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SUPREME COSTS: This is the third in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

Wisconsin is one of the only places on Earth that thrusts top judges into big-time politics.

Here Supreme Court candidates compete in officially nonpartisan statewide elections that have grown increasingly polarized and expensive, with campaigns now costing far more than those in any other state. This spring’s $144.5 million high court contest marked the first time that campaign spending approached that of recent races for governor and U.S. senator.

By contrast, the federal government and the majority of other states and countries appoint their judges. Some of those appointed judges eventually must face voters, but only in yes-or-no retention elections intended to avoid the political heat of head-to-head campaigns.

Not all of those other systems succeed in taking the politics out of choosing judges. The process of appointing federal judges is widely viewed as partisan, particularly for the U.S. Supreme Court. And even some retention elections have become multimillion-dollar contests, as activists try to change the ideological balance of state high courts.

However, 11 states have set up independent nonpartisan or bipartisan nominating commissions to ensure that Supreme Court justices are chosen by merit. Many other countries select judges through civil service systems. And 12 states use independent performance reviews of judges to help voters or appointing authorities decide whether judges should keep their jobs.

Although 57% of all Wisconsin Supreme Court justices were first appointed by governors to fill vacancies, past efforts to switch to appointing every justice faced strong political headwinds. No other state has dropped judicial elections in four decades.

Some Republicans are even pushing in the opposite direction, calling for Wisconsin to join the eight states that pick Supreme Court justices in fully partisan elections.

The trail to big-money campaigns

When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, electing judges was a new and controversial idea. Most judges had been appointed since their federal or state courts were created. In the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued for lifetime appointments to preserve federal judges’ independence against political pressures.

But some states started to embrace judicial elections in the populist wave that followed President Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election. That was partly a reaction to judicial appointments that were seen as political rewards, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson said in 2009. Mississippi was the first to switch in 1832, followed by New York in 1846 — just before Wisconsin’s first constitutional convention. 

Walworth County delegate Charles Baker argued during the convention that electing judges was consistent with democratic principles, according to the State Law Library. That view was met with thunderous opposition from Racine County delegate Edward Ryan, a future chief justice, who asked of the judiciary, “Must its judgments represent the will of the people? No sir! No sir! God forever forbid it! … It represents the eternal principles of truth and justice.”

As a compromise, the new constitution banned electing judges at the same time as other state officials, in an attempt to discourage political parties from nominating judicial candidates. After parties didn’t take the hint, the Legislature outlawed party labels on judicial ballots in 1891.

Meanwhile, every state admitted between the Civil War and the 1950s decided to elect at least some of its judges. Those races were initially partisan, until 1873, when Chicago-centered Cook County, Illinois, pioneered nonpartisan judicial elections, a concept that spread during the Progressive Era. Of the 22 states that now elect high court justices, 13 (including Wisconsin) have fully nonpartisan elections, eight have fully partisan elections, and Michigan nominates justices at party conventions but doesn’t list partisan affiliations on general election ballots.

Yet nonpartisan elections haven’t kept big money and ideological divisions out of state Supreme Court races. As documented by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, many states’ high court campaigns have ballooned past $1 million in spending over the past 25 years, driven by special interests trying to influence rulings on social, political and economic issues that include hot-button topics like abortion and same-sex marriage.

Since 2000, nine of the 13 states with fully nonpartisan elections — including Wisconsin — have seen at least one $1 million-plus high court race. But every state with fully partisan elections has had million-dollar court contests, along with partly partisan Michigan. 

Taking the ‘non’ out of nonpartisan

Political parties have helped push up the price tag for Wisconsin’s formally nonpartisan elections, aided by a state law allowing unlimited donations to candidates. The last three Supreme Court races drew $34.1 million in party cash, with Democrats outspending Republicans more than 2-to-1.

Voters seem to have mixed feelings about the partisan involvement. On one hand, 61% of Marquette University Law School Poll respondents in February said they believe party contributions cut into judicial independence, while only 38% said partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

Yet the partisan passions ratcheted up by big spending and polarizing issues have dramatically transformed how closely Supreme Court results reflect the most recent presidential vote.

In 1978, county-level results showed almost no relationship between the two, according to calculations by Marquette Poll Director Charles Franklin. But the correlation has trended sharply upward, particularly after the start of multimillion-dollar races in 2007, Franklin found. Last spring, his calculations showed a 98.5% correlation between support for liberal now-Justice Susan Crawford and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and between backing for conservative Brad Schimel and GOP President Donald Trump.

“It’s a stunning change, but not a new change,” considering how the partisanship evolved over time, Franklin said.

Nationwide, however, nonpartisan elections may still affect how voters react to candidates, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. In nonpartisan races in Montana, Arkansas and Kentucky, “voters chose the candidate who ran the less overtly partisan campaign,” Keith said. 

By contrast, Keith said, voters seem more likely to treat partisan high court campaigns like other partisan races — including in Ohio, where the Republican-controlled Legislature switched from a variation on the Michigan method to fully partisan elections, starting in 2022.

Franklin, Keith and other experts also believe that Wisconsin’s spring elections, originally designed to deter partisanship, could have had the opposite effect, by taking high court races out of competition with other major contests where candidates are seeking donations and attention. Most other states hold judicial elections in the fall, regardless of whether they’re partisan or nonpartisan, with only Georgia and West Virginia joining Wisconsin in the spring.

In October, the Marquette poll found 56% of state voters thought high court races have become so partisan that candidates should run with party labels. That idea was backed by nearly two-thirds of Republicans, with Democrats and independents almost evenly split.

However, politicians’ support for switching to partisan judicial elections seems to depend on whether they think it will help their own side. Ohio Republicans figured they would benefit from fully partisan high court elections, and they have won every race since the 2022 change, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Similarly, Louisiana Republicans are changing Supreme Court justice nominations to regular partisan primaries, starting in 2026, instead of the state’s unique all-party primaries.

In 2009, after the conservative candidate won a brutal, record-spending Wisconsin high court race the previous year, Sen. Tim Carpenter, D-Milwaukee, and other Democrats introduced a constitutional amendment to abolish nonpartisan spring elections and elect all public officials in the fall. The measure died in committee in a Democratic-controlled Legislature.

That was when conservatives were more likely to vote in low-turnout contests, said Franklin and UW-Milwaukee Professor Emeritus Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker. Now liberals have the edge in those races, Franklin and Lee said, and support for partisan elections has flipped. 

After liberals won four of the last five Supreme Court races, Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden called for moving all spring elections to the fall of even-numbered years. GOP state Rep. Dave Maxey, chair of the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee, and Van Orden’s Republican House colleague Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor, are open to discussing that idea, their spokespeople said.

Such a major change would cause numerous complications for thousands of currently nonpartisan local officials and lower court judges, as well as presidential primaries, said Wood County Clerk Trent Miner, president of the Wisconsin County Clerks Association.

Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, another GOP gubernatorial candidate, is calling for a more modest change: shifting only the statewide contests for Supreme Court and superintendent of public instruction to fall and moving primaries for fall races from August to April. 

In an interview, Schoemann said he didn’t have a strong feeling about whether high court elections should remain nonpartisan, but he added, “Everybody acknowledges that they’re largely partisan races anyway. … Let’s be honest about what they are.”

Both Schoemann and a Tiffany spokesperson said maximizing voter participation would be the main reason to reschedule elections.

Because constitutional amendments must be approved in two consecutive legislative sessions and then in a statewide referendum, any change would be at least a few years away.

Pointing back to appointment

By the 1920s, some states were growing disillusioned with judges’ involvement in electoral politics. Nowhere was this concern greater than in Missouri, where Democratic Party boss Tom Pendergast’s Kansas City machine regularly defeated state Supreme Court justices who ruled against its wishes, according to a 2014 report by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver.

In 1940, Missouri voters approved a new method of appointing judges. Under that system, now called the Missouri Plan, a nominating commission screens judicial applicants based on merit. The governor then chooses a judge from a list of potential nominees presented by the commission. Newly appointed judges typically serve a relatively short first term before facing voters in a yes-or-no retention election to keep their jobs for a longer second term.

Kansas was next to adopt the Missouri Plan in 1958, after its governor resigned a few days before his term ended — and was promptly appointed to the state Supreme Court by the lieutenant governor who succeeded him. Some form of commission-based gubernatorial appointment is now in place in 22 states, including Iowa.

Merit selection is supposed to guard against the appearance of “cronyism, patronage and self-dealing” that can arise if a governor or president has no limits on nominating judges, according to a 2018 Brennan Center report.

“With merit selection, candidates move forward in the process based on their qualifications and

experience,” the 2014 IAALS report said. “In other systems, the amount of money spent in an election campaign, name recognition, and political or party connections can be the determinative factors.”

For example, Indiana law requires that state’s Judicial Nominating Commission to “consider each candidate’s legal education, legal writings, reputation in the practice of law, physical ability to do the job, financial interests (for conflict-of-interest purposes), public service activities, and any other pertinent information the commission feels is important to select the most qualified candidates.”

A 2021 paper in the Journal of Public Economics found that justices chosen in merit selection processes or nonpartisan elections produced better work — as measured by how often their rulings were favorably cited in other judges’ decisions — than justices chosen in partisan elections.

Missouri was the first state to create an independent commission and require the governor to choose from its list. In most of the 11 states with that approach, no single official or institution dominates commission appointments, and members may be appointed by various elected leaders, the state high court or the state bar association. Some states also call for geographic or demographic diversity among commissioners.

However, not all commissions are equally independent. In 11 of the 22 states where such commissions advise governors, the governor can either appoint a majority of commission members or choose a candidate who’s not on the commission’s list. In South Carolina, legislative leaders appoint a commission to screen candidates for election by lawmakers.

Four other states allow governors to nominate high court justices without consulting a commission, although some of those governors may create their own advisory panels and all of those appointees must be confirmed by lawmakers or other officials. 

Confirmation is also required in seven states with governor-controlled commissions and three states with independent commissions.

Virginia’s legislature elects justices without nominations from either the governor or a commission.

Contentious races build support for appointments

In 1999, after Wisconsin’s first million-dollar Supreme Court race, then-state Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, introduced a constitutional amendment to let the governor appoint high court justices with Senate confirmation, but without a nominating commission. The measure drew bipartisan support but died in committee in a Republican-controlled Assembly. After three even more expensive races, then-state Rep. Mark Gottlieb, R-Port Washington, introduced a 2009 amendment calling for appointment with confirmation and retention elections. It died in committee in a Democratic-controlled Assembly. 

Abrahamson, the state’s first female justice and the only one to win four contested elections, opposed a switch to appointment. “Elected judges are more apt to go and speak with the people about the judicial system and listen to their concerns,” the late justice said in 2009.

Former Justice Janine Geske said that she had long supported elections for the same reason: “It made justices more human and someone who people can identify with,” in contrast to more isolated federal judges. But Geske added, “I liked the elected judiciary until all this happened (with big-spending television-centered campaigns). People are so sick of these terrible ads that relate to issues that the court doesn’t decide,” mainly criminal cases in lower courts.

Now the moderate Geske said she leans toward appointment, but only if nominees are screened by a bipartisan commission and only if the governor must choose from the commission’s list.

Former Justice Dan Kelly, a conservative who lost back-to-back multimillion-dollar races in 2020 and 2023, said he also supports appointment, with Senate confirmation. Citing the Federalist Papers, Kelly said judges “must reject politics entirely” in their rulings, and appointment offers “much more protection against politics” than elections in which “campaigns have become explicitly political.”

However, Kelly — who was appointed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker to fill a vacancy — disagrees on one key point with Geske, an appointee of GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson. Kelly said the governor should be free to name someone outside a nominating commission’s list as a check on a panel that may have been “politically captured” by special interests.

Kelly’s comments echo a frequent conservative critique of the Missouri Plan — that nominating commissions may be controlled by liberal-leaning lawyers. Although some states specifically require non-lawyer representation on nominating panels, a 2019 study by the Brennan Center’s Keith found attorneys dominated most commissions, with corporate and plaintiff’s attorneys outnumbering prosecutors and public defenders. 

In Kansas — the only state where the bar association names a majority of the commission — the Republican-controlled legislature has endorsed a constitutional amendment to abolish the merit selection process and return to electing justices. If voters approve the amendment in August, lawmakers would decide whether the elections should be partisan or nonpartisan.

Although 13 states switched from elections to merit selection in the 1960s and 1970s, Utah was the last state to do so in 1985, while Rhode Island was the last state to convert its appointment process to merit selection in 1994, according to IAALS. Voters rejected merit selection of high court justices in Ohio in 1987 and in Nevada in 1972, 1988 and 2010.

Geske and Burden said it would be challenging to convince Wisconsin legislators and voters to drop judicial elections for merit selection. February’s Marquette poll found 90% support for continuing to elect justices, with relatively minor differences by party. And in 2018, voters resoundingly defeated a GOP-backed constitutional amendment to end elections for state treasurer.

“On the other hand, Republicans are having their heads handed to them in Supreme Court races, so there may be some interest” among GOP lawmakers in appointment, Burden said. Liberals have won four of the last five high court races by double-digit margins and now hold a 4-3 majority on the seven-member court. Conservatives are defending seats in 2026 and 2027 and won’t have a shot at regaining control until 2028 — or later if liberals boost their majority in April.

Governors have appointed 46 of the 81 justices who have served since statehood. Conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, who is not seeking re-election in 2026, is the only current member of the court who was originally appointed.

Wisconsin is one of 10 states that don’t require their governors to consult a nominating commission or seek confirmation for a high court appointee. By contrast, 29 states require governors to use nominating commissions in filling vacancies, and 17 states require confirmation of justices appointed to fill vacancies. Lawmakers fill vacancies in South Carolina and Virginia, and sitting justices fill vacancies in Illinois and Louisiana.

In 2000, a Wisconsin state task force on judicial diversity endorsed the governor’s use of an advisory committee to screen candidates, but opposed writing the practice into the state constitution. It didn’t recommend creating a more independent commission or requiring the governor to choose only applicants recommended by the committee.

To keep or not to keep

Most states with independent commissions skip the confirmation process and wait for voters to decide the justices’ future in retention elections. 

Altogether, 20 states use retention elections for at least some high court races. California, Maryland and Tennessee combine confirmation and retention elections. In Illinois and Pennsylvania, justices initially chosen in partisan head-to-head elections must run in retention elections for subsequent terms. And in Montana and New Mexico, regular elections become retention elections if nobody files to challenge an elected incumbent.

“Because judges do not face opponents in retention elections, they usually do not need to raise money and conduct campaigns,” IAALS says on its website. “At the same time, special interest groups are not as active in retention elections as they are in contested elections, because a good judge’s performance speaks for itself” and even if they try to oust an incumbent, “they cannot select a replacement who fits their particular agenda.”

Nonetheless, special interests have targeted some retention elections, driving them into the multimillion-dollar range. According to the Brennan Center, that trend was accelerated by a $1 million race in 2010, when conservatives waged a successful campaign to defeat three Iowa Supreme Court justices after the seven-member court unanimously overturned the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Retention election spending peaked at $9.9 million in 2020, when conservatives ousted a Democratic justice from the Illinois Supreme Court. 

As an alternative to incumbent justices facing voters in either head-to-head contests or retention elections, the Brennan Center advocates for a single term of 14 to 18 years, and the State Bar of Wisconsin has called for a single 16-year term, compared with Wisconsin’s current 10-year terms.

“Extensive evidence suggests that election pressures impact judicial decision-making in a wide array of cases, and that retiring justices rule differently than those seeking to keep their jobs,” the Brennan Center wrote in its 2018 report.

Among the 46 states where justices stay in office through elections or reappointment by elected officials, New York’s 14-year terms are the longest, followed by five states with 12-year terms.

Conversely, “15 years is a long time to go without any accountability to the public,” said Danielle Kalil, IAALS director of civil justice and the judiciary.

Although no state restricts justices to a single long term, the Brennan Center cited four states that found other ways to insulate them from political pressure:

• Rhode Island justices are appointed for life, like federal judges.
• Massachusetts and New Hampshire justices serve until mandatory retirement at 70. 
• Hawaii has an independent commission that decides whether to reappoint justices after an initial 10-year term.

Judging the judges

Working with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, IAALS came up with a system for adding judicial performance reviews to the Missouri Plan, to help inform voters before retention elections. The institute now advocates for that modified plan, which it named after the late justice.

“Most Americans undergo job evaluations, and there is no reason why judges should not do the same,” IAALS says on its website. Such evaluations focus on “holding judges accountable to high quality job performance while maintaining judicial independence, by focusing on politically neutral qualities like impartiality, case administration, and clarity of communication rather than specific case outcomes.”

Alaska was the first state to use judicial performance reviews, starting in 1976. Now seven states release evaluations to voters before retention elections, five others use evaluations in reappointment decisions, and four share them only with judges. Hawaii and New Hampshire also release summaries that don’t identify specific judges. Republican-led legislatures ended evaluations in Kansas in 2011 and Tennessee in 2014.

IAALS recommends that evaluations be conducted by independent commissions, separate from nominating commissions. Kalil said evaluating commissions should survey attorneys and possibly others involved in the justice system and observe judges in courtrooms.

Cut-rate campaigns

Even if states elect high court justices, multimillion-dollar campaigns aren’t inevitable. Brennan Center data show four states with head-to-head judicial elections have escaped the national trend of high-spending races: Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho and North Dakota.

In Minnesota, candidates and their supporters spent just $637,011 to elect 10 justices in five contested and five uncontested races from 2013 through 2022 — a period when Wisconsin candidates and their allies spent almost $33 million to elect seven justices in six contested campaigns and one uncontested election, according to the Brennan Center and the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Both states share a history of nonpartisan elections, but unlike Wisconsin, Minnesota elects justices in the fall for six-year terms, with no restrictions on how many seats can be on the ballot in the same election, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities research fellow Eric Ostermeier said.

Minnesota’s elections also have been far less competitive than Wisconsin’s, said Ostermeier, the author of the Smart Politics blog. Since 2000, the average margin of victory in Minnesota has been 23 percentage points across 20 contested elections, almost twice the 11-point average in 14 contested Wisconsin elections. Only one Minnesota race was decided by a single-digit margin, compared with five in Wisconsin.

Perhaps most telling, Minnesota’s incumbent justices never lost an election and the state never had a wide-open race for any seat in that time, while Wisconsin voters ousted two appointed incumbents and six elections lacked incumbents.

Regardless of whether states elect or appoint justices, “no system is perfect,” Kalil said.

Yet public sentiment could be shifting toward change, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the election watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

“People are becoming fed up and tired,” with the flood of attack ads, Ramos said. “People are becoming more receptive to doing something.”

Sick of those state Supreme Court campaign ads, Wisconsin? Here’s how other states avoid them is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 13 minutes

SUPREME COSTS: This is the second in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices were concerned.

For the first time, a campaign for a high court seat had topped $5 million in spending, driven by negative television advertising that had rarely before been part of this state’s judicial races. They feared it could happen again.

That’s why all seven justices — conservatives as well as liberals — signed a 2007 letter to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature, calling for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections” to protect the court’s reputation against “the risk … that the public may inaccurately perceive a justice as beholden to individuals or groups that contribute to his or her campaign.”

It took two tries — and two more big-spending high court elections — before a Democratic-led Legislature and Doyle enacted a public financing law in 2009. But it lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before a Republican-controlled Legislature and GOP Gov. Scott Walker repealed it in 2011.

The justices still had their own chance to protect the court’s reputation, by strengthening the rules for when they would have to step aside from cases involving their financial backers. Instead, they adopted what might be one of the nation’s most lax recusal rules for campaign donations. 

Three of the conservative justices who had signed the 2007 letter were part of the 4-3 majority that enacted a 2010 recusal rule largely written by the major business organization that was pumping millions of dollars into conservative high court campaigns.

The stories behind that shift in recusal rules, the short-lived venture in public financing of high court races and the campaign finance laws that followed help explain how Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign spending exploded this spring to a national record of $114.2 million — almost 20 times the cost of that first big-money election 18 years earlier. That total doesn’t include billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial $30.3 million effort to hand out checks to conservative voters.

Yet the history of public financing and attempts to tighten recusal rules also offer hope for those still trying to stop the trend of ever more expensive judicial races.

Checking a box for reform

Public financing responds to a central concern that current and former justices and others voice about multimillion-dollar Supreme Court elections — the perception that big donors are buying justices who will rule in those donors’ favor when their cases reach the court.

“Why do people think this is a good use of their money? What do they think they are getting from this court?” Justice Brian Hagedorn asked about big donors in an August interview with Milwaukee’s WISN-TV. “It is in many respects a vote of no-confidence in this court — that this court is not going to be a place that’s just going to apply the law, at least all seven of us.”

Advocates of public financing believe voters and taxpayers should be a candidate’s biggest donors. Candidate campaigns receive grants from state or local governments while agreeing to limits on spending and on how much they accept from individual and organizational donors.

That wasn’t a new idea in Wisconsin in 2007. A public financing system already had been in effect for 30 years for candidates for all state offices, including Supreme Court justices. 

The Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund grew out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech — unless candidates voluntarily agreed to limit their spending in exchange for public financing.

The Legislature responded by enacting the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers decided how much the state campaign finance fund should receive each year, by checking a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.

That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “The vast majority of candidates in both parties accepted public financing and ran campaigns under spending limits.”

However, the system declined for several reasons, the Democracy Campaign report found. In 1986, the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation, leaving them frozen at that year’s levels. Also, even though the $1 checkoff didn’t increase any individual’s taxes, taxpayer interest waned, as participation fell from a peak of 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.

The third factor, according to the Democracy Campaign, was another side effect of Buckley v. Valeo, which ended limits on “issue ads” that aren’t coordinated with candidates and that don’t explicitly tell viewers to vote for or against a specific candidate. Such ads started popping up in Wisconsin elections as early as 1996. Candidates balked at spending limits when they knew they might have to respond to unlimited negative advertising by outside groups, the Democracy Campaign wrote.

Nonetheless, the 2000 Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates, then-Milwaukee County Judge Diane Sykes and then-Milwaukee Municipal Judge Louis Butler, still used public financing in their campaigns. After Sykes won, one of her advisers complained that the spending limits “killed the drama of a truly exciting matchup.” However, the candidates themselves attributed the drama-free race to their own commitment to civility, with Butler reflecting that “media coverage … didn’t come because we weren’t being nasty to one another.”

That would change after the conservative Sykes became a federal appeals court judge and Doyle appointed the liberal Butler to replace her. Incensed by a product liability decision written by Butler, the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, started spending millions of dollars to elect conservatives to the high court.

In the first WMC-funded campaign in 2007, now-Justice Annette Ziegler defeated liberal attorney Linda Clifford at a cost more than four times the previous record of $1.4 million. The high price tag and flood of negative advertising spurred calls for reform.

Doyle proposed more extensive public financing for Supreme Court campaigns. Ziegler and Butler joined the rest of their colleagues in backing the concept, without signing on to the specifics of Doyle’s proposal. The bill passed in the Democratic-led Senate but died in committee in the Republican-controlled Assembly.

Just as the justices feared, Butler’s 2008 bid for a full term sparked an even more expensive and mean-spirited contest than Ziegler’s 2007 race. Conservative Michael Gableman defeated Butler, the court’s first Black justice, in a $6 million campaign that drew accusations of racist and misleading advertising.

Diane Diel, then president of the State Bar of Wisconsin, warned lawmakers that “the infusion of such large amounts into a judicial campaign poses a threat to both judicial neutrality and public trust in the justice system.”

The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a public financing bill, and Doyle signed it into law as the Impartial Justice Act in 2009. Abiding by the new law, both 2011 Supreme Court candidates, conservative Justice David Prosser and liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, accepted state grants and held to spending limits.

But the candidates’ treasuries accounted for less than a quarter of the $5.9 million spent in a campaign supercharged by controversy over Republican legislation that stripped most public-sector workers of nearly all collective bargaining rights. Anticipating that legal challenges eventually would reach the high court, conservative interests outspent unions on issue ads, $2.7 million to $1.6 million, in a race so close that Prosser won only after a recount.

Prosser’s victory maintained the conservative court majority that later upheld the bargaining legislation known as Act 10. Meanwhile, the GOP-led Legislature and Walker repealed the Impartial Justice Act and dismantled the Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund shortly after the spring 2011 election.

Back to public cash?

State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, is now drafting a bill to revive the Impartial Justice Act, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”

Roys, who is running for governor, said one major difference in her proposal will be the size of the campaign grants. She’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates. Grants of $1 million in the primary and $3 million in the general election would exceed the campaign treasuries of any high court candidate before the 2023 race, which at the time set a national spending record of $50.4 million.

“It can’t be joke money or nobody will do it,” Roys said.

North Carolina’s first-in-the-nation system of paying for state supreme and appellate court campaigns met the same fate as Wisconsin’s original Impartial Justice Act in 2013, after Republicans won control of that state’s legislative and executive branches. That leaves New Mexico as the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.

Instead of setting specific grant levels, New Mexico uses a formula based on the number of registered voters eligible to vote in each partisan primary or general election and on whether the election is contested or uncontested, with limited individual donations supplementing public grants. With no primary contests and four general election candidates for two contested seats, the state fund provided $1.1 million of the $1.2 million spent in 2022, up slightly from 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Of the other 13 states that offer public campaign financing for at least some elections, 11 appoint high court justices; Michigan’s system applies only to gubernatorial races; and Minnesota’s system excludes Supreme Court candidates.

Both the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center advocate for public financing.

Conflict over conflicts of interest

Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on “issue ads” or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose.

That outside spending has exceeded the cash spent directly by the candidates in 10 of the last 12 contested Supreme Court campaigns — by ratios as high as 4 to 1 in 2008 and 3 to 1 in 2011.

The only exceptions were two elections in which liberal incumbents trounced conservative circuit judges: then-Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson in 2009 and then-Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in 2015.

In Wisconsin’s first two multimillion-dollar Supreme Court contests, WMC’s political action committee (PAC) spent $2.2 million on issue ads backing Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million on issue ads backing Gableman in 2008, according to Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates.

That triggered disputes over whether those two justices should step away from cases involving WMC. Ziegler refused to recuse herself from one 2007 case in which WMC had filed a friend-of-the-court brief, but a month later recused from another case brought partly by the Wisconsin Realtors Association, which had directly contributed the then-maximum $8,625 to her campaign.

Over the next two years, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and former Justice William Bablitch urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.

While the Wisconsin justices considered those petitions, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on a case in which coal company CEO Don Blankenship had spent $3 million supporting candidate Brent Benjamin’s 2004 West Virginia Supreme Court campaign — more than all of Benjamin’s other backers combined. Benjamin narrowly won and cast the deciding vote to overturn a $50 million judgment against Blankenship’s company after refusing to recuse himself.

In their 5-4 decision tossing the state court’s ruling, the federal justices held that the circumstances were so extreme that they created “a serious risk of actual bias” that required Benjamin to recuse. However, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 2009 opinion added that few other cases would likely meet the same standard.

Against that background, the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted in 2010 to deny the LWV and Bablitch petitions and adopt verbatim the WMC and Realtors Association rules recommendations. Conservative Justices Patience Roggensack, Gableman, Prosser and Ziegler backed the new rules, while liberals Abrahamson and Bradley and moderate Justice Patrick Crooks dissented.

“Neither Justice Ziegler nor any other justice recused from this rulemaking process, despite the financial backing they had received from the parties requesting the rules,” the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recounted in a report.

Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”

Also, because Supreme Court justices aren’t replaced when they recuse, the majority wrote, “involuntary recusal … has greater policy implications” than in lower courts because it changes how many and which justices are deciding a case. On Wisconsin’s closely divided seven-member high court, the withdrawal of a single justice from the majority bloc can often create a 3-3 deadlock.

Nonetheless, the State Democracy Research Initiative called the Wisconsin rules “unusual.” Former Justice Janine Geske agreed the change was a step backward.

By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign,” according to the State Democracy Research Initiative. A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit. And most states leave recusal up to judges but don’t exclude contributions as a reason to do so.

Both recusal rules and outside campaign spending were in the spotlight again in 2015.

A case before the high court turned on a state law barring independent expenditure groups and issue ad organizations from coordinating with candidates’ campaigns. Act 10 had triggered an unprecedented recall against Walker. After the Republican governor’s victory in that 2012 recall election, several district attorneys jointly opened what was supposed to be a secret John Doe investigation into whether his campaign had illegally coordinated with groups that funded issue ads supporting him.

Some of the same organizations under scrutiny had also spent millions on issue ads in support of four conservative justices. But Prosser and Gableman refused to recuse themselves from the case challenging the probe. 

Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the conservative justices’ decision not to recuse “a truly shocking situation.” By contrast, Ann Walsh Bradley recused herself because her son worked with one of the attorneys involved.

With its four-member conservative majority intact, the high court ruled the prohibition on coordinating with issue ad groups was unconstitutional, ending the investigation of Walker. Legislative Republicans promptly wrote the court’s decision into a 2015 campaign finance law, which Walker signed.

At the time, Wisconsin and Florida were the only states that allowed issue ads to be coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, said Jay Heck, executive director of the government reform group Common Cause Wisconsin. Weak coordination rules like Wisconsin’s “effectively allow wealthy special interests to bankroll candidates,” sidestepping limits on direct donations to campaigns and opening the door to “corruption and the appearance of corruption,” said Elizabeth Shimek, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center.

Strike two for recusal reform

Concern about Wisconsin’s lax recusal standards would only grow. In 2017, 54 retired judges — including Geske and Butler — petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules.

When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because the 2009 Impartial Justice Act had sliced contribution caps from $10,000 for individuals and $8,650 for political action committees to $1,000 for each. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.

Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the coordination rules for issue ads also had changed with the 2015 law and the John Doe decision that preceded it.

The retired judges asked for a rule that would require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.

And to address the high court majority’s concern about recusal leaving the bench short, the retired judges called for a constitutional amendment that would allow Court of Appeals judges to sit in for justices who recuse themselves.

But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse, while Justice Rebecca Bradley argued that required recusal would disenfranchise the voters who elected a justice.

The issue could come up again now that liberal Jill Karofsky is chief justice. Speaking at a WisPolitics event in October, she said she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new recusal rules for the court.

State law sets recusal standards for some conflicts of interest, but not campaign contributions, according to the State Democracy Research Initiative.

The Brennan Center still advocates nationwide for the kind of recusal rules that the retired judges supported, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the center’s judiciary program. However, Keith added that he wasn’t aware of any state that requires litigants to disclose contributions in court.

Another Brennan Center recommendation urges independent review of recusal motions. As of 2016, Wisconsin was one of 35 states that allow high court justices to decide whether to recuse themselves, while Michigan was among the 15 states where someone else rules on recusal, according to the center’s most recent report on that question.

Power shift prompts recusal reversal 

Efforts to redraw legislative and congressional districts in this decade have spurred new recusal controversies — and turned the tables on which party backs recusal.

When Republicans took full control of the executive and legislative branches after the 2010 elections, they drew maps that guaranteed their party a comfortable majority in both the Assembly and Senate, even if state voters were split 50-50, in what experts called one of the nation’s most extreme examples of gerrymandering.

A decade later, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers clashed with legislative Republicans over how to redraw the maps after the 2020 Census, throwing the issue into the courts. With virtually no legal precedent, justices voted 4-3 to accept the GOP argument that court-approved maps should change as little as possible from the 2011 gerrymander.

Liberal Janet Protasiewicz, then a Milwaukee County judge, called those 2021 maps “rigged” during her successful 2023 high court race. Shortly after Protasiewicz took office, flipping the court to a liberal majority, voting rights groups filed suit to overturn the legislative maps.

Citing Protasiewicz’s previous comments and her heavy Democratic financial support — which amounted to 59% of her campaign treasury — Republicans demanded that she recuse from the redistricting case. However, neither state law nor judicial rules require judges to recuse because of their statements, as long as they have not specifically promised to rule in a certain way, the State Democracy Research Initiative noted.

Also, the $9.9 million Democratic contribution to Protasiewicz was proportionately less than the $2.6 million that the conservative Alliance for Reform dropped on issue ads supporting Rebecca Bradley in 2016, the State Democracy Research Initiative’s report pointed out. Bradley didn’t recuse when an alliance leader was a party to the original redistricting litigation.

Protasiewicz didn’t recuse either when justices voted 4-3 along ideological lines to reverse the least-change doctrine and order new maps.

But Protasiewicz declined to participate in one of the liberal-led court’s three otherwise unanimous rulings rejecting challenges to the 2021 congressional maps. Two more challenges are still pending.

If the issue reaches the high court again, the panel will include new Justice Susan Crawford, whose campaign last spring received $11.8 million from Democrats while Republicans were pumping $9.7 million into her conservative opponent Brad Schimel’s race.

Shining light on dark money

Although donations to parties and party donations to candidates are unlimited under the 2015 campaign finance law, they are publicly disclosed, along with the parties’ donors’ names. Issue ad and independent expenditure groups also aren’t limited in how much they take in or spend. And issue ad groups don’t have to report either donations or spending, a practice known as “dark money” for its lack of transparency.

Roys and Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner, D-Green Bay, are working separately on campaign finance legislation that would set limits on donations to those organizations and require issue ad groups to disclose their donors, as parties and independent expenditure committees already do. Roys said her bill would focus specifically on judicial elections, while Rivera-Wagner’s bill would apply to all elections.

“Wisconsin is becoming the centerpiece for billionaires trying to influence elections,” Rivera-Wagner said. “This is just unacceptable.”

Both Roys and Rivera-Wagner said they would like to go further, but could be limited by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which removed limits on corporate and union spending on issue ads and independent expenditures, and by the GOP legislative majority’s support for Wisconsin’s 2015 campaign finance law. Another federal court case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, struck down federal limits on donations to PACs.

In that legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin remains among the 22 states that elect justices.

Next: Should Supreme Court justices be appointed?

Wisconsin Watch reporter Brittany Carloni contributed to this report.

Unlimited donations, weak recusal rules led to record Wisconsin Supreme Court spending is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 14 minutes

SUPREME COSTS: This is the first in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.

A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million.That figure was so high that it prompted the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn that “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”

Yet in 2025, spending on a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat exceeded $114.2 million.

That doesn’t include a legally questionable $30.3 million voter giveaway by billionaire Elon Musk.

The $144.5 million spent on one seat in Wisconsin was even more than the $100.8 million spent on all other state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022 combined.

At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors — and in some cases, the majority donors — to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office.

And the last two justices elected to Wisconsin’s highest court received most of their individual campaign contributions from people who don’t live in Wisconsin.

State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which the candidates’ ideologies overshadow their qualifications for an office that requires them to swear an oath to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”

Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. Reducing the influence of those factors would require changing the state constitution, state law or judicial rules of conduct. The factors include:

• Hot-button issues that turn on ideological control of the high court, such as abortion and public employee collective bargaining rights.
• Wisconsin’s narrow political divide in its electorate, state government and the high court itself, plus its role as an Electoral College swing state.
• Campaign finance laws and federal court rulings that have loosened limits on money in politics.
• Lax rules for when justices must recuse themselves from cases involving people and organizations that have spent huge sums to elect them.
• Holding court elections in the spring, which grew out of the state’s earliest yearnings for a nonpartisan judiciary but now eliminates competition against campaigns for most other major offices for donations and the public’s attention.

Some of those factors have pushed high court races in other states into the seven- or even eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has all of them.

“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.

Wisconsin Watch estimates the final total was $114.2 million — more than double the previous national record of $50.4 million for high court races — also set in this state, only two years earlier.

And that total doesn’t include the largest and most controversial expenditures of the spring campaign: Musk’s payments of $100 each to Wisconsin voters who signed a petition against “activist judges,” plus $1 million checks to three signers. Add in that $30.3 million effort and the race’s price tag jumps to $144.5 million.

The 2025 Supreme Court election was the fourth-most expensive campaign for any office in Wisconsin history, behind only the 2022 and 2024 U.S. Senate contests and the 2022 governor’s race.

“As politics has grown more intense, more polarized and more expensive, high court election campaigns now resemble the worst of a presidential primary, complete with attack ads, dark money and presidential endorsements,” Brennan Center President Michael Waldman wrote in a March analysis. “All this hardly seems the best way to induce public trust in the courts.”

Since the era of multimillion-dollar Supreme Court campaigns came to Wisconsin in 2007, candidates and special-interest groups have spent $217.2 million on 12 contested races, with the 2023 and 2025 elections accounting for three-quarters of that total, excluding the petition spending, based on information compiled by the campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. 

Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s guaranteed to be another multimillion-dollar contest.

The liberal candidate, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, reported in July that she had raised $583,933 in the first six weeks of her campaign, ahead of now-Justice Susan Crawford’s record-breaking 2025 pace. By late August, Taylor’s campaign manager said the former Democratic state legislator had taken in more than $1 million.

After conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley announced she wouldn’t seek a second 10-year term, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar entered the race. Spending topped $1 million in the conservative Lazar’s successful 2022 bid to unseat incumbent Lori Kornblum. That was almost certainly Wisconsin’s second-most expensive appellate court race, behind a $1.6 million contest for another seat in the same southeastern district in 2021.

High costs for high courts

Although Wisconsin now outpaces every other state in Supreme Court campaign costs, it wasn’t an early leader in the national trend of divisive multimillion-dollar contests.

In its 2002 report, the Brennan Center called 2000 “a watershed year for fundraising and spending in state supreme court elections,” as the total raised by candidates nationwide leaped 61%, from $28.3 million in 1998 to $45.6 million in 2000, led by Alabama, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Much of that money was spent on “television advertising — especially by political parties and interest groups — that has grown increasingly negative and controversial, and in some cases fallen far beneath the level of dignity most Americans associate with their judicial system,” the report said.

That kind of “strident, negative television advertising” characterized Wisconsin’s first million-dollar contest in 1999, then-Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, complained at the time. Liberal Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson won reelection against conservative challenger Sharren Rose in a race that cost $1.4 million.

Before then, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each, which “looks like a pittance” now, former Justice Janine Geske said in an interview. Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”

The low-key tone returned for the 2000 high court race. Justice Diane Sykes, a conservative appointed by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, and liberal challenger Louis Butler kept their pledges to run positive campaigns. Both scrupulously avoided commenting on any issues that might come before the court. They spent a total of $430,963, with both accepting public financing that limited their expenditures.

But that contest and the similarly civil 2003 race turned out to be only a temporary reprieve. After Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle appointed Butler to a vacant seat, Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers even if he couldn’t figure out which company was responsible.

That 4-2 ruling triggered a sharp reaction from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, which spent an estimated $2.2 million to ensure conservative Annette Ziegler defeated liberal Linda Clifford in 2007. The race cost $5.8 million, with conservatives outspending liberals almost 2.5 to 1.

The following year’s contest promptly broke the new record as spending jumped to almost $6 million in conservative Michael Gableman’s successful bid to oust Butler. WMC dropped an estimated $1.8 million in support of Gableman as conservatives again outspent liberals, $3.2 million to $2.7 million.

Gableman’s victory created a solid conservative majority that controlled the court for the next 15 years. And after Republicans took control of the legislative and executive branches in 2011, they changed the product liability law to prevent future rulings like the 2005 lead paint case.

Similar story lines are playing out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center. 

Musk is a prime example of that trend, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. At the same time that Musk was spending $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel’s losing Supreme Court bid, the billionaire’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model. The Tesla case is pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court and could reach the high court that Musk unsuccessfully tried to influence.

Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas on issues like auto sales or product liability, instead pouring their money into television advertising that luridly accuses one candidate or the other of mishandling criminal cases as a lower court judge or attorney. Special interests see crime as “just a visceral idea that they can use to get voters’ attention in an ad,” Keith told Wisconsin Watch. But as the UW Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recently noted, “Only a tiny fraction of the state’s criminal cases ever get to the Supreme Court level, and in recent years such cases have made up only about a third of the court’s docket.”

Big donors are reflecting and reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” similar to the legislative and executive branches, said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly. And with frequent deadlocks between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, both sides are relying more on lawsuits than lawmaking, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump’s campaign filed suit seeking to throw out more than 220,000 absentee ballots from the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court tossed the suit, but only because Justice Brian Hagedorn broke ranks with fellow conservatives to join the body’s three liberals.

That razor-thin 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin’s electoral votes were decided by less than one percentage point. Schweber, Ramos and Heck said the same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested Supreme Court elections were that close.

And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away for most of those years. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.

Spending on high court contests is rising nationwide, hitting $100.8 million for the 68 justice seats decided in the 2021-22 cycle, according to the Brennan Center’s most recent report on the politics of judicial elections.

Electing a single Wisconsin Supreme Court justice cost more this year than operating the entire seven-member court for three years.

The 16-member Court of Appeals costs $12.9 million per year.

The high court and other statewide court services, including the CCAP system for looking up cases online, cost $40.7 million.

The state share of circuit court costs in all 72 counties, including salaries and benefits for all 261 trial judges as well as reserve judges and court reporters, totals $132 million.

*Each circle represents $1 million.

Sources: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and OpenSecrets

Graphic by Hongyu Liu

Parties crash in with cash

Efforts to keep partisan politics out of judicial campaigns date back to Wisconsin’s 1848 founding. In a provision that survives to this day, the first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, a move that some constitutional convention delegates hoped would discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates. That proved to be a vain hope, but it laid the groundwork for formally nonpartisan spring elections to evolve by 1891, according to the State Law Library.

Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer.  Other states that elect judges hold those elections in the fall, regardless of whether they are partisan or nonpartisan. That means they’re competing for donations with many other high-profile races, while Wisconsin’s high court races are often the biggest spring contests outside presidential primaries, noted Burden, Keith and Marquette University Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin.

The spring timing took on national political significance this year, as the first major election in a battleground state after Trump’s November 2024 victory, Burden said. Musk “essentially connected the dots for voters” by turning the contest into a referendum on Trump’s policies, and by extension on Musk’s own role in slashing the federal government, Burden said. That strategy backfired so spectacularly that Musk said afterward he planned to cut back his future involvement in politics.

But it took more than a century for that partisan dynamic to evolve. Even as the total cost of high court campaigns soared into the millions, a relatively small percentage of the cash was coming from the parties, although the state Republican Party soon became the largest single donor to some conservative candidates.

The proportions started to change after 2015, when a campaign finance overhaul by the GOP-dominated Legislature allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates. While wealthy donors can contribute no more than $20,000 directly to a Supreme Court candidate (up from $1,000), they now can give as much as they want to a party, and the party then can donate all of that money to the candidate.

Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 to Bradley in the 2016 campaign (which was already under way when the new law took effect) to $423,615 to Sauk County Circuit Judge Michael Screnock in the next contested race in 2018. The GOP cash was more than 39% of the money raised by the conservative Screnock, who lost to liberal Rebecca Dallet.

Democrats still weren’t spending heavily on high court races until fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state party chair in 2019. The state, local and national parties poured $1.4 million into Jill Karofsky’s 2020 campaign, $9.9 million into Janet Protasiewicz’s 2023 campaign and $11.8 million into Crawford’s 2025 campaign. The state party was the largest single donor to each justice, accounting for more than 59% of Protasiewicz’s treasury, just under half of Karofsky’s fundraising and more than one-third of Crawford’s cash.

That far outpaced Republican contributions of $328,586 to then-incumbent Kelly in 2020 and $900,461 to his unsuccessful comeback bid in 2023. The GOP didn’t start to catch up until this year, when it threw $9.7 million into Schimel’s losing campaign, representing more than 61% of the former attorney general’s war chest.

Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans by $23.2 million to $11.7 million, or nearly 2 to 1.

In February, the Marquette poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.

State Democratic and Republican party leaders didn’t respond to interview requests. But some GOP activists blamed party chair Brian Schimming for the conservative losses in 2023 and 2025. That led to a study that called for an even greater party role in high court elections, while discouraging advertising by other outside groups like Musk’s PACs.

Special interests spend right and left

Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Nearly all of that spending fell along ideological lines. In addition to the parties, conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates. 

Of all the special-interest spending, only $38.3 million, or 24%, went into candidates’ campaign treasuries from 2007 through 2025, $25.8 million on the liberal side and $12.5 million on the conservative side. The rest was spent directly by outside groups, typically on advertising that is usually outside the candidates’ control. That money mainly fell into two categories: independent expenditures and “issue ads,” both operating under rules that were significantly loosened by the conservative-led U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.

Campaign ads funded by independent expenditures clearly state which candidates they support or oppose. Like the campaigns themselves, political action committees making independent expenditures must file reports with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, disclosing how much they received and spent and who their donors were. Unlike campaigns, they can take money from corporations and unions, and anyone can give them unlimited contributions.

By contrast, “issue ads” try to sway voters under the guise of expressing concern about a particular issue, but without using specific phrases like “vote for” or “vote against.” Issue ad groups aren’t required to reveal how much they spent or who gave them cash. Their funding is often called “dark money” because it’s hidden from the light of public disclosure.

Because of the way issue ad spending is reported, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign was unable to distinguish the exact amount spent on issue ads in the Supreme Court race from similar spending that targeted the simultaneous campaign for state superintendent of public instruction. Based on preliminary data from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center, Wisconsin Watch estimates $13.9 million was aimed at the Supreme Court contest.

Using that estimate and previous Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates, issue ads accounted for most of the special-interest spending in eight consecutive Supreme Court contests from 2007 through 2018. For the entire 2007-2025 period, issue ad spending totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals. 

By contrast, most of the special-interest money went into independent expenditures in the last four high court campaigns. Liberal groups spent slightly more than conservative organizations in the 2019, 2020 and 2023 races, but this year, Schimel supporters outspent Crawford backers, $33.3 million to $18.1 million. From 2007 through 2025, independent expenditures totaled $83.5 million — $47.6 million for conservatives and $35.4 million for liberals, plus almost $450,000 on candidates eliminated in the 2023 primary.

Musk’s petition giveaways don’t fit neatly into either the independent expenditure or issue ad categories — and whether they fit into campaign finance law at all is a subject of litigation. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign filed a civil suit against Musk, accusing him of violating Wisconsin’s election bribery law.

Donors change tune to 'Non-Wisconsin'

Out-of-state donors like Musk didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign figures show. During that time, the highest proportions of out-of-state donations were:

• Almost 32% to Gableman in 2008.
• More than 12% to Ziegler in 2007.
• Almost 12% to liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, who narrowly lost to then-Justice David Prosser in 2011, after Republicans stripped nearly all collective bargaining rights from most public-sector employees.

Out-of-state donations to conservative candidates remained below 10% as out-of-state donations to liberals rose to about 23% each for Hagedorn’s opponent Lisa Neubauer in 2019 and Karofsky in 2020.

But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and left each state to regulate abortions. The decision revived an 1849 Wisconsin law that was interpreted as banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother.

As Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate, her 2023 campaign took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin, while Kelly’s $340,405 in out-of-state money represented just one-eighth of his individual donations.

Similarly, Crawford, a Dane County judge who had represented Planned Parenthood as an attorney fighting a different abortion law, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors for her 2025 campaign, hitting a likely unprecedented 69% of individual contributions.

Crawford took in more from individual out-of-state donors alone than all liberal candidates from 2007 through 2023 had received from all individual contributors combined. By contrast, Schimel’s $1.1 million from other states amounted to less than one-fifth of his individual donations.

In July, after Crawford was elected but before she took her seat, the liberal-controlled court voted 4-3 along ideological lines to overturn the 19th-century law. 

Over the last 12 campaigns, out-of-state donors contributed $20.7 million to Wisconsin Supreme Court races, all but about $1 million of that in the last two races. Liberal candidates took in almost $19 million from outside Wisconsin, more than 10 times the nearly $1.8 million that went to conservative candidates. In its review of the 2025 campaign, the state GOP called for a greater effort to attract out-of-state dollars for conservatives.

From the parties’ perspective, Democrats have beaten Republicans at their own game, triumphing under rules largely crafted by GOP lawmakers and conservative judges. Now Republicans hope to win back their advantage with more of the same.

But for reformers, the most pressing issue is how to stop the competition for ever-greater spending and reduce the influence of big money on the high court.

Next: Could new laws and recusal rules stem the tide of Supreme Court campaign spending?

Because of the use of scrolling graphics, the republication button is not available for this story. Reach out to Matthew DeFour at mdefour@wisconsinwatch.org if you would like to republish.

Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have drawn an ‘obscene’ amount of spending. Here’s why and what can be done about it. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.