Why Musk Wants to Control Wisconsin Supreme Court

Cartoon by Diane Barton.

The race for Wisconsin Supreme Court is becoming almost comical. Over the weekend conservative candidate Brad Schimel posed for a photo with MAGA backers standing before a 50-foot inflatable Donald Trump, a blown-up figure that, it must be said, had very large hands. Meanwhile in last week’s debate liberal candidate Susan Crawford called her opponent “Elon Schimel,” while a liberal group connected with the Working Family’s Party is now planning billboards portraying Schimel as a cute little puppet of Elon Musk, sitting on the billionaire’s lap.

The race hasn’t just become nationalized. It has been turned into the MAGA-Trump-Musk show, with the help of unprecedented spending by Musk, who has bankrolled two “independent” spending groups that together have already spent more than $11 million on a continuing barrage of ads. That spending has been increasing on an almost daily basis and is likely to rise higher. In addition, Musk is spending unknown amounts backing a group running misleading ads praising Crawford as a “progressive champion” who will “stand up for immigrants” and promote a justice system that gives criminals “second chances” — a ploy to turn off moderate and conservative voters.

Musk’s massive spending will help the state smash past records for total campaign cash in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race and and has given Schimel a roughly 3-to-1 advantage in independent spending over Crawford.

Why would he spend so much on one state’s judicial race? Many have pointed to the state law which bars manufacturers from owning a car dealership, preventing Musk’s company Tesla from owning any dealerships. Lawyers for Tesla have pushed for a court decision overruling the law without success, but the issue is likely to be appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Brad Schimel’s vote on the case could help Tesla get a majority ruling. It’s obvious Schimel would have a conflict of interest and should recuse, but he has rejected calls for him to do so on any cases.

But is it really worth spending $11 million to gain perhaps a few thousand more sales per year of Tesla cars in one state? And that would be under normal, pre-2025 sales conditions for Tesla, which no longer apply. The backlash over Musk’s role in decimating the federal government is causing a decline in U.S. sales of Tesla, as well as protests and even acts of vandalism against auto owners in the U.S. The drumbeat of charges that he is trying to buy an election in Wisconsin may increase the backlash, and reduce rather than increase his sales.

But there is something of far more importance to Musk and Trump that’s at stake in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Musk is the beneficiary of massive government subsidies to his companies, particularly Space X, receiving more than $20 billion over the past four years, with another $11 billion in promised future payments, as the Washington Post has reported.

That’s a lot of money. In fact it’s much more than the $10 billion in savings that Musk’s DOGE office has claimed from all the federal contracts it cancelled, and those claims were filled with errors, as the New York Times reported.

Those future payments to Musk could be endangered — as could the Trump-Musk push to radically down-size the federal government — should Democrats take over Congress in the 2026 mid-term elections.

The House of Representatives, where the Republicans hold a 218 to 213 edge (with two vacant seats for each party), is the most vulnerable to a flip-flop of power: a loss of just three seats could give control to the Democrats. And Wisconsin could by itself turn around at least two seats, if congressional seats were fairly districted.

Wisconsin is an evenly divided, 50-50 swing state with eight congressional seats. Yet Republicans hold six of them. That’s due to a plan created in 2011 and still largely in place: to pack the congressional districts in Milwaukee and Dane County with an overwhelming number of Democrats, and crack the other six districts apart to make them majority Republican. Only the western district held by Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden has a small edge for the GOP; the other five seats have an almost insurmountable Republican majority for Democratic opponents.

While the current Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal majority took on gerrymandering of the state’s legislative districts, leading to a deal with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and Republican legislative leaders to create fair districts, the court did not get around to the congressional districts. But it still could.

Schimel and Republicans have already signaled their concern about this, accusing Crawford of having plans to remap congressional districts, something she has denied. GOP leaders have reason to fear this: Fairly mapped districts combined with backlash to Trump’s radical agenda, could conceivably flip three congressional districts in Wisconsin.

The high court could also take other votes that could affect the 2026 election, a story by Vote Beat noted: “Fights over electronic voting, Wisconsin’s membership in the multistate Electronic Registration Information Center, and election officials’ ability to access citizenship data are brewing in lower courts.” And the current liberal majority approved the use of absentee ballot boxes. These issues all relate to Republican efforts to reduce voter turnout.

It seems unlikely Musk has been tracking all this, but Republicans certainly have. They know this race is critical not just to Wisconsin but to the national 2016 mid-term election and future election lawsuits by Republicans in this always critical swing state. And you can bet they shared this concern with Trump, who surely conveyed the message to Musk. Why else would he be spending so lavishly on this election?