Musk-backed SCOWIS attack ad features wrong Susan Crawford

A week after booking a seven-figure TV ad buy in Wisconsin’s high-stakes Supreme Court election, a political action group tied to Elon Musk has canceled one social media ad that featured the wrong person.

An ad by the group Building America’s Future attacking Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate in the April race, featured the face of a different Susan Crawford.

While the ad linked to a website attacking Judge Crawford’s record on crime, the image in the ad featured author, climate change columnist and former Harvard Law School Professor Susan P. Crawford.

The ad, which was first reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, ran for four days on Facebook, according to public data from the parent company Meta, and cost about $3,000.

That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of thousands the Musk-linked Building America’s Future has promised to pour into the race, which pits Crawford against former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel.

But it’s a sign of an increasingly negative campaign environment, said Michael Wagner, an expert on political communications at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“One thing that we’ve seen in our politics over the last several election cycles is an increasing willingness to take the shot, even if the candidate isn’t sure that the shot is accurate,” Wagner said. “The rush to get on air with negative ads, the appetite some audiences seem to have for them, all kind of contribute to the environment where mistakes like this can happen.”

The Building America’s Future group, a nonprofit that Musk helps fund, has pledged to run about $1.6 million worth of ads in Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, Wausau and Green Bay areas.

That group did not respond to WPR’s request for comment.

While the Schimel campaign wasn’t behind the ad, mistakes like this from outside groups can reflect on the campaign itself, Wagner said — not to mention have collateral damage on the wrong Crawford.

“It just makes it look like the opposition to Crawford doesn’t have their act together and might just be willing to say anything without carefully vetting what it is they’re talking about,” Wagner said.

A spokesperson for Schimel’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Crawford’s campaign, Derrick Honeyman, called the ad “a fraud from start to finish.”

“Maybe an audit is needed of the staff at Musk’s shady far-right group,” Honeyman said. “Wisconsinites shouldn’t trust a single thing from these guys.”

Outside groups in general are pledging to spend millions of dollars on the race, which will determine the ideological balance of the high court. Conservative groups, including Musk’s own America PAC and the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, have promised to back Schimel. Liberal megadonors, including George Soros, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are investing in Crawford.

Additionally, the state Democratic Party has backed Crawford and the state Republican Party has backed Schimel, both to the tune of millions of dollars. Through state financing regulations, those parties are allowed to funnel unlimited money into campaigns.

Costly ad buys are not often that effective, said Wagner. But affecting voters just a little can make a big difference in swing state Wisconsin.

“These ad wars have an enormous amount of money in play, and they are not likely to move the needle very much,” he said. “But in Wisconsin, you don’t need to move the needle very much to win.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court race is expected to be among the most expensive court races in American history, with some campaign trackers projecting upwards of $70 million being spent to try and tilt the outcome.

That’s because, for the second time in two years, the court’s ideological majority is up for grabs. In 2023, the election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz to the bench gave liberals a majority for the first time in 15 years. That election was, at the time, the most expensive court race in the country.

Since that election, the court struck down Republican-drawn legislative maps which had previously been upheld by a conservative majority. The high court is also due to settle a lawsuit on abortion and could weigh in on another involving public sector unions.

Those stakes are drawing nationwide attention to the race, and a mistake in an ad could encourage both sides to look at their messaging, said Wagner.

“The race has already been extraordinarily negative, and now that there’s an example of a negative ad that plainly gets a fact wrong — a key fact, like who is one of the people running for office — it has the potential to give the candidates pause in terms of how they behave,” he said.

“Although it probably won’t give the candidates pause in terms of how they behave,” he added.