Failed Vice Presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) framed Democrat-aligned Susan Crawford’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election win on Tuesday as the state overcoming billionaire Elon Musk, who tried to boost her conservative opponent Brad Schimel.
“Wisconsin beat the billionaire,” said Walz in a post to X. Walz notably campaigned for Dane County Circuit Court Judge Crawford, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and drag queens.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court race has implications not just for the battleground state, but for the nation. The highly consequential election, which resulted in liberals keeping their 4-3 majority, ended up becoming the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, reaching nearly $100 million and nearly doubling the previous record held by the state’s 2023 Supreme Court election, according to estimates from the left-leaning Brennan Center for Justice.
While judicial races are nonpartisan, both sides of the political aisle were heavily invested in the results of the election. Wisconsin justices serve ten-year terms, and another chance to change the court will not arise until 2028.
Wisconsin beat the billionaire.
— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) April 2, 2025
Musk, who is Tesla CEO and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), heavily campaigned for Trump-backed Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge and former Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, warning at a rally ahead of the election that the race “will be important for the future of civilization. It’s that significant.” The tech billionaire also dumped more than $20 million into the race — approximately $3 million went to the Republican Party of Wisconsin while the rest went to America PAC and Building America’s Future, according to a breakdown by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Musk’s sense of urgency appeared to be driven by Democrats’ claims that a Crawford win would mean they could redraw legislative maps and ultimately lose Republicans two U.S. House seats, threatening the GOP’s slim majority and potentially stalling President Donald Trump’s agenda. The two seats are currently held by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) in the 1st Congressional District in southeast Wisconsin and Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) in the 3rd Congressional District in the western part of the battleground state.
However, Democrats made the race, like every other election since the fall of Roe, a referendum on abortion, as the state’s high court will soon have the chance to rule on an 1849 abortion restriction which is currently paused. They also used Musk’s large financial involvement in the race to claim that he was trying to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, and coupled his supposed heavy-handedness with the rage liberals already feel at his taking a machete to the bloated federal bureaucracy.
The reality is, total spending — both campaign and outside spending — is nearly indistinguishable between the two candidates, and Crawford’s campaign, backed by its own collection of left-wing billionaires from out of state, outspent Schimel by nearly double, a tally from Brennan Center for Justice shows.
The tally updated on Tuesday shows Crawford’s campaign spent more than $28 million compared to nearly $15 million the Schimel campaign spent. Election filings from February showed tech billionaire Reid Hoffman, an alleged past visitor to Epstein Island, contributed $250,000, while Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a rabid supporter of abortions and transgenderism, contributed $500,000. Billionaire George Soros, who has backed dozens of soft-on-crime prosecutors and has been linked to defund-the-police groups, contributed $1 million.
Total spending shows more than $45 million toward Crawford and $53 million toward Schimel — in a political environment where Democrats typically outspend Republicans by millions in off-year elections. In the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, Democrat-funded candidate Janet Protasiewicz, who ended up winning and flipping the court 4-3 liberal, raised six times more than her opponent, conservative candidate Dan Kelly, and massively outspent him in an election also largely focused on abortion.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
