Mother Jones illustration; Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Getty
On February 20, a dark money group funded by Elon Musk began running ads attacking progressive judge Susan Crawford, who is running in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April that will decide the balance of power on the court. Another super-PAC created by Musk has spent $2 million on voter turnout efforts in support of conservative candidate Brad Schimel, a former state attorney general who was appointed to a judgeship in suburban Milwaukee by former Republican Governor Scott Walker. Collectively, groups tied to Musk have already spent more than $4.2 million on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race—a clear sign that his plans for oligarchy extend well beyond Washington.
“I’ve been tracking these races for many years,” says Douglas Keith, senior counsel in the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “I’ve never seen this much interest in a state supreme court election coming directly from the White House.”
“In North Carolina, there has been a multi-year, hyper focused effort among political actors in the state to gain and keep control over the state supreme court. It is getting harder and harder for the public to think of these courts as doing anything different than raw politics.”
On the same day the Musk-funded ads started running in Wisconsin, the Republican majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court issued a little-noticed decision that increases the likelihood that Republicans will overturn the election of Democratic State Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs—the last uncertified race from November 2024.
These two developments show the extraordinary steps Republicans are taking to rig the political system in their bid to preserve state power. With all the focus on a constitutional crisis in Donald Trump’s Washington, it’s easy to overlook how a similar dynamic is playing out at the state level.
The GOP majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked the state election board in January from certifying Riggs’ victory after two recounts confirmed her 734-vote lead. More than two months after the election, the court finally sent the case back to the lower courts, but three of six justices, including Republican Chief Justice Paul Newby, expressed their support for overturning the election and throwing out more than 65,000 ballots challenged by Republican candidate Jefferson Griffin, even though he hasn’t presented a single instance of someone voting illegally.
On February 20, the court ruled 4-2 that it would not bypass the court of appeals, on which Griffin sits, further delaying any final ruling. Here’s why that matters: a lower court has already rejected Griffin’s voter challenges. So too has the state board of elections. But if the court of appeals, which has a 12-3 Republican majority, rules in favor of their colleague Griffin and the state supreme court deadlocks 3-3, the appeals court would have the final say.
The fix appears to be in. The chief judge of the appeals court, Chris Dillon, will choose the panel of judges that hears Griffin’s appeal. Chief Justice Newby, who Griffin has called a “good friend and mentor,” appointed Dillon as the top judge last year, breaking with precedent to oust sitting Republican Judge Donna Stroud, who was deemed too liberal by hard-right Republicans. Fellow Republican judges, including Griffin and North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Phil Berger Jr., donated to a primary campaign against Stroud. Dillon owes his power to Newby—and Newby has made it very clear he’ll go to unprecedented lengths to put his protégé Griffin on the court.
If that wasn’t enough of an old boys club, another member of the court of appeals, Tom Murry, donated $5,000 to Griffin’s legal effort to challenge Riggs’s victory but has not recused himself from potentially hearing the case despite calls for him to do so. Newby’s wife, along with the wife of another Republican state supreme court justice, donated the maximum amount, $6,400, to Griffin’s legal fund.
Musk’s donations may have as much to do with self-interest as ideology. His first tweet about the race, urging his followers to “vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” came a week after Tesla sued the state for ruling that it could not open car dealerships in Wisconsin.
North Carolina Republicans won a majority on the state supreme court in part by changing the rules of how these races function, including eliminating public financing for judicial elections and turning previously nonpartisan contests into partisan races. “In North Carolina, there has been a multi-year, hyper focused effort among political actors in the state to gain and keep control over the state supreme court,” says Keith. “It is getting harder and harder for the public to think of these courts as doing anything different than raw politics, and to have any reason to trust their decisions as worth following. And a state supreme court overturning an election after the fact and disenfranchising voters in order to get their ally on the bench with them would only make it harder for the public to trust the decisions coming out of this court.”
In Wisconsin, top GOP donors are trying to buy the state supreme court race so they don’t have to overturn it. Schimel is running as an openly MAGA candidate in the ostensibly nonpartisan race. He attended Trump’s inauguration, claimed the January 6 insurrectionists did not receive fair trials, and said he’d welcome Trump’s endorsement. Musk’s America PAC has spent $2.2 million on get-out-the-vote efforts and digital ads, while another group funded by him, Building America’s Future, has spent $2 million on ads and other forms of media attacking Crawford for allegedly giving a lenient sentence to a child molester, advancing the longtime GOP playbook of attacking Democrats as soft on crime. Another ad by Wisconsin’s top business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, calls the progressive judge “Catch ‘N Release Crawford.”
Musk’s donations may have as much to do with self-interest as ideology. His first tweet about the race, urging his followers to “vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” came a week after Tesla sued the state for ruling that it could not open car dealerships in Wisconsin. Schimel has praised Musk’s intervention in the race, practically begging dark money groups to get involved on his behalf. So far, outside groups backing Schimel have spent more than to $8 million supporting his candidacy, in a race that is expected to be the most expensive state judicial contest in history. This could give Schimel a major advantage after progressives flipped control of the court in 2023, when Democratic-backed candidate Janet Protasiewicz outspent her conservative opponent Dan Kelly.
“At this point, the difference between spending on the right and spending on the left is noteworthy,” Keith says. He estimates $18 million has been spent supporting Schimel and $8 million supporting Crawford from their campaigns and outside allies. “It seems like voters are probably seeing a lot more ads in favor of Schimel or attacking Crawford than they are the other way around.”
State supreme court races have become increasingly contentious as the US Supreme Court has devolved power to the states and issues like abortion rights and redistricting are increasingly decided at the state level.
After the progressive majority took control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April 2023, they struck down the gerrymandered state legislative maps that gave Republicans lopsided majorities for over a decade. The court could soon consider 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. Similarly, when Republicans won a majority on the North Carolina Supreme Court in the 2022 elections, they reversed a previous court decision striking down the state’s gerrymandered legislative and congressional maps. That allowed the GOP-controlled legislature to draw a new gerrymandered US House map that gave the party three new seats—just enough to ensure Republicans retained control of chamber and could rubber stamp Trump’s agenda.
“There’s a growing awareness of how state high courts are going to be involved in deciding what sets of rules and laws upcoming elections take place under,” says Keith. “And so if you care about upcoming elections as a political donor, you may increasingly be caring about who sits on state supreme courts. And that that may be one reason that Musk is getting involved.”
It’s also the case that many of the GOP’s anti-democratic actions at the state level over the past decade have furthered the autocratic turn of the national Republican Party. For example, the GOP-controlled legislature in Wisconsin stripped power from Democratic Governor Tony Evers during a lame duck session after his election in 2018. Evers called it a precursor to January 6.
Similarly, North Carolina Republicans, in a lame-duck session after the 2024 election that was supposed to deal exclusively with hurricane relief, took away the power from the Democratic governor to name a majority of members on the state and local election boards—the very entities who first rejected Griffin’s attempt to throw out tens of thousands of ballots.
The high courts in states like North Carolina and Wisconsin will rule on the validity of such laws—and their decisions will shape the rules of elections up and down the ballot in critical races for years to come. The fate of democracy isn’t just at stake in Washington.
