“I need to talk for just a minute or two about my opponent,” Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford tells a crowd of supporters in Kenosha. “Elon Musk.”
It’s become her signature line. And it was particularly apt for her to deliver on Friday, March 28, the same day Musk announced that he would hold a rally in Wisconsin to hand deliver two million dollar checks to people who had voted in the April 1 election, which he abruptly backtracked on after legal experts pointed out that his pledge violated the state constitution.
“This is the guy,” Crawford says in Kenosha, “who has spent over $25 million trying to keep me off the Wisconsin Supreme Court.”
The spring election will decide the ideological majority on the court. When she entered the race, Crawford, a circuit court judge in Madison’s Dane County, expected to discuss the hot button issues that the court often decides, such as abortion, gerrymandering, voting rights, crime, and public safety. And indeed, the court could soon decide the fate of the state’s 1849 abortion ban, a law restricting collective bargaining for public sector unions, and the legality of Wisconsin’s congressional maps.
But Musk’s involvement—he has spent more money in Wisconsin than any donor to a judicial election in US history—and the controversial, possibly illegal, tactics he’s employed, has dramatically raised the stakes, giving the election huge national significance. “Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler tells me in Kenosha, a lakefront city forty miles south of Milwaukee.
“It’s probably something of a test case for him to see if this works,” Crawford says when we speak after her event, in a former bank built in 1928, with an ornate ceiling and towering chandelier. “And if it works here, I think that we can look forward to seeing Elon Musk trying to buy not just judges, but other elected officials in other states with the same tactics.” She calls Musk’s scheme to pay voters for signing his pac’s petition against “activist judges” and giving million dollar checks to those who’ve voted, “very concerning to me. Because it certainly seems like an effort to buy votes in this election.”
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Author: Ari Berman
Ari Berman is Mother Jones' national voting rights correspondent. He’s the author of the new book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, as well as Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.
