The seven members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court hear oral arguments. (Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

This story was published in partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy, 

The more than $100 million spent on this spring’s Supreme Court election in Wisconsin set a new national record for spending on a state judicial race. The figure almost doubles the previous record of $51 million, which donors poured into the Wisconsin Supreme Court race in 2023. 

“The spending in this race is an indication of just how dominant state high courts have become in the biggest political fights playing out today,” Douglas Keith, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Judiciary Program, told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). He pointed to the “growing recognition” of the significance of state courts in ruling on both challenges to election laws and abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022. 

The record spending on the 2025 Wisconsin race, the pathways the money traveled and the outsized influence of a few major donors raise questions about the future and fairness of judicial elections in Wisconsin and beyond. 

Outside spending

The campaign for liberal candidate Susan Crawford — who ultimately won the election by 10 points — raised more than $28.3 million, while her conservative counterpart Brad Schimel pulled in over $15.1 million in campaign funding, according to a CMD analysis of Wisconsin Ethics Commission filings. 

Special interest and ideological political action committees (PACs) accounted for the majority of the spending, dropping almost $57 million on both the liberal and conservative candidates. Thirteen of those outside groups spent more than $1 million each (and in many cases, well over $1 million) on the race, for a total of $48.8 million — more than the combined total raised by the two campaigns. 

 

“Big money has ruined us,” Janine Geske, a retired Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, told CMD. “It distresses me. It just goes to the heart of the independence of the judiciary.” 

Several of the highest spending groups are linked to just a small number of individuals. Billionaire Charles Koch’s astroturf operation Americans for Prosperity spent more than $3.3 million, while shipping giant Richard Uihlein’s Fair Courts America super PAC spent over $4.4 million. 

Few backers drew more attention than Trump’s top campaign donor Elon Musk, who funneled nearly $18.7 million into the race to boost Schimel through his America PAC and the Building America’s Future PAC, a group he has reportedly funded in part since 2022.

“The Musk involvement helped politicize [and polarize] the race,” Charles Franklin, professor of law and director of the Marquette Law School Poll, told CMD. “That was a brand new element.” 

There was a strong turnout in the April election, with 51% of Wisconsin’s eligible voters casting ballots — remarkably high for an election in which the state Supreme Court was the highest office on the ballot. 

“Voter turnout is up because the race is important, but it’s also up because so much money is being poured into it,” Franklin said, noting a 15-year rise in turnout in the state’s elections for its highest court. 

Political party loophole

Although Wisconsin Supreme Court elections are officially nonpartisan, the state’s Republican and Democratic parties played major roles. “It’s been so obviously a de facto partisan race for several cycles,” said Franklin, who also highlighted the significance of endorsements from President Trump and former President Obama in the election. 

The maximum amount that can be legally given to the campaign committee of a candidate running for the Wisconsin Supreme Court is $20,000. However, individuals can make unlimited contributions to a political party. Some donors use this as a legal loophole to funnel money to judicial candidates by first giving money to the state party, which then transfers the funds to the candidate’s campaign committee. 

In the most recent election, the Wisconsin Democratic Party gave more than $10.4 million to Crawford while the state GOP contributed over $9.5 million to Schimel, according to a CMD analysis of Wisconsin Ethics Commission filings. The contributions from the state parties accounted for almost two-thirds of Schimel’s overall campaign spending and more than a third of Crawford’s. 

The top donor to one of the two major political parties in Wisconsin is Diane Hendricks, who has given just under $3.6 million so far this year to the state GOP. She is the owner of Hendricks Holdings and a co-founder of ABC Roofing Supplies, the largest roofing supply company in the country. 

 

In addition to the $18.7 million Musk spent through PACs, he also gave $3 million to the Wisconsin GOP this year. Similarly, Richard Uihlein has given nearly $1.7 million to the

Wisconsin GOP in 2025 on top of the $4.4 million his PAC dropped on the race. His wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, gave more than $2.1 million to the state party. The couple each sent the maximum individual contribution of $20,000 to Schimel’s campaign as well. 

Major donations also flowed in on the Democratic side. Billionaire investor George Soros gave $2 million and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker gave $1.5 million to Wisconsin’s Democratic Party. 

Reform prospects 

The Marquette Law School Poll conducted in February found that 61% of respondents believe party contributions reduce the independence of judges. 

“It’s crucial that the public be able to look at courts and think they’re doing something different than raw politics,” Keith said. “This kind of an election makes it really hard for them to think of courts that way if the process for picking judges looks like the process for picking a U.S. senator.” 

Geske, who supports judicial elections in principle, shares that concern. “If there is no faith, we don’t have a system. It doesn’t work.” 

Yet, in that same poll, 90% of respondents said it was better to elect rather than appoint state Supreme Court justices. Wisconsin is one of 14 states that rely on nonpartisan elections to choose their Supreme Court justices, a practice it has followed since becoming a state in 1848. 

While the Marquette Law School Poll suggests there is broad public support for electing judges, record-breaking spending on those races raises concerns about judicial independence. 

The rising tide of outside spending is unlikely to recede, particularly given the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) allowing unlimited outside spending on elections, including for judicial races. 

“Citizens United really set us back,” Geske said. “It destroyed the ability to have an independent judicial race where people can really look at the quality of the candidate versus the politics of it.” 

In 2017, she was one of 54 judges who petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court for stricter ethics rules to prevent judges from hearing cases involving major campaign contributors. But since the petition was ultimately rejected, no state rule currently requires a judge’s recusal or automatic disqualification from hearing such a case. The decision to recuse is left up to each individual justice in each case. 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. (2009) held that a judge’s recusal is required when the campaign support received is so significant that it creates a “serious risk of actual bias,” but that standard has rarely been applied since the decision.

Geske had hoped that Wisconsin’s highest court would revisit the possibility of stricter ethics rules in this context but now thinks that is unlikely given the significant financial contributions several justices have received. She believes that stronger guidelines rather than requiring mandatory recusal may be a more viable option. 

Even if recusal guidelines were strengthened, Geske noted there would be practical complications if a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice stepped aside from a case. Unlike some other states, Wisconsin has no system for replacing a recused justice. If one of the seven justices steps aside, the court could be left with risking a deadlocked 3–3 decision. 

Beyond the question of independence, Keith said more could be done to enhance transparency in Wisconsin judicial elections overall, such as requiring more frequent financial disclosures. “While we know a lot about what groups were spending and how much they spent, we know very little about where their money was coming from,” he pointed out. “A lot of it is informed guesswork.” 

“The unprecedented and obscenely high amount of political money being raised and spent in Wisconsin Supreme Court elections is a fairly new and horrific development in our state,” wrote Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, in 2024. “It wasn’t always this way here and it cannot and should not continue.” 

Heck pointed out that Wisconsin enacted the Impartial Justice Act in 2009, which provided public financing for state Supreme Court campaigns in exchange for a voluntary spending cap and a ban on soliciting private contributions. However, Republican Governor Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled legislature repealed the measure and dramatically weakened Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws. 

“We went from being the progressive good government promised land to the political wasteland of the country,” Heck said. 

Common Cause has called for updating and reinstating the 2009 reforms, along with strengthening recusal rules and prohibiting coordination between campaigns and outside groups. 

A recent poll by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign found that almost three of four Wisconsin voters want limits on outside PACs, but that reform is not possible until the Citizens United decision is overturned. 

Next year’s Supreme Court election 

Major reforms are unlikely before the next election in April 2026, when conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley will be seeking to retain her seat. Spending will likely be lower than in this year’s race given that the court’s new 4–3 liberal majority will not be in play.

However, the scale and tone of the 2025 race may influence the 2026 election and others in different ways. Geske said she knows judges who would have previously considered running for the state Supreme Court but are no longer interested. 

“When you get into these kinds of numbers and that kind of race, they’re not going to put themselves and their families through it,” she said. “It narrows the number of people who are willing to run for the court.” 

Geske said that if judicial elections had been like this when she ran in 1993, she wouldn’t have run. “When I was running, we really tried to have bipartisan support,” she said. “Now it really is: ‘Whose side are you on?’” 

“I think that will continue and, as a result, I think that big money will continue to follow.”

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GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN - MARCH 30: Billionaire businessman Elon Musk arrives for a town hall meeting wearing a cheesehead hat at the KI Convention Center on March 30, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The town hall is being held in front of the state’s high-profile Supreme Court election between Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel, who has been financially backed by Musk and endorsed by President Donald Trump, and Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

On April 1 Wisconsin voters decisively voted against unprecedented, massive outside interference in our state Supreme Court election by the nearly $30 million from the richest and second (to Donald Trump) most egotistical person in the world – Elon Musk.  In handing Musk’s endorsed candidate, Brad Schimel, a more than 10 percentage point, 269,000-vote drubbing, Wisconsinites rendered the nation a great service by humiliating Musk here and thereby driving him from the corridors of power and influence in Washington D.C. where he has been  savaging vital U.S. government services and programs that helped the poorest people in our nation and in the world.

Wisconsin also opted to preserve recent democracy reforms in our state by maintaining the current 4-3 progressive majority on the Court.  Fairer and more representative state legislative voting maps and the restoration of the use of secure ballot drop boxes for voters will be preserved and the possibility of new and enhanced political reform is possible in the years immediately ahead either through upholding reforms passed legislatively, through court action, or both.

But what can be done about the obscene amount of political money raised and spent to elect a new Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice in 2025 – as much if not more than $105 million – by far the most amount ever spent in a judicial election in the history of the United States?  Wisconsin faces new state supreme court elections every April for the next four years and a continuation of such frenzied and out of control spending for the foreseeable future seems both unbearable and unsustainable.

Voluntary spending limits for Supreme Court candidates with the incentive of providing them with full public financing if they agree to statutory spending limits is a possibility.  Wisconsin actually had such a law in place for exactly one Supreme Court election in 2011.  The Impartial Justice Act was made possible by passage with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the Wisconsin Legislature and enactment into law in 2009.  In 2011, both candidates for a seat on the high court agreed to the voluntary spending limits of $400,000 each and received full public financing. That campaign was robust, competitive and the result was close, which is what you would expect in Wisconsin.  And it cost just a tiny fraction of the more than $100 million that was spent in 2025.

Unfortunately, later in 2011, then-Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature defunded the Impartial Justice Act and all other public financing for elections, Four years later, Walker and the GOP completely eviscerated and deformed Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws. They did away with limits on what political parties and outside groups can raise and spend in elections, increased individual campaign contribution limits and, most alarmingly, legalized previously illegal campaign coordination between so-called issue ad spending groups and candidates, which greatly increased opportunities for corruption and undue influence through campaign spending. Disclosure requirements were weakened and, in some instances, dismantled altogether.

In just four short years, Wisconsin was transformed from one of the most transparent, low spending and highly regarded election states in the nation to one of the worst, least regulated special interest-controlled political backwaters in the nation, akin to Texas, Louisiana or Florida.

This current corrupt status quo will remain in place for the upcoming state Supreme Court elections in 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029 unless the governor, Legislature and the Wisconsin Supreme Court take action and do the following:

• Re-establish an “impartial justice” law for the public financing of state Supreme Court elections modeled after the 2009 law which was in place for only one election before it was repealed. Update and revise it to better fit current times and circumstances including more realistic spending limits and higher public financing grants.
• Establish clear recusal rules for judges at all levels in Wisconsin that clearly decree that if a certain campaign contribution is reached or surpassed beyond a certain threshold amount, then the beneficiary of that contribution (or of the expenditure against her/his opponent) must recuse from any case in which the contributor is a party before the court.
• Restore sensible limitations on the transfer of and acceptance of campaign funds and make illegal again campaign coordination between outside special interest groups engaged in issue advocacy with all candidates for public office — particularly judges.
• Petition the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the disastrous 2010 Citizens United vs F.E.C. decision which ended over 100 years of sensible regulation of unlimited corporate, union and other outside special interest money in federal and by extension state elections, unleashing the torrential flood of campaign cash drowning democracy today.

These are common-sense, achievable reforms that, if enacted into law, would go a long way toward restoring desperately needed public confidence in the fairness, impartiality and trust in Wisconsin’s courts and in particular, our Wisconsin Supreme Court which was regarded as the model for the nation and the best anywhere a quarter century ago. But it will take determined action by all three branches of Wisconsin’s state government working together with the voters to uphold election integrity and curb corruption in a way all of us can embrace.

Ultimately, of course, it’s up to us, the voters, to hold our governmental institutions accountable and ensure that they work for us instead of for their own narrow interests  and those of the donor class. In this critical season of resistance and defiance against tyranny — speak up, make noise and ensure that your voice is heard.  Demand real reform and an end to the corruption of our representative government.

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