Musk Is Not Stopping at DOGE

Opinion|This Election Will Be a Crucial Test of Musk’s Power

Elon Musk has set his sights, and spent tens of millions of dollars, on being involved in national and international elections and politics. Now his focus has turned to a U.S. state election: the race to fill a crucial seat that will determine control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

That election is scheduled for April 1 (early voting begins on Tuesday), and Mr. Musk is supporting the conservative candidate Brad Schimel over the liberal candidate Susan Crawford. A victory for Judge Schimel would flip the court from liberal to conservative control, with potentially enormous implications for access to voting, legislative districts, abortion and more.

The prospect of a billionaire with outsize influence over the federal government also seeking to dictate the direction of state-level democracy should be profoundly alarming to anyone committed to federalism, a core constitutional value. Federalism is especially important right now. With unified Republican control in Washington, D.C., and a Congress that has been a willing participant in its own defenestration, states and state institutions are poised to become ever more critical sites for the preservation of rights and the rule of law.

Mr. Musk’s interjection started in January with an X post urging his followers to “vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court.” (The contest is nonpartisan, but it was clear what he meant: Vote for Judge Schimel.) He has since unleashed his spending juggernaut on the race: According to recent filings, his AmericaPAC has spent over $6.3 million on it, and the Musk-affiliated Building America’s Future has spent another $4.3 million. Yet another Musk-affiliated PAC, Progress 2028, is airing deceptive ads that purport to support Judge Crawford but in fact appear designed to help Judge Schimel.

Wisconsin’s politics are as divided as those of any state, and the State Supreme Court has long been in the middle of them. Wisconsin has a Democratic governor and attorney general, a Republican-controlled legislature, and a 4-3 State Supreme Court with liberals currently in the majority. In November 2024, Mr. Trump won the state by just 29,000 votes — his narrowest victory in any battleground state — while the Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin was narrowly re-elected.

For years, extreme gerrymandering produced an enormous Republican advantage in the State Legislature. But in 2023 — in another expensive and closely watched Supreme Court race — liberal Janet Protasiewicz beat conservative Dan Kelly to change the ideological balance of the high court. Later that year the new 4-3 majority found that the State Legislature’s gerrymandered maps violated the State Constitution and needed to be redrawn. The new maps ultimately put in place, drafted by the Democratic governor and enacted by the Republican legislature, created the conditions of genuine democratic competition.