Record-setting Wisconsin Supreme Court race nears finish line

With all that’s happened in Wisconsin and national politics over the past year, it’s easy to forget the race for state Supreme Court has been chugging along since 2023.

That November, just months removed from an election that saw liberals flip the court, conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel announced his candidacy from inside a welding plant while his band played covers from artists ranging from Michael Jackson to Santana. In June 2024, liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford joined the race to succeed retiring Justice Ann Walsh Bradley.

Since then, the contest between Schimel and Crawford has attracted record-breaking spending, presidential attention and an unusual level of political spectacle for a judicial election.

As the race entered its final day Monday, both candidates were on a whistle-stop tour of Wisconsin.

According to social media posts, Schimel’s campaign bus stopped to greet supporters in Dane County, Columbia County and Wausau. He was also in Salem with Republican U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil this weekend.

Meanwhile, Crawford was joined by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin for appearances in Mequon and Elkhart over the weekend. She also stopped in Sheboygan and appeared on a Spanish-language radio station in Milwaukee. Crawford was set to conclude her tour in Madison.

The old-fashioned, retail politics approach by the candidates themselves stood in sharp contrast to the campaign’s biggest outside spender, who announced another giveaway on the race’s last day.

Pitching it as the “easiest money you ever made” in an X post, billionaire Elon Musk encouraged followers outside Wisconsin to get people inside the state to post pictures of themselves giving a thumbs-up next to a Schimel sign.

“Every time you do that you get $20 and they get $20,” he wrote.

At a 1,000-person rally in Green Bay Sunday, Musk highlighted the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ability to redraw congressional maps as a reason he got involved in the race.

“Whichever party controls the House to a significant degree controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization,” he said.

National attention fixates on court race

“We’ve become the laboratory of American politics,” said Mordecai Lee, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who served in the state Legislature for 14 years.

Lee said Wisconsin’s razor-thin statewide election margins make national donors, analysts and politicians see the state as a bellwether.

He said the timing of the race — the country’s first statewide election since President Donald Trump’s inauguration — adds to that perception.

“Everybody intuitively understands that whether we as Wisconsinites want it or not, that this is going to be interpreted as a referendum on Trump’s presidency,” he said.

Lee said he believes campaigns have been targeting low-propensity voters who usually skip off-year elections.

“I’m guessing that we’re going to see some record-breaking turnouts for spring elections,” he predicted of tomorrow’s vote.

Court may rule on several pivotal cases

In the near future, the court will likely rule on cases that could affect abortion rights in Wisconsin and could potentially strike down Act 10, the 2011 law that prohibited most public sector unions from collectively bargaining.

The court doesn’t plan to hear any cases on Wisconsin’s congressional maps — which Democrats say unfairly hurt them. But both Musk and the top Democrat in the U.S. House have said the ideological balance of the court could influence future district-drawing, and thus, potential control of Congress.

Republicans have singled out Crawford campaign remarks to Democratic donors as proof of potential impartiality in a case on congressional maps. Justices are technically nonpartisan, and have to remain neutral on potential cases while campaigning.

The Supreme Court declined to hear a case on Wisconsin’s congressional maps in 2024.

Crawford and Schimel — who have both received millions from the state Democratic and Republican parties, respectively — have not pledged to recuse themselves from cases involving the two parties.