Wisconsin Voters Reject their Whiff of Musk
When can a $20 million campaign contribution actually hurt a candidate? When the donation is given by a cartoon megavillain.
When tech billionaire Elon Musk dropped a colossal pile of money into the race for Wisconsin Supreme Court, it was supposed to be a game-changer. And it was — just not for the side he intended to help. The cash went to bolster the campaign of former Attorney General Brad Schimel, the conservative in the race. But instead of propelling Schimel across the finish line, the Musk Millions acted like a 50-pound ankle weight strapped to a guy already running uphill.
Musk, ever the political neophyte, seems to believe that money equals votes. But anyone who's spent more than ten minutes in a swing state knows it’s far more complicated than that. Wisconsin isn’t Twitter. You don’t get to spend your way into popularity with a few dramatic posts and some Super Bowl-ad-level checks.
By the time Musk’s cash flood hit, the airwaves were already saturated with TV ads. A recent poll showed that only 38 percent of Wisconsin voters had a positive impression of Musk, while 60 percent had a negative impression, so Democrats hung Musk around Schimel’s neck. All the tech billionaire really did was hand Democrats a golden opportunity to paint Schimel as his corrupt toadie.
The results were telling. Schimel ran a full six points behind another conservative (Brittany Kinser, running for state superintendent of instruction) on the statewide ballot, a gap almost certainly caused by the Musk stink that blew up Schimel’s candidacy like a Tesla battery fire. In a state where elections are often decided by the width of a slice of gouda, that’s a death sentence.
(The idea that a conservative would run closer in a state superintendent race than a state supreme court race is unheard of in Wisconsin, especially on the same night - Teachers' unions typically dominate superintendent races.)
"It looks like Elon Musk's intervention probably backfired," Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the university's Elections Research Center, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last night. "It really provided fuel for Crawford's campaign and a kind of focal point for people who were upset by what's happening in Washington."
The election continues a catastrophic streak for conservatives in Trump-era state supreme court elections in Wisconsin. Conservatives once had what seemed like an insurmountable 5-2 majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. They've now lost 4 out of the last 5 races and are in a 4-3 minority.
This court election had national implications from the start. The left tried desperately to frame the race as a referendum on Musk — a Donald Trump proxy with worse personal approval ratings and fewer working satellites. Now that their strategy of guilt-by-billionaire has worked in Wisconsin, expect to see it rolled out in races across the country.
But while the Musk angle may have made headlines, the stakes in this election were always much bigger than one donor or one candidate. This wasn’t just about who sits on the state’s highest court. It was about whether Wisconsin will still have a legislature that reflects the will of voters — or one that’s rewritten by a handful of progressive justices.
If Schimel had won, the court might have served as a check on this judicial activism. But now, with Judge Susan Crawford ascending to the bench, the progressive project will accelerate. The court will be seen not as an impartial arbiter of law, but as the enforcement arm of the Democratic Party — a place where failed policy ideas go to be resurrected by robe-wearing partisans.
And so Elon Musk, perhaps thinking he was saving America from the brink, ended up pushing Wisconsin a few steps closer to the edge. His $20 million investment bought conservatives nothing but headaches. Next time, maybe he should spend it on building a time machine — so he can go back and stay out of Wisconsin.