When the balance of power on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court was on the line two years ago, the race smashed national spending records for state judicial elections and gave liberals a narrow majority after 15 years of conservative control.
Although the state is divided politically, voters overwhelmingly backed a candidate who outwardly supported reproductive rights at a time when abortion services were on hold across Wisconsin due to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned federal protections.
On April 1, the ideological makeup of Wisconsin’s highest court is up for grabs once again — and again the state judicial race has become the most expensive in the nation as abortion remains a top animating issue in a state that went for Donald Trump in November while also reelecting Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
But as Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford faces conservative Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel, one person’s involvement is drawing as much attention as any issue: Elon Musk.
Two groups funded by the world’s richest man and polarizing Trump adviser have spent more than $13 million in support of Schimel, the former state attorney general, according to a tally from the Brennan Center for Justice.
Musk, who has taken his metaphorical chain saw to the federal government and lashed out at judges who’ve blocked the president’s swift moves, is far from alone in funneling money from outside Wisconsin into an officially nonpartisan state Supreme Court election. Liberal financier George Soros has given $1 million to the Wisconsin Democratic Party ahead of the April voting, and billionaire Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker — who previously signed a state law banning out-of-state campaign contributions to Illinois judicial candidates — gave the Wisconsin Democrats $500,000 in January.
Pritzker’s cash is not the only impact Illinois is having on the high-profile Wisconsin race.
Conservative megadonors Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein of Lake Bluff together have given $1.3 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party this year. And on the ground, Democratic volunteers from Illinois have gone door to door in the Milwaukee area on recent weekends supporting Crawford as part of Operation Swing State, which brings reinforcements from the deep-blue Chicago area to battleground states, said Ben Head, the group’s co-lead.
The first high-profile campaign since the November election, this off-year court race has become a national proxy battle and a bellwether of voter sentiment in perhaps the swingiest of swing states in the early days of the second Trump era. At the same time, the outcome could play a pivotal role in deciding the future of a range of issues important to Wisconsinites, including abortion, union rights and the partisan makeup of the state’s legislature and congressional delegation.
“Wisconsin is potentially in deep trouble” if the court’s newfound 4-3 liberal majority is undone, Pritzker said Friday during an unrelated event in Peoria. “This is a battle that everybody understands will determine perhaps the future for Wisconsin politics in the next — certainly for the next several years.”
As of late last week, nearly $67 million had been spent, according to the Brennan Center, to influence what will likely be an electorate of fewer than 2 million voters. That’s already ahead of Wisconsin’s 2023 national record of $56 million, which obliterated the previous high-water mark of $15 million set during the 2004 election of Illinois Supreme Court Justice Lloyd Karmeier, even when adjusting for inflation.
While the dollar figures have become eye-popping, electing one judge to a 10-year term on a seven-member court can have a greater influence on a range of policy issues than electing a single lawmaker to a larger legislative body for a shorter term, said Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“So maybe it’s surprising it took this long for the money and the parties and the ideological groups to find these races, but now it seems impossible to unwind,” Burden said.
First major election after Trump
Coming off his party’s failed effort to deliver the state’s 10 electoral votes to Kamala Harris in November and his own unsuccessful bid earlier this year to lead the Democratic National Committee, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler is now trying to leverage the unpopularity of Trump and Musk — and their early actions to freeze spending, shutter federal agencies and fire federal workers — among the state’s voters to boost Crawford’s chances and preserve the court’s liberal majority.
“This election is the first test of whether Democrats can get up off the mat,” Wikler said in a recent interview. “It’s the first contest since November in which Musk tries to buy one outcome and the public can decide whether he’ll get that outcome. … And so for anyone thinking about how to fight back against Trump and Musk and what this administration is doing, there’s no more powerful way to send a message than to ensure that Susan Crawford beats Brad Schimel.”
A recent poll from Marquette University Law School found, for example, that 59% of registered Wisconsin voters thought Trump’s freezes and closures exceeded his legal authority, while 53% thought Musk’s moves under the aegis of the Department of Government Efficiency were disrupting programs required by law. The poll also showed 51% of voters disapproved of Trump’s performance as president, while 53% had an unfavorable view of Musk.
The survey of 864 registered Wisconsin voters was conducted Feb. 19-26 and has a margin of error of 4.6 percentage points.
On the Republican side, state GOP Chair Brian Schimming said the Democrats’ complaints about Musk’s spending in the race ring hollow.
“They have rushed to put out news releases for years about how much money they’re raising, and now the fact that we’ve gotten close or in relative parity to them, now it’s terrible,” Schimming said in a recent interview. “So the whole Elon Musk thing is a diversion away from Susan Crawford’s terrible record.”
Schimel and his supporters have criticized Crawford in particular over what they argue was a too-lenient sentence she handed down in a child sex abuse case, while Crawford has said she followed the law.
Still, while the picture likely has changed somewhat in the last few weeks as TV advertisements have ramped up, the Marquette poll showed large swaths of voters lacked familiarity with the candidates, with 38% saying they didn’t know enough about Schimel to form an opinion and 58% saying the same about Crawford.
But the poll also showed the two running even in terms of favorability among voters who said they were certain to vote and were very enthusiastic about the race, said Charles Franklin, a Marquette law professor who directs the poll.
Noting other polls also have shown a close race, Franklin said, “it could go either way, depending on which pollster you believe or what happens in the last weeks of the campaign.”
Aside from the fervor over Musk and Trump, the issue of access to abortion could again play a key role in the outcome.
Despite Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly supporting legal abortions in all or most cases, Schimming, the state Republican chairman, said Trump’s victory and the close outcome in the U.S. Senate race last year after Democrats campaigned heavily on the issue shows it isn’t always decisive to election outcomes.
But Winkler, the Democratic chair, said the possibility of losing access to reproductive health care is “not academic here.”
Post-Roe fallout
For a little over a year, Dr. Allison Linton traveled from Milwaukee to a Planned Parenthood clinic in north suburban Waukegan to perform abortions, when terminations were halted in her home state due to uncertainty over the enforceability of an 1849 abortion ban.
Most of her patients during that time from mid-2022 to late 2023 were also from Wisconsin, many traversing the same route to Illinois, she recalled.
“So it just felt like this really, truly ridiculous thing that all of us were traveling from the same state,” said Linton, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. “It was a burden that people did not need to have.”
The day abortions ceased in Wisconsin was devastating, the obstetrician-gynecologist recalled. Her clinic had a full roster of patients scheduled on June 24, 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a 5-4 ruling.
“All of those patients we had to tell, ‘We know you are scheduled, we know you were trying to get health care, but harkening back to a law from over a hundred years ago, we can’t provide care for you,’” she said. “It was insulting.”
Soon after the fall of Roe, Planned Parenthood officials in Illinois and Wisconsin announced a partnership where physicians like Linton would travel south to provide care, easing the burden for Illinois providers who were quickly overwhelmed by the crush of out-of-state patients.
When abortions resumed in Wisconsin in September 2023 it was due to a Dane County Circuit judge’s ruling that the 1849 law bans feticide but doesn’t apply to consensual abortions. The 175-year-old law was subsequently put on hold, and a case on the matter is pending before the state’s high court.
Schimel, who has been supported by anti-abortion groups and on Friday got Trump’s formal endorsement, said during a recent debate that the 1849 abortion ban “was a validly passed law,” though he added, “I don’t believe it reflects the will of the people of Wisconsin today.”
Crawford declined during the debate to comment on the 1849 law but expressed pride in supporting Planned Parenthood in abortion-related cases during her time as a private practice attorney and criticized the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.
“My 23-year-old daughter doesn’t have the same rights that I had,” Crawford said during the debate.
Linton warned that abortion restrictions in Wisconsin would affect residents in Illinois.
“When we were having all of our patients coming into Waukegan, that meant there were less appointments for Illinois-based people that needed this care. So it really is this domino effect,” she said.
Before Roe was overturned, the Chicago Abortion Fund fielded calls from fewer than 20 Wisconsinites seeking abortions in Illinois each month; after abortions were suspended in Wisconsin in June 2022, the monthly average more than tripled, to nearly 70 patients, said Megan Jeyifo, the nonprofit’s executive director.
“Any shift that causes more people to come to Illinois will affect more people in Illinois,” said Jeyifo, who grew up in Wisconsin and had an abortion in Milwaukee at the age of 16. “We want to make sure people in our state have access to care too.”
But Dan Miller, state director for Pro-Life Wisconsin, sees the issue much differently. Every day, he posts a near-identical message on the Musk-owned social media site X decrying Wisconsin’s Democratic governor and encouraging readers to vote for the conservative Supreme Court candidate.
“Today is March 19th, 2025, and Tony Evers is STILL the worst Wisconsin governor in U.S. history,” Miller wrote. “Vote for Brad Schimel — April 1st, 2025 — Wisconsin Supreme Court.”
Pro-Life Wisconsin had erected billboards along federal highways bearing messages directed at abortion-seekers traveling to Illinois or other neighboring states, “begging them to turn around and choose life for their baby,” he said.
While Miller knows many pregnant Wisconsinites traveled to Illinois for abortions while those services were suspended in Wisconsin, he speculated some ended up not terminating.
“If you’ve ever seen some of the cars that these people drive up to an abortion facility, it doesn’t surprise me that many babies were saved because of the law,” he said, adding that many of the vehicles were in poor condition. “Some of those cars never would have made it to Illinois, quite frankly.”
Matt Yonke, communications director for the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League, thinks Wisconsin’s 1849 law was “clearly intended to limit abortion.”
“The contention that it holds space for consensual abortions is a pretty willful misreading of the history,” he said.
Some argue the legislation is archaic and outdated. Yonke disagrees.
“Women’s suffrage was granted in many states at (about) the same time as this law, also before cars and electric lights and modern medicine,” he said. “We don’t think those laws are outdated because of their age or because they were instituted before other technological innovations. Our laws against murder predate just about all human technology, but I’d argue we ought to keep them nonetheless.”
More battles to come
Abortion is far from the only consequential issue likely to come before Wisconsin’s high court in the coming months and years.
Another pivotal issue that could soon come before the court is a challenge to the historic restrictions on public sector union rights enacted under Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2011.
The controversial law limiting the collective bargaining rights of most public employees, excluding police and firefighters, was previously upheld by the Wisconsin Supreme Court but was overturned in December by a Dane County judge. The Supreme Court last month ruled the lawsuit challenging the law must go through an appellate court before potentially reaching the high court.
The court also could play a role in determining the balance of power in both the state legislature and possibly Congress in rulings on redistricting proposals.
In late 2023, the court’s new liberal majority threw out the state legislative boundaries Republicans drew after the 2020 census. Ultimately, Evers, the Democratic governor, signed into law new districts that were a compromise with the Republican-controlled legislature ahead of last year’s election. Still, Democrats credited the new maps with helping them pick up 14 legislative seats in November.
Earlier last year, the court declined to take up a Democratic challenge to the state’s congressional boundaries, but the justices could be asked to take up issues of mapmaking again after the 2030 census, if not sooner.
Between now and then, Wisconsin voters will head to the polls each spring to cast ballots in a state Supreme Court race.
Because the next two seats to come up are now occupied by conservatives, the April 1 election could be the last chance for a few years for the right to regain a majority with a Schimel win over Crawford in the race to replace a retiring liberal justice.
Given those dynamics, the upcoming races might not attract the same level of attention and spending as the past two, said Burden, the UW-Madison election expert.
But after 2023, no one could have predicted the role Musk would play in a second Trump administration or the extent to which he would involve himself in a state judicial race, Burden said.
“It seems unlikely that a combination like that would happen again next year and the year after and the year after,” he said. It’s possible “there won’t be an Elon Musk, but there might be a liberal-conservative balance up for grabs again and again if we stay at a 4-3 majority and … neither side gets more than that.”
Chicago Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner contributed from Peoria.
