“I need to talk for just a minute or two about my opponent,” Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford tells a crowd of supporters in Kenosha. “Elon Musk.”
It’s become her signature line. And it was particularly apt for her to deliver on Friday, March 28, the same day Musk announced that he would hold a rally in Wisconsin to hand deliver two million dollar checks to people who had voted in the April 1 election, which he abruptly backtracked on after legal experts pointed out that his pledge violated the state constitution.
“This is the guy,” Crawford says in Kenosha, “who has spent over $25 million trying to keep me off the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”
The spring election will decide the ideological majority on the court. When she entered the race, Crawford, a circuit court judge in Madison’s Dane County, expected to discuss the hot button issues that the court often decides, such as abortion, gerrymandering, voting rights, crime, and public safety. And indeed, the court could soon decide the fate of the state’s 1849 abortion ban, a law restricting collective bargaining for public sector unions, and the legality of Wisconsin’s congressional maps.
“Elon Musk would really like to buy himself a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” Crawford said. “He wants to put somebody there that he thinks he can have some influence over and access to.”
But Musk’s involvement—he has spent more money in Wisconsin than any donor to a judicial election in US history—and the controversial, possibly illegal, tactics he’s employed, has dramatically raised the stakes, giving the election huge national significance. “Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler tells me in Kenosha, a lakefront city forty miles south of Milwaukee.
“It’s probably something of a test case for him to see if this works,” Crawford says when we speak after her event, in a former bank built in 1928, with an ornate ceiling and towering chandelier. “And if it works here, I think that we can look forward to seeing Elon Musk trying to buy not just judges, but other elected officials in other states with the same tactics.” She calls Musk’s scheme to pay voters for signing his pac’s petition against “activist judges” and giving million dollar checks to those who’ve voted, “very concerning to me. Because it certainly seems like an effort to buy votes in this election.”
“Elon Musk would really like to buy himself a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court,” Crawford adds. “He wants to put somebody there that he thinks he can have some influence over and access to. And I think in part, that’s because he’s got business interests here,” she says, referencing a lawsuit Tesla has filed against Wisconsin.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul challenged Musk’s scheme in court on Friday, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to block it before Musk’s rally. Musk spoke for two hours in Green Bay on Sunday, walking out in a cheesehead and giving million dollar checks to two people who signed his PAC’s petition, Nicholas Jacobs, the chair of the state college Republicans and Ekaterina Diestler, a graphic designer. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the event, holding signs that read, “My Vote is Not for Sale.”
Crawford, 60, a former prosecutor and circuit court judge since 2018, is an unlikely candidate to go toe-to-toe with Musk. She’s petite and mild-mannered, with a reserved, lawyerly demeaner. She likes baking sourdough bread and painting in her spare time. “She did not expect to be running against the richest man in the world,” Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Dallet said when she campaigned with Crawford in the Milwaukee suburbs the next day.
But she’s now the best hope of Democrats and progressives to strike the first blow against the Trump-Musk alliance and provide a blueprint for how Democrats can defeat oligarchy in other battleground states. On the other hand, if the Trump and Musk-backed candidate Brad Schimel, a former state attorney and judge in suburban Milwaukee, wins, it will embolden Musk to spend many more millions extending his plan for oligarchy to the states at the same time he dismantles the federal government with little resistance, steamrolling whatever checks and balances stand in his way.
“If Musk is able to buy the Wisconsin State Supreme Court,” Wikler says, “he’s going to send a signal to any other potential elected judge in the country or other candidate for public office that if they swear fealty to Trump and agree to be a rubber stamp for Trump agenda and do whatever it is that Musk wants them to do, he will pour enough money in to guarantee their victory.”
The fate of democracy is not an abstract issue in Wisconsin. The state supreme court came one vote short of overturning the election in 2020, when Trump tried to throw out 221,000 votes only in the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane Counties.
Crawford, who lives in Madison, took that personally. “My ballot was one of the ones they were trying to throw out,” she says. “So I was very disturbed by that.”
She worries that Schimel, who has said that the Wisconsin Supreme Court “screwed [Trump] over” in 2020, will “absolutely” try to overturn future elections if he sits on the court.
“He has said that he thinks the Supreme Court did the wrong thing in failing to overturn the election results,” she says. “He’s had a history of being supportive of voter suppression in Wisconsin, so it’s very concerning to see somebody like him with such a hard right, partisan agenda, to see what he might do on the court.”
Schimel has aggressively tied himself to Trump’s MAGA platform. He attended Trump’s inauguration, claimed the January 6 rioters did not receive fair trials, and said he wanted to be part of a “support network” to fight the lawsuits against the Trump administration. He’s amplified Trump’s election denialism, telling a conservative radio host that he needs to “make this too big to rig so we don’t have to worry that at 11:30 in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines.”
Trump endorsed Schimel on March 21. Campaign material distributed by Musk’s America PAC says Schimel is on “Team Trump.” Schimel stumped in Milwaukee in the final days of the campaign wearing a Make America Great Again Hat.
“I know that if another voting rights case comes in front of our court, I would not want Brad Schimel to be one of those people deciding whether to throw out lawfully cast ballots,” Justice Dallet said in suburban Milwaukee.
Republicans say the onslaught of spending against Crawford, led by Musk, has tightened the race, while Democrats believe Musk’s money will motivate their voters to turn out. Early voting shows high turnout in both blue and red strongholds, with double the number of early votes compared to the last Supreme Court race in 2023, when progressives won the majority on the court. In a good sign for Democrats, the city of Milwaukee set a record for early voting on Saturday, with turnout up roughly 200 percent compared to the April 2023 race; more than three-fourths of the statewide early vote on Saturday came from Milwaukee and Madison.
Democrats believe they have an eight-point lead among the roughly 500,000 voters who have voted early, but it’s hard to predict how many Republican voters will turn out on Election Day. The airwaves have been blanketed with ads from both sides. The race is expected to top $100 million, by far a record for any state judicial contest, with a quarter of overall spending coming from Musk-backed groups.
Musk’s attempt to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court is especially notable because Wisconsin used to be known for its history of good governance. Teddy Roosevelt once called it “a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.” But after Republicans took control of the state following the 2010 elections, they dismantled its tough campaign finance system, abandoned judicial ethics rules, and otherwise politicized previously well-regarded institutions, making the state a laboratory for undermining democracy.
“They gerrymander to rig the system, and when they can’t gerrymander, then they try to take away people’s votes,” State Rep. Robyn Vining, who flipped a Republican-held district in suburban Milwaukee in 2018, tells me. “Then when they can’t rig the votes, the richest man in the world comes in and decides he wants to try and buy it.”
Wisconsin Democrats repeatedly said they believed Musk’s scheme would backfire because state voters wouldn’t like the idea of a billionaire swooping in to buy an election. “It’s everything that Wisconsin is not,” Vining says. “The Wisconsin work ethic is a big deal. You work hard for what you have, and to have the richest man in the world come in and just to buy a seat for his own advantage, it’s not who we are. As a Wisconsinite, that’s infuriating.”
Now, Wisconsin is the laboratory that will tell us whether not just the state, but the entire country, is swinging toward an insurmountable oligarchy or whether democracy still has a fighting change.
As she knocked on doors in Schimel’s home county, trying to turn out the pockets of blue in a red stronghold that is trending more puple, Vining handed out campaign literature showing Crawford on the front, saying she would “protect abortion rights” and “strengthen voting rights.” On the back was Schimel next to Musk, showing how much money Musk has poured into the race, “because Musk knows Brad Schimel is for sale.”
“We’re going to be the first to test of whether or not the richest man in the world can come in and buy our election,” Vining says. “I hope that we show them that we will be the last. It would be really great if Wisconsin could shut this down.”
