Republicans put Trump’s court fight on the ballot

That’s meant more money from new sources — more than $11 million so far from Elon Musk and his PACs, his first intervention in a state court race. It’s been spent behind a former state attorney general who entered the race early with a plan to “nationalize this” and “unite conservatives,” matching the expected out-of-state spending from liberals.

Democrats have worked to make Musk a problem for Republicans, with Crawford labeling her opponent “Elon Schimel” and national party figures holding anti-“oligarchy” and anti-Musk rallies across the state.

“Democrats are looking for any possible way to fight back, to do something to relieve the just constant anxiety of this Trump/Musk onslaught,” said Democratic Party of Wisconsin chairman Ben Wikler, while hosting a “pet the vote” event in Madison alongside his family dog, Pumpkin. “Organizing to elect Susan Crawford gives them a channel for that energy.”

Republicans, just as confidently, have leaned on Trump. Unlike Dan Kelly, whose 2023 defeat gave liberals their majority, Schimel has embraced the GOP and campaigned at MAGA rallies; direct mail ads from Musk’s America PAC tell Republicans that the judge will “support President Trump’s agenda” if he wins.

This week, as early voting got underway, the president’s court reversals and denunciations of unfriendly judges echoed in Wisconsin. At the Oconomowoc rally, Trump Jr. marveled at how a deportation flight was halted by “some random judge in the middle of nowhere,” linking it to the Schimel-Crawford race.

“A liberal judge, just like this, wants to overrule the will of the President of the United States and the people who put him there with a mandate to end this nonsense,” Trump Jr. said.

The paid TV messaging that most voters will see, from the campaigns and Musk’s $10 million-plus PAC buys, have focused more on lurid crime stories than Trump. They include stories of child sex predators who didn’t get maximum sentences (in anti-Crawford ads) and backlogged rape kits (in anti-Schimel ads) — little of it related to cases that would come before the state’s high court.

The Trump angle is reserved for voters, contacted at their homes in person and in direct mail. In some settings, like his sole televised debate with Crawford, Schimel says he would rule impartially in any interaction with Trump or Musk. With conservative audiences, he is much more direct about his support for Trump, which supporters see as the way to pull out hundreds of thousands of Republicans who would otherwise ignore the race.

“People are really fired up,” said Brett Galaszewski, the vice chair of the Milwaukee County GOP and national enterprise director at Turning Point Action, which has hundreds of paid staff in the state reaching Republicans who typically skip non-presidential elections. “They’re seeing the effects of what DOGE is doing, and what Trump has done in these first days of his presidency, and the everyday Wisconsinite wants more of that.”

Crawford has gone after Schimel’s Musk and GOP ties, and has spoken more carefully about her own support from Democrats. The risk of the GOP’s MAGA campaign, she told Semafor, would be “that it undermines the confidence of Wisconsin citizens in the impartiality of the judiciary and of the Supreme Court, in particular.” Schimel entered the race, he said on Monday, because he saw the Democrats working to “unravel the very foundation of our judicial system by promising how you’re going to rule on cases that aren’t even filed.”

But the candidates have implemented those theories of the race very differently. Schimel has encouraged the president to endorse him, and to come to Wisconsin, but as a corrective to liberal overreach. Crawford has stayed well away from high-profile events organized by Bernie Sanders and Tim Walz.

“I’m not going to discourage anyone who can attract a large audience, and wants to support my candidacy, from showing up,” she told Semafor. “But I do want voters to understand that I’m not coordinating with these folks.” The election, technically, is nonpartisan. But the campaign is not.

The trick to winning Wisconsin’s off-year spring elections, since the parties started polarizing and prioritizing them, is getting out the largest fraction of the usual partisan vote. Hundreds of thousands of people who voted red or blue for president will skip it. That’s inevitable. Two years ago, Justice Janet Protasiewicz won just 62% as many votes as Joe Biden did in 2020, but that was enough for a double-digit popular vote victory. That’s what Republicans want to overwhelm.

They’ve never tried to do that by running back to Trump voters. But the basic idea — telling voters that they have a partisan reason to vote in this nonpartisan race — has worked before. Five years ago, Republicans narrowly won the race for another seat on the court after Democrats out-spent them, running ads about conservative blog posts by candidate Brian Hagedorn. The Republican State Legislative Committee made a last-minute buy that accused liberals of lobbing “false attacks … just like they did against Justice Kavanaugh.”

That was the last Democratic loss before Wikler took over the party. Republicans, through their alliance of outside groups, are trying to replicate what they think he did: selling national donors on the importance of the race, and organizing very early to find unlikely voters. The goal now, said Wikler, is to blow past the huge turnout from 2023 — more than 1 million votes for their candidate, a Democratic record — with deeper organizing. Holding the seat had been part of a multi-year plan to break Republican control of the state, and they would use Musk to remind them of the stakes.

“Door knocks more than double what we did in 2023, phone calls more than double,” said Wikler. “Relational friend to friend outreach, more than quadrupled.”

Democrats’ data suggests that the Musk message is the most powerful motivator for their voters, now that the brief liberal majority has fulfilled one of their 2023 campaign goals, new legislative district maps, and may fulfill another: striking down the state’s 1849 abortion ban. Republicans believe that their issues are more vital and immediate to the hard-to-get voters. Every day, they are hearing about some Trump setback, and they’re being told that this is a way to stop them.

If that works for Republicans, at a moment when Democrats are feeling depressed by their party’s national leaders, it would reveal a strategy that the GOP can use for the rest of the year. And it would devastate Democrats, who have been outperforming in special elections since they turned over the White House. When I asked Walz what defeat would mean, he didn’t try to spin it. “Oh my God, that’s it,” he said. “That’s the country. That’s the republic. That’s everything.”

Shah Mehdi, 40, who planned to vote early for Schimel, said that he was sick of Democratic attacks on both Musk and Trump, who he has complete faith in; he had traveled to DC for Trump’s inauguration rally and caught one of the pens the president threw to the audience after signing a pile of executive orders.

“They are attacking patriot Elon and he’s rescuing astronauts from space and removing waste from our hard-earned tax dollars,” Mehdi said. “It’s crazy.”

Sammie Sackmann, a Democrat who’d come to Eau Claire to hear Walz speak, said that a Schimel win would empower Trump to do so many things she feared. “Our town is already behind in so many things, like education,” she said. “For us to take things away from people who can’t even vote yet, to take away their future — it would be unthinkable.”