A political action committee backed by billionaire Elon Musk has scheduled hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of TV ads in Wisconsin this week with the state Supreme Court election fast approaching.
The ads are expected to aid conservative Brad Schimel who is running against liberal Susan Crawford in a race that will determine the ideological balance of the court.
The ads from the Musk-backed Building America’s Future will start running on stations around Wisconsin Thursday and will continue through early March.
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Available contracts posted by the Federal Communications Commission show more than $400,000 worth of ads will run in the Madison, Eau Claire, Wausau and Green Bay areas. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports more than $255,000 more will also be running in and around Milwaukee.
The FCC data doesn’t identify the content of Building America’s ads. However, the ads are expected to aid Schimel, the state’s former Republican attorney general. On Jan. 27, Musk called on Wisconsin residents to “vote Republican to prevent voting fraud” in a post on the social media site X, which he owns.
Schimel’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the ad buy.
A statement from Crawford’s campaign blasted the ad buy, with spokesperson Derrick Honeyman accusing Musk of “buying off” Schimel.
“In D.C., Elon Musk has taken control of Americans’ private financial information and cut funding for hungry kids,” Honeyman said. “Now, Musk is trying to buy off Brad Schimel and take over control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court so that Schimel can rubber-stamp an extreme agenda of banning abortion and cozying up to corporations.”
The April election will decide who replaces retiring liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley. Liberal justices took a 4-3 majority on the court in August 2023. Prior to that, conservative justices held the court’s majority for 15 years.
The race is officially nonpartisan, but the state Republican and Democratic parties are heavily invested.
Since liberals took control, the court has struck down Republican-drawn state legislative voting districts as unconstitutional and reauthorized absentee ballot drop boxes. The court’s former conservative majority banned drop boxes in 2022 and upheld the Republican legislative maps.
The latest state campaign finance filings show Crawford has raised around $7.7 million since entering the race, while Schimel has raised around $5 million. Of the totals, the Democratic Party of Wisconsin transferred $2 million to Crawford and the Republican Party of Wisconsin transferred nearly $1.7 million to Schimel.
The court has several high-profile cases headed its way, including a challenge to the state’s pre-Civil War abortion law. It could also hear a lawsuit against Wisconsin Act 10, the landmark law restricting collective bargaining for most public employees.
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