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The most important election of the year arrives April 1, and will decide who controls the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The race pits Brad Schimel, the former Republican Attorney General, against Susan Crawford, a judge from heavily leftist Dane County. With the recent retirement of progressive justice Ann Walsh Bradley, the state’s highest court now stands deadlocked, with three conservatives and three liberals, so the winner will be the tie-breaking vote in what might be the swingiest of the swing states.
The election has nationwide implications, in more ways than one.
Democrats are attempting to make the race a referendum on President Trump’s most potent ally, Elon Musk. Here in Wisconsin, the party is currently running an ad that barely mentions Schimel — but instead attacks Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
The narrator accuses the “out of control” Musk of threatening to cut Social Security, slash cancer research and eliminate the Department of Education, and damns Schimel in passing, saying he’d let Musk get away with all of it.
Musk has pumped millions of dollars into groups backing Schimel, so if Democrats successfully paint the conservative candidate as a Musk puppet, this strategy will undoubtedly spread nationwide. If liberals succeed in defeating Schimel based on DOGE’s handiwork, it might actually be Democrats who keep Musk in the news to use his influence as a talking point in the 2026 midterms.
The contest is also an early look at how voters feel about Trump’s second term. The president has won Wisconsin twice — each time with fewer than 20,000 votes, or less than 1% of the statewide tally.
Trump endorsed Schimel on Friday, calling Crawford a “Radical Left Liberal” who has been soft on crime, and effectively tying Schimel to his own agenda.
“And if she wins, the Movement to restore our Nation will bypass Wisconsin,” Trump warned.
A Marquette University Law School poll conducted in February showed Wisconsin residents split on Trump’s job performance, with 51% disapproving and 48% approving. (Musk fared worse: Only 41% of respondents viewed him favorably.)
The race also might indicate how much swing-state voters will be hearing about abortion in the near future. Democrats are pitching Schimel as an abortion extremist: In Wisconsin, pro-abortion activists have been unsuccessful in rescinding an 1849 law that bans abortion in the state. A 4-3 liberal state court majority would almost certainly do so.
But while Democrats have counted on abortion as a big election-winning issue in the post-Roe world, Republicans like Trump continue to win statewide here. If it fails to take out Schimel, liberals may be forced to drop abortion as their silver-bullet issue.
And of course, Schimel’s election could thwart Democrats’ hopes of pushing changes through the courts that they can’t pass in the GOP-majority state legislature.
Their top priority is overturning Act 10, former Gov. Scott Walker’s 2011 law that effectively ended collective bargaining for government unions.
Before its passage, public employees paid nothing for their health or retirement benefits; Walker’s law required them to make modest contributions in line with the private sector.
When membership in a government union was compulsory, union bosses would take a portion of employee salaries and pump the cash into Democrats’ campaigns to keep sweetheart union deals coming.
Crawford has bragged about her efforts to overturn the anti-collective bargaining law, boasting in a Madison-area newspaper that she “fought against Act 10.”
As protesters circled the state capitol in 2011 to protest Act 10, their favorite chant was, “This is what democracy looks like!”
In 2025, “democracy” may well look like liberal judges overturning a popular law to restore a money spigot in the interest of funding their own campaigns — a flood of cash that could drown future Republican presidential candidates in the Badger State.
Christian Schneider, a former columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, writes at Anti-Knowledge and hosts the podcast “Wasn’t That Special: 50 Years of SNL.”