Why Elon Musk Wants Brad Schimel on the Wisconsin Supreme Court
The former state AG has pledged his allegiance to the Republicans’ political agenda.
HAVING ELBOWED HIS WAY INTO an illicit co-presidency, shut down entire agencies because he felt like it, fired thousands of federal workers without grounds or authority, and begun laying his hands on millions of Americans’ sensitive personal and financial information, Elon Musk has set his sights on another questionable goal: electing Brad Schimel to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
“Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” Musk posted last month on X, which he owns, along with everything else.
Musk’s post, true to form, was factually deficient. For one thing, Wisconsin’s supreme court elections are nonpartisan—meaning there is, strictly speaking, no Republican candidate, although the involvement of political parties and other outside groups long ago transformed these races into de facto partisan affairs. Musk inadvertently admitted what others seek to conceal, sort of like when he gave those Nazi salutes.
The April 1 election is between Schimel, a former Republican attorney general who is now a circuit court judge in Waukesha County, and Susan Crawford, a circuit court judge in Dane County. Crawford formerly worked as a state agency attorney and as chief of staff to then-Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat, as well as an attorney in private practice. The winner will serve a ten-year term.
It is expected to be the costliest judicial election in U.S. history, with one state watchdog group predicting total spending of between $70 million and $80 million.
The current national record was set in Wisconsin’s last supreme court election, in 2023, when just over $50 million was deployed, mostly by political parties and other outside groups, which under state laws enacted by Republicans in 2015 are not bound by any spending limits. This election shifted control of the seven-member state supreme court from conservatives to liberals for the first time in decades. If Schimel wins, that control will shift back, although liberals would have opportunities to regain the majority in 2026 and 2027. If Crawford wins, liberals will rule at least through 2028.
Most of the money pouring into the current race is being churned into an almost constant stream of attack ads accusing the opposing candidate of being a dangerous extremist who’s soft on crime. On February 17, Crawford’s campaign launched an ad bashing Schimel for accepting a campaign donation from a lawyer whose client then got a plea deal on child pornography charges. Two days later, Schimel’s campaign began airing an ad bashing Crawford for giving a sweetheart sentence to a child sex predator. After accusing her of “putting pedophiles back on the street,” the narrator intones “criminals are praying Susan Crawford gets elected because she fights for them, not us.”
This is the level of discourse the people of Wisconsin have come to expect in their state supreme court elections.
Meanwhile, Building America’s Future, a Musk-backed political nonprofit, is spending at least $1.6 million on an ad campaign that began February 20 and will continue through early March. The 30-second spot, like ones run by Schimel’s campaign, rips Crawford over her alleged fondness for child molesters. In addition, Musk’s America PAC is investing $1 million on canvassing and field operations to help Schimel win.
SCHIMEL HAS EXPRESSED GRATITUDE FOR Musk’s help, saying “I’m welcoming anybody that can help me get the word out about this race, help me raise support.” He’s also openly courting Donald Trump’s favor.
“Who wouldn’t want the endorsement of the sitting president, who is enjoying high popularity right now?” Schimel said during a recent TV interview. “And whether you like what he’s doing or not, I think anybody has to acknowledge that he’s accomplished an awful lot since November 5.” Put an emphasis on the word “awful” and it’s a true statement.
Schimel, of course, insists that the help he is getting from Musk and others will have no effect on how he conducts himself. “You can’t be for sale,” Schimel said at an event on February 18, incidentally his sixtieth birthday (Crawford will turn 60 on March 1). “People want to support you. It should be [that] they’re supporting you because they like the things that you stand for, not because they’re buying some result.”
But no one has to buy what is given freely, and Brad Schimel has long demonstrated his willingness to use his power for highly partisan purposes. During his tenure as Wisconsin attorney general from 2015 to 2019, Schimel defended environmental polluters in other states and signed onto a brief backing ExxonMobil’s quest to block investigations into whether it had suppressed information about climate change (hint: yes). He also opposed gun laws in Washington, D.C., and teacher-tenure laws in Indiana. And he played a leading role in a twenty-state effort to undo the Affordable Care Act, which has provided health care coverage to hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin residents.
In 2018, when Schimel sought a second term as state attorney general, forty-five former assistant attorneys general signed a letter accusing him of having “blatantly politicized” his office. Schimel was defeated in that election by Democrat Josh Kaul, who still holds this position. The very next day, Walker appointed Schimel to be a circuit court judge in Waukesha County. He seems to have no qualms about his activist past, boasting on a conservative radio show last year that “we sued the Obama administration every ten minutes when I was AG.”
Schimel said during this interview that the “national relationships with donors beyond Wisconsin” he formed in the course of his partisan activities while AG gave him hope that he could come out on top in the money battle. “We’re gonna nationalize this,” he said. “Frankly, our donor base is excited about this chance to take this court back.”
THE APRIL 2023 ELECTION THAT DELIVERED the Wisconsin Supreme Court to liberal control took place during a fifteen-month period in which abortion was completely unavailable in Wisconsin following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. After Roe was overturned, the state reverted to a pre-Civil War law that, under one interpretation, banned the procedure outright. Reproductive choice was a pivotal issue in this race.
Liberal Janet Protasiewicz, a Milwaukee County circuit court judge who voiced support for reproductive rights, handily beat conservative former Justice Dan Kelly, who once characterized abortion as “a policy that has as its primary purpose harming children.” Her margin of victory was 11 points.
A few months after Protasiewicz’s win, a Dane County judge ruled that the 1849 law only applied to feticide, the ending of a woman’s pregnancy against her wishes. Shortly thereafter, Planned Parenthood resumed performing abortions in Wisconsin. Abortion remains a key issue in the current race, as the state supreme court has agreed to decide two abortion-related cases, including a challenge to the 1849 law.
Both candidates insist they will not prejudge cases, but it’s not hard to figure out how they will likely rule on cases regarding reproductive rights. Schimel has repeatedly affirmed his belief that the 1849 law is still valid. In 2012, he signed on to a Wisconsin Right to Life white paper stating that this law put the state in “the enviable position of being able to immediately protect unborn children once Roe is eliminated.”
Crawford told me in an interview that she believes the Dobbs decision was wrongly decided, calling it “the first time the Court has ever taken away a right that was recognized and long vested under our United States Constitution.” She said it was “deeply concerning to me when the government starts invading some of those fundamental decisions that men and women make every day about how to live their lives and what’s best for them and their families.”
Crawford’s campaign bio proudly points out that during her former role as an attorney in private practice, she “protected voting and workers’ rights, and represented Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin to defend access to reproductive health care.” One of her campaign ads describes her as a “leader who fought for abortion rights.” Meanwhile, in spite of his past advocacy on the issue, Schimel’s campaign website makes no mention of abortion; his campaign spokesperson, Jacob Fischer, declined to respond to my interview requests after ascertaining that abortion would be a topic of inquiry.
But abortion, it’s safe to say, is not a main engine driving Musk’s interest in Wisconsin’s supreme court election. The issue for him, and for Trump, is power—specifically, the power to help Republicans prevail in elections.
MUSK’S ENCOURAGEMENT TO THE FAITHFUL to “vote Republican” for Schimel in the nonpartisan race is not the only factual matter he got wrong in the fourteen-word span of his post. His mention of “voting fraud,” an apparent reference to another poster’s paranoid comments about the court’s July 2024 reversal of a ban on the use of absentee ballot dropboxes, is also flatly untrue.
There is no basis whatsoever for alleging significant fraud in Wisconsin elections or in its use of dropboxes. Joe Biden’s 21,000-vote Wisconsin win in 2020, which Trump continues to rail against, was affirmed by two partial recounts, multiple state and federal lawsuits, a nonpartisan audit, a conservative law firm’s review, and a partisan review conducted by a conservative former state supreme court justice. And that’s just for starters.
As for absentee-ballot dropboxes, no one has presented any non-speculative evidence that their use led to fraud. The GOP demand that they be disallowed, which court conservatives reflexively endorsed, was advanced as a means to lay the groundwork for false accusations of fraud should Trump and his followers again be displeased by an election result. In the 2024 election, with dropboxes again in use, Trump won Wisconsin by about 30,000 votes, an outcome that no one has disputed.
Of course, ballot dropboxes have always been a red herring. The real reason Musk and other Republicans want to restore conservative control of the court is that its current liberal majority rejected heavily gerrymandered electoral maps that for more than a decade gave Republicans a huge electoral advantage. In the 2022 legislative elections, for instance, Wisconsin Republicans came away with a 64–35 supermajority in the state assembly and a 22–11 majority in the state senate even though the Wisconsin electorate is nearly equally divided between the two major parties.
Last fall, under fairer maps accepted by both parties (albeit grudgingly in the case of Republicans), Democrats flipped fourteen seats, and they now have a shot at regaining a majority in one or both chambers next year. A win by Schimel in April would allow the Republicans to use their weakened but still intact majorities to pass new rigged maps before that can occur, knowing that the supreme court will have their backs.
IN HIS EAGERNESS TO CURRY FAVOR with Trump and MAGA Republicans, Schimel has expressed sympathy for the hooligans who ransacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, saying a few days before the fourth anniversary of this event that they did not get “a fair shot” in court. Schimel, who has secured endorsements from about eighty current and retired sheriffs, has also made a public display of his cowardice and hypocrisy regarding the hundreds of rioters who assaulted police.
After telling reporters that “Anyone convicted of assaulting law enforcement should serve their full sentence, attacking our men and women in uniform is never acceptable in our society,” Schimel promptly refused to criticize Trump for issuing commutations or full pardons to the rioters who did just that. “Presidents have the power to pardon,” he said meekly. “It’s a power they have. I don’t object to them utilizing that power.” This just days after Schimel wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post sharply taking President Joe Biden to task for the pardons and commutations he issued.
“This spring, Wisconsinites have a choice between lawlessness or order,” Schimel declared in this op-ed. “I am the only candidate who will stop the madness and restore integrity in our justice system.”
Brad Schimel is not going to be stopping any madness, because he has joined the vast ranks of Republicans who are unwilling to criticize Trump, no matter how outrageous he gets. And that demonstrates Schimel’s unfitness for the office he seeks.
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