The SCOWIS race was about more than Elon Musk

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Total spending by billionaires and Political Action Committees (PACs) for the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court (or SCOWIS) race reached $100 million. (Unclear if that includes the $1 million checks billionaire oligarch Elon Musk handed out to not-so-random voters.) That’s almost double what was spent in 2023, when Justice Janet Protasciewicz was elected, a race that made the money spent in other state court elections that year “look quaint by comparison,” writes Douglas Keith of the Brennan Center for Justice.

By now it also feels quaint, if no less true, to say that we obviously need to get money out of politics. But regardless of whether the path forward is through overturning Citizens United or passing legislation, that’s not happening anytime soon. We should continue to work to make that happen, but we have to accept that, for the time being, buckets of corporate money will continue to flow into elections and spew out the ads, flyers, and text messages no one asked for.

However, the biggest spenders in this race didn’t win. Brad Schimel’s spending—whether by his official campaign or PACs—dwarfed Susan Crawford’s by around $10 million, yet Schimel lost by almost 10 points. One theory that’s been floated is that Elon Musk’s involvement backfired for Schimel’s campaign by motivating more voter turnout on the left. An estimated 2.3 million people voted last week, which is higher than the 1.8 million people who cast ballots in the 2023 SCOWIS election. But that higher turnout didn’t result in a higher margin—the 2023 SCOWIS election also had a 55-45 split between the two candidates. 

The likelier explanation is that Musk’s influence cut both ways—maybe it prompted more conservatives to vote for Schimel while also prompting more liberals to vote for Crawford? Maybe that’s true on an individual level, but the numbers tell a different story. Instead this election appears to be a continuation of a trend beginning with the 2020 spring election, when only 1.5 million people voted, but Jill Karofsky beat Dan Kelly, again, 55-45.

A 10-point difference in a blue state is pretty solid, but in a “purple” state like Wisconsin? That is not politics as usual. (I can hear the political science research proposals being churned out as I write this.) At the same time SCOWIS elections were seeing these wide margins, other statewide races were spending as much—if not more—money, had higher voter turnout, but the winning candidates still barely squeaked past their opponents. In his 2022 reelection campaign, Gov. Tony Evers only won 51% of the vote over Tim Michels, who received almost 48% of votes (one independent candidate won 1%). More than 2.6 million people voted in that election—more than in either of the most recent SCOWIS elections—and more than $234 million was spent by both gubernatorial candidates and their PACs. 

Yes, yes, you can’t compare a fall gubernatorial election to a spring SCOWIS election. Apples and oranges. But that’s sort of my point: whatever is happening with SCOWIS elections is unique to SCOWIS. The influence of campaign cash and national political figures isn’t enough to explain it. Furthermore, this trend with SCOWIS didn’t start until 2020. In 2019, Brian Hagedorn beat Lisa Neubauer, 50.22% to 49.72%, by less than 6,000 votes. As for the campaign spending, that is also a continuation of a trend that started in 2015, when SCOWIS opened the floodgates for outside money to pour into state elections.

Any number of factors, big or small, could be shaping these outcomes. But I have a theory that I don’t think is getting enough consideration: gerrymandering. The only people who benefit from a gerrymander are elected politicians in safe seats. Voters learned that elected officials tend to be less responsive to their constituents, even if they’re from the same political party. Throughout the redistricting fight in Wisconsin, when people described what they wanted out of the new maps, the most common word they used second only to “fair,” was “competitive.” In Wisconsin, we have seen widely popular proposals not discussed, much less enacted, because Wisconsin Republicans have been responding to a far-right agenda instead of the will of their constituents.

There was no better illustration of this than The People’s Maps Commission (PMC). The commission received feedback on proposed redistricting maps from all across the state, only for Wisconsin Republicans to push through their own maps, which not only perpetuated the gerrymander, but further solidified it. At a hearing on the maps, 150 people from across the state testified that the Legislature should take up the PMC maps. Only two spoke in favor of the Republican maps: Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg). Guess which maps were taken up by the Legislature? The Legislature approved the Republican maps in November 2021, and one week later Evers vetoed them.

The fight over the maps continued. The then-conservative SCOWIS approved Evers’ maps, but then the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down, so SCOWIS installed the Republican maps. (Yes, I’m oversimplifying.) It was only when the SCOWIS flipped to a liberal majority in 2023 that we were able to implement our current, more-competitive state legislative maps. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this fight was center stage in Wisconsin politics when we had our first SCOWIS race with a 55-45 split that favored the liberal candidate. Wisconsinites experienced mass disenfranchisement; for some voters that took the form of literal barriers to voting, but for others it took the form of a realization that their votes no longer mattered, at least not to the Republican majority in the Legislature. We then voted, by a large margin, for justices who said they would not allow that to happen again. 

We should get money out of politics. But even in our permissive-to-downright-corrupt landscape of campaign finance, it’s important to remember that money is not destiny. As much as Musk tried to literally buy votes, it’s not that simple. You can buy ad time and billboards, but if people don’t buy the message you’re selling, they’ll either tune it out or be even more motivated to vote for your opponent. All money can do is amplify the message.

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