In the end, after all the spending and contention and noise, the April 1 election for Wisconsin Supreme Court was something of a blowout: Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford trounced Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel. Crawford, backed by Democrats in the wink-wink nonpartisan race, snared 55 percent of the vote against Schimel, who was backed by Republicans including President Donald Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk. The election was called within an hour of the polls closing. Her margin of victory was about 236,000 votes.
“This was supposed to be the closest election since the last close election in Wisconsin,” says Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, referring to the November presidential contest when Trump won the state by less than 30,000 votes. “And [instead], it looks like a massive repudiation of Musk and Trump and everything that’s happened since January 20.”
Heck says Schimel “wrapped himself in Elon Musk and sought Trump’s endorsement and received it.” Crawford, meanwhile, “wisely distanced herself from the partisans in the Democratic Party,” including Bernie Sanders and Tim Walz, who came to Wisconsin to boost her candidacy. And the voters of Wisconsin, Heck adds, chose to “reclaim their state from the national conservative movement.”
Speaking at a town hall meeting in Green Bay last Sunday, Musk, wearing a cheesehead hat, declared that Wisconsin’s state supreme court election is “going to affect the entire destiny of humanity.” While that might be a bit overblown, it was in fact a hugely important election, one that will decide the future of reproductive rights in Wisconsin, as well as labor rights, voting rights, and the possible redrawing of Congressional districts to weaken Republicans’ current advantage.
It was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, with total spending in excess of about $105 million, mostly for television ads in which the opposing candidate was portrayed as a wholehearted supporter of violent criminals, especially child rapists. That’s more than twice the previous record of $51 million, set in Wisconsin’s last supreme court race, in 2023, when liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative Dan Kelly by an eleven-point margin.
In all, Musk and affiliated groups pumped more than $20 million into the race on Schimel’s behalf. The tech billionaire offered $100 payments to voters who signed a petition opposing activist judges and handed out two $1 million checks to rally-goers, in possible violation of state law.
Musk framed the election as a referendum on the Trump Administration, urging voters to elect Schimel to advance Trump’s agenda, more than two months into a second term that is proving to be even more boundary-pushing than the one that came before. And Schimel spoke openly of providing the increasingly unpopular President with a “support network.” Those proved to be unwise decisions.
“I gather that Schimel felt that he needed to turn out the Trump voters to have a chance of winning,” Heck says. “But I think this probably demonstrates that Trump voters vote for Trump, and they may be pretty undependable if he’s not on the ballot. So you’re much better off trying to distance yourself from other partisan politicians. And I think Crawford did a much better job of that.”
Crawford, in her victory speech at the Park Hotel in downtown Madison, joked about “taking on the richest man in the world . . . and we won.” She framed the election result as a victory for judicial probity:
“Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections, and our supreme court. And Wisconsin[ites] stood up and said, loudly, that justice does not have a price, our courts are not for sale.”
At Crawford’s election-night party, the sentiment of the moment was one of “huge relief,” as one woman put it after the race was called. “People listen. Money isn’t everything,” she said.
“It says so much about who we are,” a man exiting the event was overheard telling another attendee. “You can’t buy us.”
In this supreme court election, as with the one in 2023 that shifted control of the court to liberals for the first time in decades, Dane County voters played a huge role. But this time the turnout was even higher—more than 280,000 votes in Dane County compared to about 240,000 two years ago. In both elections, the liberal candidate garnered about 82 percent of the county total. The total number of votes cast statewide also increased, from 1,843,480 in 2023 to more than 2.2 million in this year’s election.
Crawford’s win means liberals will control the court at least through 2028, although there is no reason to believe the state supreme court elections slated for each of the next five years will be any less hard-fought, costly, or contentious.
Once upon a time, Heck notes, Wisconsin “had $500,000 supreme court elections and candidates who sought the endorsement of former governors of both political parties. That was twenty-five years ago. Will we ever get back there? Probably not, but we could certainly put some limits on the amount of money that’s raised and spent. We could certainly put into place stronger recusal rules, particularly with regard to campaign contributions.” He says Wisconsin’s recusal rules rank forty-seventh in the nation in terms of their strength.
Heck is hopeful that these changes can occur. “But,” he notes, “that’s going to take time. It took a long time for us to get where we are. Now, it’s going to take some time and education to get us back there. But I think there’s a lesson here, and that is that when you try to make a race for judge a national referendum, be careful what you wish for.”
This article was originally published in Isthmus, a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. Isthmus staff writer Liam Beran contributed to this report.