on donations to political parties, political-action committees, and legislative campaign committees. Political parties were allowed to give as much as they wanted to candidates. “It has become a shell game here,” Matt Rothschild, the former executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, told me. “Why even have a twenty-thousand-dollar donation limit to a candidate when you can give twenty million dollars, like Musk is doing, to outside groups?”
Since 2019, the state Democratic Party, with Wikler as its chair, has consistently outpaced Republicans in fund-raising, drawing enormous contributions from wealthy out-of-state donors. Democratic-backed candidates have won nine of the past twelve statewide races. However, two of the most important recent elections went Republican: the 2022 Senate race and the 2024 Presidential race. Rothschild, who advocates against out-of-control spending, regardless of party, believes the recent Democratic winning streak needs to be put in perspective. “There are more rich billionaires on the right—and they have more money,” Rothschild said. “Elon Musk is proving that right now. It wasn’t a game that we could continually win.”
The first Musk-funded ads attacking Crawford mistakenly used a photo of a different Susan Crawford, something of a metaphor for Musk’s ignorance of the state. In a recent debate, Crawford called her opponent “Elon Schimel,” and she has noted how Musk is energizing her base. “Once he got involved, I think that really lit a fire under people,” she told me. “People do not like to see Elon Musk walking into a state judicial race and basically trying to buy a seat on a state Supreme Court.”
A day after Trump’s endorsement, Schimel joined Musk and Senator Ron Johnson for a chat streamed on X. If the Republicans win the race, Johnson said, “we have to thank Elon for all the support he’s given.” The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk is planning to expand his state-based efforts by getting involved in local elections in Nevada, where he has clashed with a county commission over a tunneling project. The Journal noted that other battleground states, including Arizona and Georgia, are clamoring for him to get involved in their races, too. Last week, Musk announced that America PAC will be offering a hundred dollars to any registered Wisconsin voter who signs a petition “in opposition to activist judges,” a reprise of an offer he made to Pennsylvania voters during the 2024 Presidential election. This past Wednesday, he awarded a million dollars to one of the petition’s signers, with the promise of more million-dollar prizes to come. “It’s corrupt, it’s extreme, and it’s disgraceful to our state and judiciary,” a Crawford spokesperson said in a statement.
Two days later, Musk announced that he would hold a rally in Wisconsin for registered voters and “personally hand over” one-million-dollar checks to two people who have already cast their ballots. (Early voting began March 18th.) “Conditioning entry to this event and eligibility for the $1 million payout on whether someone has voted arguably violates Wisconsin law, which prohibits providing anything of value to induce a person to vote,” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance expert at Documented, a nonpartisan watchdog, told me. Musk quickly deleted the original tweet and posted on X that the rally would now be open to anyone who signed his petition and that the million-dollar checks would be given to two attendees “to be spokesmen for the petition.”
If Crawford wins, it may be because of unlikely supporters like Josann Reynolds, a retired circuit-court judge who was appointed by Scott Walker. Reynolds worked in the same building as Crawford. “I am not unfriendly with Susan, but we’re not friends,” she told me. “I never shared a meal with her and never had a one-on-one phone call.” But she has respect for Crawford as a jurist. “She’s smart, she’s hardworking,” Reynolds said. “I believe that her temperament, her intellect, and her experience all bode well for her to be on our Supreme Court.”
Last month, Reynolds returned from a trip to Mexico and was shocked to be greeted by a barrage of ads characterizing Crawford as “catch-and-release Crawford.” The ads slammed Crawford’s sentencing of a child-sex offender to four years in prison as too lenient and blamed her for the fact that he lived near a school after being released. Reynolds noted that the Wisconsin Department of Corrections is responsible for where released prisoners live after they serve their sentences; judges have no control over it. “I had never heard about ‘catch-and-release Crawford,’ ” Reynolds told me. “It did not exist before Elon Musk and others began contributing a lot of money to this race.” (And the state Supreme Court does not impose criminal sentences.) His involvement has heightened her fear over the ongoing attacks on judges. “It’s all very alarming,” she said. “And the most alarming part is, if you don’t toe the line, they’re coming for you. And their resources are enormous.” ♦
