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Elon Musk has taken a sudden, intense interest in the Wisconsin Supreme Court this year, plowing at least $18m into the campaign of conservative circuit judge Brad Schimel ahead of the state’s election on April 1 to find a replacement for the retiring liberal Ann Walsh Bradley, in which Schimel is facing off against more moderate rival Susan Crawford.
The court currently has a four-three liberal majority but, with Bradley stepping down, Schimel’s election in her stead would swing the ideological balance in favor of the right – although the race is, technically speaking, nonpartisan.
Musk is so committed to flipping the balance of power that he has been offering local voters $100 to sign a petition denouncing “activist judges” and handing one lucky signatory $1m as part of a last-ditch effort to publicize his cause.
Musk will give a speech in Wisconsin on Sunday. Afterwards, he will give $2 million to two Republican voters.
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The world’s richest man might be assumed to have enough on his plate already, running Tesla, SpaceX and X while simultaneously assisting President Donald Trump in overhauling the federal bureaucracy through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and caring for 13 children.
So why is the Big Tech boss making record-breaking campaign donations to influence a judicial contest in the Badger State?
While it might appear, at first glance, a pretty parochial concern compared to some of Musk’s other ventures, he stressed his belief in the importance of the outcome during an X Spaces event on Saturday with Schimel and Wisconsin GOP Senator Ron Johnson.
After overcoming the now-customary technical glitches, Musk said: “This is a very important race for many reasons.
“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.”
His concern is that a Crawford win would mean a progressive-majority Supreme Court in Wisconsin, which would empower it to pass revisions to the current electoral map, which currently sends six Republican representatives and just two Democrats to Washington.
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A change in favor of the opposition could potentially loosen the GOP’s stranglehold over the lower chamber, allow the Democrats to retake the House, and, therefore, more easily thwart Trump’s legislative agenda.
Another reason not cited by the billionaire but highly relevant is that Tesla, his electric vehicle brand, is battling Wisconsin in court over laws prohibiting auto manufacturers from selling directly to consumers through their own dealerships, filing a lawsuit in January, The New York Times reported, came just days before Musk began pumping cash into the state in support of Schimel’s candidacy.
A former state attorney general and Waukesha County circuit judge, Schimel has been “a willing accomplice” in all of this, according to Mother Jones, attending Trump’s inauguration in January and lobbying hard for the president’s endorsement, which finally arrived last week.
“All Voters who believe in Common Sense should GET OUT TO VOTE EARLY for Brad Schimel,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
In order to win the president’s favour, Schimel reportedly attended a “Mega MAGA rally” last March at which he posed in front of a 50-foot blow-up doll of Trump, wore a garbage man costume on Halloween, and has been pictured on a boat wearing a T-shirt that reads: “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president.”
He has also criticized the Wisconsin Supreme Court over its handling of the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost to Joe Biden, saying the Republican had been “screwed over” by its decision to keep a Green Party candidate off the ballot, also calling liberal justice Brian Hagedorn “soft-headed” and the court’s three female progressives “dumb as a sack of hammers,” “addled,” and “crazy.”
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In addition, Schimel has parroted Trump’s calls for electoral reform, recently telling a conservative radio host it was crucial to shore up the process against alleged Democratic malfeasance, “So we don’t have to worry that at 11.30 pm in Milwaukee, they’re going to find bags of ballots that they forgot to put into the machines.”
Musk has likewise resorted to election scaremongering to win the day, posting on X in January that it is “very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!”
He was referring to the court’s decision to reinstate mail-in vote drop boxes last July ahead of November’s vote, although there is no evidence to suggest the boxes are vulnerable to tampering or manipulation.
Like Trump, Musk has increasingly turned on the judiciary in recent weeks and called for the impeachment of federal judges whose decisions have blocked the president’s executive orders, with D.C. District Court Judge James Boasberg coming in for particular abuse after ruling against Trump’s deportation flights carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has demanded an end to public calls of this nature, but neither man has taken much notice. Musk is likely to run up against Boasberg again now that both men have been assigned to examine the “Signalgate” scandal that has engulfed Trump’s top security officials.
