Demonstrators protest outside the KI Convention Center before the start of a town hall meeting with Elon Musk on March 30, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

It turns out Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is not so powerful after all. 

Musk’s gambit in Wisconsin — dumping more than $20 million into a nominally nonpartisan Supreme Court race, blanketing the airwaves with negative ads, paying people to sign petitions against “activist judges” and cavorting in Green Bay wearing a cheesehead hat while handing out million-dollar checks to Republican voters — didn’t help, and likely hurt, his chosen candidate in an election Musk described as crucial to “the course of Western civilization” and “the entire destiny of humanity.”

Poor Brad Schimel, whose campaign Musk took over. At his victory party in the Republican stronghold of Waukesha, where he underperformed Trump’s 2024 vote tally, setting up his quick downhill slide, Schimel sat strumming a guitar as the results came in showing that Susan Crawford trounced him by a whopping 10 points. 

After proclaiming that he got into the race because he was disgusted by the Court’s “partisanship,” Schimel ended up promising to be a “support network” for Trump and stood by as Musk became his biggest donor and the public face of his campaign. At some point Tuesday evening he may have begun to regret that approach. Trump himself seems to be rethinking Musk after the debacle in Wisconsin, reportedly telling his inner circle that his billionaire adviser won’t be around much longer.

Other Republicans would be wise to get the message that “Elon Musk is politically toxic, that he is a massive anchor that will drag Republicans to the bottom of the ocean,” Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told the Examiner during Crawford’s victory party. 

Wisconsin voters are not alone in recoiling from Musk as he takes a chainsaw to federal health care programs and Social Security, gleefully slashing the safety net to fund giant tax breaks for a handful of super-rich people like himself. In 10 Wisconsin counties where Trump won in 2024, voters rejected Musk’s entreaties to support Schimel, delivering a majority of votes to Crawford. That included Republican-leaning Brown County, where Musk campaigned in his cheesehead hat.

“I think the whole country is going to know unmistakably that Musk and Trump have crossed line after line after line, and the blowback has begun,” said Wikler. “Wisconsin is a bellwether state. Whoever wins Wisconsin probably wins the country, and Trump and Musk just lost decisively. At this point, every Republican who hasn’t yet spoken out against Elon Musk is going to have to think through whether they want to stay in public life or they want this to be their final term in office.”

But don’t count on Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson to do any of that sort of hard thinking. Johnson told Lawrence Andrea of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Musk was “net beneficial” to Schimel, and that his 10-point loss might have been even bigger without Musk’s help. Likewise Wisconsin Right Now declared that there was no lesson to be learned from Schimel’s loss and chalked it up to the inevitable backlash by angry liberals to Trump and Musk’s bravery. 

That kind of analysis bodes well for Democrats.

After Tuesday, the liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court is secure for another three years, just as it is poised to decide key cases on abortion, labor rights and Wisconsin’s gerrymandered congressional maps. Celebrating on stage with Crawford at the Park Hotel in Madison Tuesday night were the other women who make up that majority, including Justices Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz, who each won the last two Supreme Court elections by 10 points or more against a right-wing opponent, just as Crawford did. 

In all three races a key issue was Wisconsin women’s right to control their own bodies, with voters decisively rejecting candidates who embraced a dangerous near-total abortion ban. In all three races money also played an outsized role — a growing threat to voters’ ability to make their voices heard over the din of deceptive big-money ads. If we are going to reclaim the Court from the corrupting influence of self-interested donors like Musk — who is currently pursuing a lawsuit to try to overturn a Wisconsin law that prevents him from selling Teslas directly to consumers — we need to put an end to the campaign finance arms race.

But for now the most important lesson of the 2025 Supreme Court race is that voters can stand up to the mind-boggling spree of destruction by MAGA nihilists. 

Musk’s failure to buy a seat on the Court should encourage people across the country to believe in themselves and their ability to resist the authoritarian bullies who are targeting civil society, flouting the law, trampling our rights and trying to rule by intimidation and the sheer force of their money.

It didn’t work in Wisconsin. That’s a good sign.