Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
For the past several months, pick-me gazillionaire Elon Musk has been firing tens of thousands of federal workers in the most cartoonishly evil ways possible—gutting things like NIH cancer research and HIV prevention programs while bragging about feeding entire agencies of dedicated civil servants “into the wood chipper.” The backlash has already started to hit him where it hurts, as “Tesla Takedown” protests have turned his once edgy cars into pricey pariah boxes for toxic losers.
But Tuesday’s Wisconsin state Supreme Court election might be Musk’s most delicious comeuppance yet. Musk made the race his personal mission, saying that it “will be important for the future of civilization” and spending $22 million in support of Republican Brad Schimel, turning it into the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. That Schimel got trounced by Democrat Susan Crawford tells us a few things about the limits of money in American politics.
Neither Musk nor anyone in his orbit nor in the state GOP seemed to understand, before Tuesday night, that his presence in the race was having the opposite of its intended effect. “I thought he was going to be an asset for this race,” the Outagamie County GOP chair told Politico in an instantly memeable quote. “Maybe I have blinders on.” She wasn’t alone.
Unfortunately for Wisconsin Republicans and their plot to stay in power forever through aggressive court-approved gerrymandering, Musk did not just quietly write checks to his favorite political action committees, like the most effective billionaire reactionaries have been doing since the Supreme Court unleashed Citizens United on the country. Instead, he decided to make himself the face of the Schimel campaign, planting himself in the Badger State, headlining rallies, and writing million-dollar checks to well-connected Republican supporters—a seeming display of flagrant vote-buying that the state attorney general challenged (though, as in Pennsylvania last year, Musk found a way to carry out the stunt without it being deemed an illegal lottery).
Musk has probably received undue credit for Republicans’ stunning but extremely narrow victories in the November 2024 elections, and Donald Trump is reportedly already reconsidering his role in the administration. But one of the first and most obvious lessons to draw from Musk’s Wisconsin fiasco is that there are real, tangible limits to the influence that money can buy in American politics. The GOP’s victory last fall happened, after all, despite the party’s being outspent by the Harris campaign and its affiliated super PACs. It’s not even clear that the hundreds of millions of dollars that Musk himself poured into the election were a net positive for the GOP at all, since the party tended to do worse in states where Trump mounted a visible campaign than where he and his movement were mostly background noise and could more credibly pretend they weren’t going to do all the horrific things they are now doing.
You also don’t need multiple regression models to see that the big spender has lost two of the four post–Citizens United presidential elections. That doesn’t make the orgiastic frenzy of millionaire and billionaire spending in those elections good for the country or really anything but an embarrassing stain on American democracy. While political science research suggests that campaign spending can drive turnout in generally lower-profile judicial races, Musk’s face-plant in Wisconsin suggests that, happily, there are real limits to what can be accomplished by throwing stacks of cash at random Midwestern Republicans. It also helped that Crawford was not exactly a pauper and got only marginally outspent in a race that saw over $107 million in expenditures. According to political scientists John Sides, Daron Shaw, and Matt Grossman in Campaigns and Elections, in local races, “a better-funded candidate can totally eclipse a relatively impoverished opponent,” and that just isn’t what happened here. One obvious caveat, though, is that the current Democratic coalition (a group that includes high-propensity college-educated voters as a key bloc) seems to have a turnout advantage in midterm, off-year, and special elections that it has had trouble replicating in presidential elections over the past decade. In this case, at least, the outcome was not attributable to differential turnout, which was high across the board.
Given that his approval ratings are even worse than Trump’s, Musk was always going to be a net negative in this contest. But he didn’t help his case with his over-the-top rhetoric and actions. On X, his wild-eyed gibberish about, for example, how only the far-right Alternative for Germany party can save the country is signal-boosted by his algorithms and lauded mindlessly by his army of clout-chasing reply guys. Massively overpaying to acquire Twitter has given him a platform that reliably amplifies his incessant lies and feeds his porcelain ego.
In the real world, though, Musk unintentionally highlighted his own absurdity to people who may have previously paid him little mind. His extravagant efforts to boost turnout forced people who aren’t terminally online to ask themselves why the world’s richest dude wants Brad Schimel to be on the state Supreme Court so badly he’s willing to risk legal action.
One negative result hardly spells the end of Elon Musk’s threat to American democracy, nor should it give Democrats false confidence that they have somehow cracked the MAGA code and can bank on retaking the House in 2026. Republicans did, after all, manage to get Wisconsin voters to enshrine into the state constitution a requirement to show a photo ID when voting, a referendum that Musk has bragged about.
But Musk’s flop in Wisconsin should serve as a reminder of two things. First and most important, the MAGA-era GOP is not some unstoppable godlike force, despite recent capitulations from craven bootlickers at law firms like Paul Weiss and universities like Columbia. The nation’s political thermostat is not broken, and Susan Crawford didn’t need to join the pile-on against trans folks or clap while Trump’s goon squads disappear immigrants who are here legally into Salvadoran gulags in order to win this election. Political gravity did a lot of the work here, and it is still very real.
The second is that the utility of both Musk’s infinite bullshit machine and his towering piles of money is not limitless. Even Trump now seems to realize that Musk is dragging his administration down with him. And while it isn’t happening as quickly as many Democrats would hope, given the administration’s constant and shocking abrogations of the constitutional order, many Americans seem to be slowly realizing that the government they unwisely elected in November isn’t invested in their well-being after all. There are some things even Elon Musk can’t buy his way out of.
