Carol Guzy/ZUMA Press Wire
On March 22, Elon Musk hosted conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel and US Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) for a discussion on X about the importance of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on April 1. It began 36 minutes late and was beset with technical difficulties, as Musk repeatedly talked over Schimel.
But once things got straightened out, Musk made it clear why he is offering voters $100 a pop to sign a petition opposing “activist judges” and spending $18 million through various political groups—a record for any donor in a Wisconsin judicial contest—to elect Schimel and flip the ideological majority of the court.
“This is a very important race for many reasons,” Musk said. “The most consequential is that [it] will decide how congressional districts are drawn in Wisconsin, which if the other candidate wins, instead of Justice Schimel, then the Democrats will attempt to redraw the districts and cause Wisconsin to lose two Republican seats. In my opinion that’s the most important thing, which is a big deal given that the congressional majority is so razor-thin. It could cause the House to switch to Democrat if that redrawing takes place.”
Musk’s fear is that the court, if it retains a progressive majority, will strike down the congressional lines that give Republicans a 6-2 advantage in the US House delegation. (Democrats have made similar claims.) The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave that map an F for partisan fairness, saying it had a “significant Republican advantage.” The court has yet to take up a lawsuit challenging the congressional map, but if they were to eventually strike it down, that could help Democrats retake the House, which would allow Democrats to scrutinize the unprecedented role Musk is playing in shredding the federal government, accessing sensitive personal information on millions of Americans, and the $38 billion in federal funding his businesses receive.
Musk was essentially admitting that his spending spree in Wisconsin has nothing to do with the state itself, and everything to do with protecting his own power. (It should also be noted that Tesla is currently suing the state for blocking the company from opening car dealerships there.) That’s a prevailing theme for the Trump administration. At the same time Musk and Trump are threatening to impeach federal judges for rulings they don’t like, they’re going all-out to put their handpicked judges on the bench, who they’re confident will rubber-stamp their radical agenda and extend their plan for oligarchy to the states.
And Schimel, a former state attorney general and judge in suburban Milwaukee, is a willing accomplice. What’s most notable about his campaign, other than the amount of money he’s attracted from Musk, is how obsequious he has been toward Trump. He attended Trump’s inauguration and practically begged for an endorsement from the president, which finally arrived on Friday night. He said he wanted to “nationalize the race” so that large donors, like Musk, would spend millions of dollars on his behalf.
He appeared at a “Mega Maga Rally” on the campaign trail in March, posing in front of a 50-foot blowup doll of Trump with a “Vote Brad Schimel” sign on it. He wore a Trump-as-garbage-man costume on Halloween. He was pictured on a boat wearing a shirt that said, “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.” This is ethically dubious behavior from a judge who could hear cases involving the president.
More substantively, he has defended some of Trump’s most extreme actions and amplified some of his most dangerous rhetoric. He told the right-wing group Turning Point USA that he is running for the court to provide a “support network” for Trump and combat the lawsuits against his administration. He claimed the January 6 insurrectionists did not receive fair trials and defended Trump for pardoning 1,500 of them.
He told supporters that “the Wisconsin Supreme Court screwed [Trump] over” by keeping a Green Party candidate off the ballot in 2020 and declined to say whether he would have voted to overturn the 2020 election (the court came one vote short of doing so). He criticized the one conservative judge, Brian Hagedorn, who voted with the liberal justices to uphold the election as “soft-headed” and called the progressive female justices “dumb as a sack of hammers,” “addled,” and “crazy.”
He has echoed Trump’s election disinformation, telling a conservative radio host recently that Republicans needed to make the election “too big to rig” so that Democrats in Milwaukee could not steal it. “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,” Schimel said, repeating one on the most prevalent conspiracy theories spread by Trump in 2020. (In reality, some votes are often counted later in the day because of a state law, which the GOP-controlled legislature refuses to change, prohibiting election officials from processing absentee ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day.) That earned a rebuke from a bipartisan group, the Democracy Defense Project, that includes Schimel’s Republican predecessor as state attorney general, JB Van Hollen.
“We don’t discourage people from voting early but phrases like ‘too big to rig’ cast doubt on our election process in Wisconsin, when just the opposite is true,” the group’s board responded.
Musk has spread his own election misinformation. He first mentioned the race on X in January, writing that it was “very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” He was referencing a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in July 2024 reinstating mail-in ballot drop boxes, even though there is no evidence that the use of drop boxes has led to voter fraud.
Even worse, one of the dark money groups he funds, Building America’s Future, created a deceptive front group called Progress 2028 that purports to be a progressive alternative to Project 2025 and is running digital ads and sending out text messages praising Schimel’s opponent, Dane County Judge Susan Crawford for positions she has not actually taken. “Judge Susan Crawford would reform cash bail (and) supports second chances, not incarceration,” one text message said. “Say thank you.” These fake ads are meant to tie Crawford to unpopular positions and motivate conservative activists.
“Musk’s group takes things to an unacceptable new low,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote in a strongly worded editorial. “Disinformation is misinformation on steroids. It is not just stretching the truth or even innocently sharing mistruths, it is deliberately false and misleading. Progress 2028’s actions are corrosive not only for cleverly weaving truths with targeted false information, but because they also foment distrust in the electoral system and democracy.”
Musk and his advisers are betting that the onslaught of dark money against Crawford and the strategy of aggressively tying Schimel to Trump will motivate Trump’s supporters to return to the polls on April 1. “This is entirely winnable, and you know, if we do win it, again, we have to thank Elon for all the support he’s given this race,” Ron Johnson said on the livestream with Musk. Andrew Romeo, the senior adviser for Building American’s Future, wrote on March 20 that “Schimel is in the midst of a monumental comeback,” moving from down 13 points to within 5 of Crawford in their recent survey and could win the race by “closing the enthusiasm gap with the base.”
At the same time, Democrats believe that casting the race as a referendum on Musk is a winning strategy for them. “Knowing that Musk is trying to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court is propelling a wave of energy into supporting Susan Crawford and defeating Brad Schimel,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me recently.
On the livestream with Schimel, Musk seemed dismayed by the turnout to date. “If you look at the early voting data so far, Democrats are winning, which is not good,” he said.