Madison watch party. Turned joyous as returns pointed to a 10-point margin. The Crawford victory maintains a left-leaning 4-3 majority on state supreme court. Bad news for Trump-Musk. Bad news for restrictions on women’s health care and abortion choices. Image: Joe Timmerman
Crawford beats ex-attorney general Schimel
MADISON, Wis. – A Madison judge, Susan Crawford, decisively defeated Trump-backed and Musk-financed Brad Schimel, a former Republican attorney general, for a state Supreme Court vacancy. With 84% of the votes counted, Crawford led by 10 percentage points. Her victory was a worrisome setback for Trump and Musk, who had framed the race as evidence that the race would be a signal of public support for their warp-speed federal reforms. Wham, it backfired. Trump had staked his reputation on the race. And the mega- wealthy Musk had made $26 million in media buys. Democrats responded with $10 million. Some estimates had $80 million was spent – the most in any state judicial contest in American history. On the day before the election, Wisconsin television stations were running wall-to-wall political ads – some darkish especially from Schimel.
What Crawford victory means
Supreme Court judges in Wisconsin serve 10-year terms. Although supposedly nonpartisan, judges tend to fall into liberal and conservative camps. What’s ahead:
> The Court will have a 4-3 progressive-leaning majority.
> Decades of Republican conspiring to redraw boundaries of election districts to their advantage will end.
> As a result, Democrats will be positioned to take control of the Legislature and also of the state’s U.S. Congressional delegation.
> Legal challenges to Wisconsin’s abortion bans, dating to an 1849, will have a better chance in the courts.
> A Musk lawsuit to force the state to allow him to sell his Tesla line of automobiles will have a less sympathetic ear.
A worrisome Trump-Musk moment
The race had an unusually heavy turnout for a special election — 2.3 million in what’s usually a low-turnout event. This made the race an indicator of shifting public sentiment on larger issues such as Trump policies as diverse as his cutbacks in federal health services, social inclusion, higher education, as well as immigrant deportations and annexations of Canada and Greenland. Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin state Democratic chair, said voters were “coming out of the woodwork” to express distaste for Trump reforms. In Florida there were two special elections that bode negatively for the Trump-Musk team. Although the FL-1 and FL-6 seats will remain Republican, the victory margins were dramatically short of Trump’s victories 4-1/2 months earlier in the last presidential election.
Verbatim
Crawford: “Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court. And Wisconsinites stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”
Also on ballot
> State education chief: Jill Underly, the incumbent Democrat with labor union support, defeated voucher advocate Brittany Kinser.
> Voter ID: This obstacle to voting, already in state law, was enshrined in the state constitution.