Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election this spring will decide just one seat, but the contest already is shaping up as one of the most costly and contentious battles of the new year – with the control of the seven-member court and the fate of a 19th century abortion ban hanging in the balance.
The race – between liberal candidate, Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford, and the conservative contender, Waukesha County Circuit Judge Brad Schimel – also marks a test of how voters in a crucial swing state view Republican and Democratic politics in the first few months of Donald Trump’s presidency. And it underscores the role of the judiciary in sorting out the thorny issues deeply dividing Americans, ranging from the future of abortion in a post-Dobbs era to union protections for public-sector workers.
The election is expected to top the $51 million price tag of the last Supreme Court race in the Badger State, as tallied by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. That race, in 2023, broke national spending records for a judicial election.
The April 1 Wisconsin judicial election is officially nonpartisan, but political actors on both sides of the aisle are racing to shape its outcome. Billionaires, such as liberal financier George Soros and Republican-aligned roofing magnate Diane Hendricks, have written big checks to the state Democratic and Republican parties, respectively – which has transferred campaign cash to the candidates’ committees.
A new round of ads is slated to begin Thursday from a group tied to the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The group, Building America’s Future, has bought $1.6 million of advertising in the race so far, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact.
Musk – who spent more than a quarter billion dollars to help elect Trump last year and is the leading figure in the new administration’s drive to slash spending and remake the federal workforce – previously expressed support for Schimel’s election.
“It’s going to be a blockbuster,” said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a state where a Democrat controls the governor’s mansion and Republicans hold the legislative majority, the state Supreme Court “is the center of the action,” he said. “It’s become a place where a lot of hot-button issues people care about get decided.”
Former attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, is making plans to campaign for Crawford next month, a source familiar with the matter said. An email Wednesday from former Vice President Kamala Harris’ team seized on the Musk-aligned group’s investments, asking supporters to donate to the Democratic National Committee because “Wisconsin Democrats need our help to fight back.”
“We don’t have Elon Musk, but we do have lots and lots of folks who care who are willing to chip-in a few bucks where and when they can,” the email read.
While Trump ally Musk has voiced his preferred choice in the race, it’s unclear whether the president will decide to wade into the politics of the state’s judicial election, but Schimel has welcomed the possibility of a Trump endorsement in a state he won in 2024.
“Who wouldn’t want the endorsement of the sitting president who is enjoying high popularity right now?” Schimel recently said on WISN-TV’s political show “UPFRONT.”
Democrats are casting the race as one measure of whether voters in a purple state want to erect judicial guardrails on the kinds of policies espoused by Trump and his allies. The court campaign comes as groups affected by the sweeping actions that Trump and Musk have taken are asking federal courts to block the new administration’s moves.
And liberals have sought to portray Schimel – who advanced conservative policies during his tenure as state attorney general between 2015 and 2019 – as a jurist likely to operate in lockstep with Trump and his Make America Great Again movement.
“Courts are one of the only checks of the Trump administration’s power,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told CNN in an interview. “Having a MAGA state Supreme Court in a state like Wisconsin would be disastrous.”
Republicans, on the other hand, argue a liberal majority in the court threatens decisions made on the legislative level, including a 2011 law that stripped government workers of collective bargaining rights.
“This open seat is really going to determine if we’re going to have a court that is run by activist liberal idealogues or if we’re going to have a court that’s going to have a majority of constitutional conservatives who interpret the law as its written and not how they wish it was written,” state Rep. Tyler August, the majority leader of Wisconsin’s State Assembly, told CNN in an interview.
The two judicial candidates are set to face off for the first time in a debate hosted by WISN-TV on March 12, less than three weeks before election day.
Closely divided court in a closely divided state
Wisconsin holds a pivotal place in US politics, as one of a handful of swing states that helps determine who wins the White House. Five of the last seven presidential elections in the Badger State have been decided by less than 1 percentage point. Last year, the state swung to Trump by roughly 29,300 votes out of more than 3.3 million cast, after narrowly backing Democrat Joe Biden four years earlier.
Wisconsin gave Trump his narrowest margin of victory last year, even as the state’s voters reelected Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin to a third term.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court race will set up enthusiasm tests for both parties in the state. Democrats on the national level find themselves in a rebuilding period as they look to shore up party operations and tweak messaging following bruising losses in the 2024 election.
The outcome of the April election “will show everyone in American politics whether Democrats have found their fighting spirit,” Wikler said.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, who party members chose to lead the committee this month, will make his first trip to Wisconsin to campaign over the weekend.
“The DNC is all hands on deck to turbocharge the coordinated campaign on the ground,” said DNC deputy communications director Abhi Rahman. “Voters don’t want Elon Musk in the White House and they certainly don’t want him buying our elections. We will fight like hell to ensure that the Wisconsin Supreme Court continues to represent all Wisconsinites, and isn’t bought and paid for by out of touch billionaires.”
For Republicans, the race could demonstrate whether the gains Trump made with the electorate can extend to other conservative candidates outside of the presidential election year, especially in key battleground states like Wisconsin.
“We just won the state for Trump,” said Wisconsin Republican party chair Brian Schimming. “Our people our pretty jacked up, pretty excited. That has rolled over into this race. I think certainly our grassroots understand what the stakes are in this race.”
After the 2020 presidential election, the Wisconsin high court – then narrowly controlled by conservatives – played a key role in rebuffing Trump’s challenge to Biden’s win with one right-leaning justice siding with liberals to toss out a Trump lawsuit.
Liberals currently hold a one-seat advantage on the high court, an edge gained two years ago after a liberal, Janet Protasiewicz, beat Republican-aligned Dan Kelly to win an open seat. A Crawford victory this year would retain the liberal majority, while a Schimel win would flip the court back to conservatives.
The winner is set to serve a 10-year term.
Since the liberal takeover two years ago, the court has delivered major victories to Democrats – reversing a 2022 high court ruling that had imposed a near total ban on ballot drop boxes and striking down state legislative maps drawn by Republicans.
The court also could revisit congressional maps that have helped the GOP hold a lopsided advantage of 6 out of 8 US House seats, despite the razor-thin margins of victory for Republicans and Democrats in statewide races. Opponents of Crawford have criticized her for participating in a briefing with Democratic donors that was described on an invitation as a “chance to put two more House seats in play in 2026.”
Republicans argue it showed she would support redrawing the state’s congressional maps to favor Democrats, while the Crawford camp said she has not weighed in on the congressional maps, did not see the invitation for the event and joined the call only for a short period to share her background and rationale for running.
Additionally, the justices could weigh in on a 2011 state law that stripped collective-bargaining rights from thousands of nurses, teachers and other public employees and sparked massive protests against lawmakers and the state’s governor at the time, Republican Scott Walker. A challenge to that law is now working its way through a lower court.
But perhaps the biggest issue looming over the court centers on abortion. The justices are set to decide whether an abortion ban enacted in the state in 1849 and that provides no exception for rape or incest can still be enforced.
In an interview with CNN, Crawford declined to weigh in on the 19th century law, saying it would violate the state’s judicial code for her to comment on an issue pending before the court.
But Crawford, who represented Planned Parenthood as a private attorney, indicated that the government’s role in abortion should be limited. “As a woman who has gone through pregnancy and birth, I always wanted to be able to make my own decisions about my health and my family, along with my doctors,” she said.
Crawford’s campaign has taken aim at Schimel’s record on abortion and pointed to an audio recording of him telling a local Republican group last year that: “There is not a constitutional right to abortion in our state constitution.”
In a statement to CNN, Schimel said “I can’t imagine making the deep and personal decision that a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy has to make. I cherish all life.”
“But a judge’s job is to apply the law, not make the law,” he added. “The people of Wisconsin, through referendum or their elected representatives, should decide the question of abortion. As the next Supreme Court Justice, I will respect the will of the people.”
Schimel’s campaign also has run an ad featuring his two daughters who he and his wife adopted. “I’m personally grateful for the choice their mothers made,” Schimel says in the spot.
Crawford’s campaign has run ads tying him to abortion restrictions and pointing to what it said was a two-year backlog of untested rape kits during his tenure as state attorney general to argue that he had neglected sexual assault survivors. An ad from Schimel said he cleared a backlog of 4,000 tests while in office.
For its part, some of Schimel campaign’s advertising has sought to portray Crawford as soft on crime, questioning her sentencing and bond decisions in two cases involving child sexual assault. In an interview, Crawford said Schimel’s ads are “full of inaccuracies.”
Flood of early money
Crawford and Schimel have already exceeded the fundraising pace by candidates at this point in the 2023 race – with the liberal candidate raising the most. But by Wednesday afternoon, advertising purchased by groups supporting Schimel had helped conservative interests pull ahead of Crawford and her allies on the airwaves, according to AdImpact’s tally.
Among the groups newly active in the race: The conservative-aligned Building America’s Future, a nonprofit that does not disclose its donors but has been funded at least in part by Musk in the past, according to Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.
An official with Building America’s Future declined comment, and Musk did not respond to a CNN inquiry.
The race has been on Musk’s radar for weeks. On his social media platform last month, he highlighted the court’s 2024 decision restoring the use of ballot boxes in elections and urged his followers “to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!”
Other big donors to the political party committees active in the race include wealthy Republicans, such as Hendricks, the roofing magnate; Elizabeth Uihlein, whose family owns a packaging firm; and J. Joe Ricketts, the co-owner of the Chicago Cubs.
Combined they donated more than $2 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party, which in turn transferred nearly $1.7 million to Schimel’s campaign last month. And a group that has been funded by the conservative Uihlein family in the past, Fair Courts America, is slated to begin advertising next week, according to upcoming buys tracked by AdImpact.
On the Democratic side, Soros and fellow Democratic billionaire, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, recently donated $1 million and $500,000, respectively, to the Wisconsin Democratic Party. The party has sent $2 million to Crawford’s campaign.
Schimming, the GOP state party chair, welcomed support from Republicans across the country, arguing the court election could have far-reaching implications beyond Wisconsin.
“I cannot emphasize enough that what happens in the Supreme Court Wisconsin may literally reach to control of the House of Representatives,” Schimming said. “For anyone who thinks I’m ringing the alarm bell too hard, I’m not.”
Wikler said the high stakes of the Wisconsin election mean it’s all hands on deck for Democrats everywhere.
“For so many Democrats, there’s this question of ‘What do we do now?’ as people watch in horror as Trump and Elon Musk shred the federal government,” he said. “One blinking red-light answer is to put your energy into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. That’s the message we are trying to yell from the rooftops.”
CNN’s David Wright and Steve Contorno contributed to this article.
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