How Much Did Musk Pay Per Vote?

Elon Musk speaking at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Photo by Gage Skidmore. (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Republican members of Congress defending billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and his meat-ax approach to cutting federal funding and employment have called him a “genius.”

Yet Musk doesn’t look like so smart when it comes to his investment in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election. He spent $25 million to “buy” the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel, as Democrats charged, and failed badly. Schimel lost, liberal candidate Susan Crawford won, and the Supreme Court will continue to have a 4-3 liberal majority.

Even worse for Trump, his trashing of Crawford and the court’s liberal majority won’t help him when his attempt to overthrow the state law preventing auto manufacturers (like Musk’s company Tesla) from owning dealerships comes before the high court as it is likely to do. That could mean less Teslas sold in Wisconsin.

Looking at Musk’s investment in a more granular way, which one would assume a genius businessman would want to do, let’s consider how much he spent per vote. Musk’s approach, if we can believe Scott Walker, came from a plan hatched by Walker and the former Republican governor’s political consultant Keith Gilkes. Their pitch was for Musk to get involved in the Wisconsin race as he did in the presidential race in November. “You were effective in Wisconsin, and you can be effective in this race again in Wisconsin,” Walker said he told Musk.

Except. Musk spent money on a presidential race that polls showed was very close and with Trump leading. A relatively safe investment. And a race so close that the Musk super PAC canvassing voters door-to-door could get a big return from turning out a relatively small number of voters compared to the total number voting in Wisconsin and other swing states in November. Trump won Wisconsin by just over 29,300 votes, a margin of less than 1 percent.

Which is a very different situation than the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. The state’s previous high court race, in 2023, with the abortion the key issue, was an 11% loss for the conservatives, with liberal Janet Protasiewicz defeating conservative Dan Kelly by more than 203,000 votes. Granted, Schimel was a better candidate than Kelly, but abortion was still going to be a major issue in this year’s election. Moreover, we now know that Republicans knew Crawford was ahead in the race and their polls showed Schimel’s high point in the polls was five points behind. In short, this would not be like the presidential election, where a relatively small increase in turnout could decide the election.

Was Walker honest about this, did he let Musk know how long the odds were? I’ll leave it to readers to weigh in on that question.

However Musk made his decision, he went all in, spending more money on a state judicial election than any one donor in history. How many votes did he win for that $25 million investment?

Here’s a rough, back-of-a-napkin estimate, the kind Walker was said to have done in crafting his massive $3 billion investment in Foxconn that failed so spectacularly. The turnout in Wisconsin’s high court race went from 1.8 million voters for the 2023 election to 2.3 million voters in 2025. You could argue that most if not all of 500,000 voters came from race being nationalized from Musk money and Trump’s endorsement (and he probably wouldn’t have endorsed without Musk’s money).

Of that 500,000 votes Schimel got 45% or 225,000, which works out to a cost of $111 per vote. Wow.

But that is probably an underestimate. Here I turn to a much wiser man, pollster Charles Franklin, whose Marquette University Law School poll is considered among the best in the country.

“Campaign spending would have broken the record, by a lot, even without Musk’s $25 million,” he noted via email, “so it would have been a hot race in any case. In our late February poll 83% knew the ideological balance of the court was at stake, even though many didn’t yet know the candidates. So I think those are reasons to think turnout would have gone up a good bit in any case.”

Franklin adds that the turnout has been rising for high court races going back seven years, from 997,485 in 2018 to 1,207,569 in 2019 to 1,549,697 in 2020 to 1,839,656 in 2023 to 2,364,372 this year.

“I think we would have seen at least a 20% increase in 2025 over 2023, just based on recent growth in April turnout. So maybe 8% of the increase might be fueled by Musk? That would be about 157,000 extra votes beyond the 20% increase I think is due to recent ‘normal’ 20% growth.”

So Musk’s spending increased the total turnout by 157,000 votes with 45% of that going to Schimel. That’s about 70,650 votes gained at a cost of $25 million or about $353 per vote gained. Double wow.

Has anyone in state history ever spent more per vote?

I always think of the 1980 race for Wisconsin’s U.S. Senator by the late Douglas Cofrin as the record setter. “The Great Cofrin,” as he liked to call himself, was an heir to the Fort Howard Paper Company fortune, and the first owner of Milwaukee Magazine. He spent $1.4 million on his disastrous run for Senator in the Republican primary, taking third place with just 84,355 votes, spending nearly $17 per vote. (You’ll find more information on a 1982 column I did on Cofrin; it’s the second item in the piece.)

For his efforts at the polls Cofrin was lampooned in a Milwaukee Journal column by Joel McNally (who recently passed away), and was ridiculed as a poor businessman (among other things) in a later Milwaukee Magazine story (after Cofrin sold it) by Charlie Sykes. Yet Cofrin spent 20 times less than Musk did per vote in the election he lost. So who looks more foolish? I leave that, too, for readers to decide.