“Eighty per cent of our canvassing interactions are about Musk,” Matt Mareno, the chair of the Waukesha County Democratic Party, told me. The county is heavily Republican, but Mareno said that many people have expressed frustration that Musk is unelected and not accountable to anyone. Recently, a canvasser for Schimel carrying literature from Musk’s America PAC showed up at Mareno’s door. Mareno has a large Susan Crawford campaign sign in his yard. “He had no idea who Susan Crawford was,” Mareno told me. “I said, ‘So, like, you don’t know who’s running against your boy Brad?’ ” The canvasser didn’t. He had been flown in from Texas and was being put up at a hotel and paid twenty-five dollars an hour. (Turning Point USA is paying canvassers for Schimel even more—two hundred and fifty dollars a day.) “They’re using the sledgehammer approach,” Mareno said. “If you can write a twenty-million-dollar check and bring people in to hit every door, then you can do whatever you want, and it works because of scale.” (Neither America PAC nor Turning Point USA returned requests for comment.)
Mareno, who helps organize the Democratic canvassing operations for the county, expects to deploy about six hundred canvassers—all of them unpaid volunteers—during the final weekend of the campaign, about ten times the normal amount for a spring election. “The thing that makes me feel good is our energy,” he said. “I’ve never seen it this high for a spring race before. At the same time, we’ve never seen this level of money coming on the other side.”
The flow of money into Schimel’s campaign was made possible by the destruction of Wisconsin’s once robust campaign-finance laws. Those laws grew out of the state’s progressive tradition, which sought to restrain the power of wealth in the political system. The movement was spearheaded by Robert (Fighting Bob) La Follette, who served, at various times, as Wisconsin’s governor, a U.S. senator, and a third-party candidate for President. Under La Follette, Wisconsin became the country’s premier “laboratory of democracy,” passing major reforms to protect labor and the environment and to promote clean and transparent government. By 1911, Wisconsin had banned corporations from donating to candidates, set strict limits on spending, and barred politicians from trading favors for donations. The state’s reputation for clean government deepened in the nineteen-seventies, when it passed further reforms that included public financing of elections.
But in 2010 the U.S. Supreme Court issued Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a sweeping decision that struck down limits on independent election spending by corporations and ushered in the era of the super PAC. Wisconsin Republicans took it upon themselves to dismantle state-level campaign-finance restrictions. Schimel, as the state’s attorney general, supported the effort. A criminal investigation led by the Milwaukee district attorney had allegedly found, among other things, that Walker’s campaign illegally coördinated with dark-money groups in the run-up to a 2012 recall election, which Walker narrowly won. Individuals involved in the dark-money groups, who were later supported by the attorney general’s office, brought a lawsuit challenging the investigation, and arguing that such coördination should be permitted on First Amendment grounds. In 2015, the court agreed with the plaintiffs, in a 4–2 decision, and killed the investigation, retroactively legalizing coördination. Schimel applauded the ruling. “The assertive recognition of First Amendment rights by the Wisconsin Supreme Court protects free speech for all Wisconsinites,” he said.
In an unusual move, the court also ordered the prosecutors to destroy more than a thousand documents that they had gathered as evidence. But some of them were first leaked to the Guardian, showing what appeared to be quid-pro-quo payments to dark-money groups, including seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars paid by the owner of a company that had manufactured lead paint in exchange for legislation granting legal immunity from lead-poisoning claims. Schimel ordered an investigation to find out who leaked the documents. Meanwhile, he declined to investigate a conservative plaintiff who intentionally violated a gag order by speaking to the Wall Street Journal.
The court’s ruling prompted the Wisconsin legislature to gut the state’s campaign-finance laws. Permissible donations for statewide offices doubled, from ten thousand to twenty thousand. More significantly, the legislature removed limits on donations to political parties, political-action committees, and legislative campaign committees. Political parties were allowed to give as much as they wanted to candidates. “It has become a shell game here,” Matt Rothschild, the former executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, told me. “Why even have a twenty-thousand-dollar donation limit to a candidate when you can give twenty million dollars, like Musk is doing, to outside groups?”
Since 2019, the state Democratic Party, with Wikler as its chair, has consistently outpaced Republicans in fund-raising, drawing enormous contributions from wealthy out-of-state donors. Democratic-backed candidates have won nine of the past twelve statewide races. However, two of the most important recent elections went Republican: the 2022 Senate race and the 2024 Presidential race. Rothschild, who advocates against out-of-control spending, regardless of party, believes the recent Democratic winning streak needs to be put in perspective. “There are more rich billionaires on the right—and they have more money,” Rothschild said. “Elon Musk is proving that right now. It wasn’t a game that we could continually win.”
The first Musk-funded ads attacking Crawford mistakenly used a photo of a different Susan Crawford, something of a metaphor for Musk’s ignorance of the state. In a recent debate, Crawford called her opponent “Elon Schimel,” and she has noted how Musk is energizing her base. “Once he got involved, I think that really lit a fire under people,” she told me. “People do not like to see Elon Musk walking into a state judicial race and basically trying to buy a seat on a state Supreme Court.”
A day after Trump’s endorsement, Schimel joined Musk and Senator Ron Johnson for a chat streamed on X. If the Republicans win the race, Johnson said, “we have to thank Elon for all the support he’s given.” The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk is planning to expand his state-based efforts by getting involved in local elections in Nevada, where he has clashed with a county commission over a tunneling project. The Journal noted that other battleground states, including Arizona and Georgia, are clamoring for him to get involved in their races, too. Last week, Musk announced that America PAC will be offering a hundred dollars to any registered Wisconsin voter who signs a petition “in opposition to activist judges,” a reprise of an offer he made to Pennsylvania voters during the 2024 Presidential election. This past Wednesday, he awarded a million dollars to one of the petition’s signers, with the promise of more million-dollar prizes to come. “It’s corrupt, it’s extreme, and it’s disgraceful to our state and judiciary,” a Crawford spokesperson said in a statement.
Two days later, Musk announced that he would hold a rally in Wisconsin for registered voters and “personally hand over” one-million-dollar checks to two people who have already cast their ballots. (Early voting began March 18th.) “Conditioning entry to this event and eligibility for the $1 million payout on whether someone has voted arguably violates Wisconsin law, which prohibits providing anything of value to induce a person to vote,” Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance expert at Documented, a nonpartisan watchdog, told me. Musk quickly deleted the original tweet and posted on X that the rally would now be open to anyone who signed his petition and that the million-dollar checks would be given to two attendees “to be spokesmen for the petition.”
