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This Progressive Judge Is Democrats' Best Hope to Take Down Elon Musk - Mother Jones
“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 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.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/susan-crawford-elon-musk-wisconsin-supreme-court-schimel-ttrump/