Judge Susan Crawford, the Democrat-backed nominee for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, during the final stop of the Common Sense Justice Tour ahead of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in Madison, Wisconsin, US, on Monday, March 31, 2025.
Jim Vondruska | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Susan Crawford has won a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, NBC News projects, allowing liberals to maintain their narrow majority on the battleground state’s highest court — and defying Elon Musk after he spent millions of dollars to oppose her.
Crawford, a Dane County circuit judge who was backed by Democrats, secured a 10-year term on the court over Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County circuit judge and a former Republican attorney general. As the first major battleground state election of President Donald Trump’s second term, the technically nonpartisan contest drew national attention and became the most expensive state Supreme Court race in U.S. history.
The outcome is a setback for Trump and his billionaire adviser, Musk. Trump endorsed Schimel in the final stretch of the race, while Musk injected himself into the center of it, spending huge sums of money, visiting Wisconsin days out from Election Day and frequently posting about the race on his X feed. In turn, Democrats and progressive groups made Musk their primary villain, attacking his influence on the race and his efforts to slash federal jobs and the government through the Department of Government Efficiency.
“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin,” Crawford told supporters Tuesday night. “And we won.”
In a brief concession speech, Schimel said, “I knew I had to put my all in,” but that “you gotta accept the results.”
Crawford’s victory also means liberals will maintain a 4-3 advantage on the court for at least another year heading into a term when it could decide cases about abortion rights, unions and collective bargaining rights, and congressional maps and redistricting.
Despite the more than $15 million that Musk and groups affiliated with him dropped into the race, Democrats overall held a narrow ad spending advantage, according to AdImpact.
Democratic-aligned groups spent millions of dollars blasting Musk as “trying to buy” Schimel and the election, while Crawford herself repeatedly used Musk as a foil at her campaign events. The Democratic Party of Wisconsin launched a town-hall tour dubbed “People v. Musk,” on which surrogates including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz further bashed Musk and DOGE.
Some also pointed out that Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, sued in Wisconsin this year challenging a state law banning carmakers from owning dealerships. The case could end up before the state Supreme Court.
Democrats also attacked Musk’s offer of $100 to Wisconsin voters to sign a petition to oppose “activist judges.” The Democratic state attorney general, Josh Kaul, also unsuccessfully tried to block Musk from giving $1 million to people to be “spokesmen” for the petition at a rally Sunday.
Conversely, groups on the left largely stayed away from making the race about Trump, who narrowly carried the state in two of the past three presidential elections.
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates Brad Schimel and Susan Crawford participate in a debate Wednesday, March 12, 2025, in Milwaukee.
Morry Gash | AP
The anti-Musk playbook is one that Democrats could seek to replicate in other elections this year and in the 2026 midterms.
Schimel embraced Trump in the closing days of the race, a move strategists said was intended to try to juice conservative turnout.
In addition to running ads touting Trump’s endorsement, Schimel appeared at a campaign town hall event in March with Donald Trump Jr. and told a group of canvassers from the conservative group Turning Point USA that Trump needs a “support network” around him to help him fight the myriad suits his administration has faced.
Each side tried to paint its opponent as soft on crime — even though the state Supreme Court rarely hears cases about sentencing — while Crawford also attacked Schimel in ads that focused on allegations that the state Justice Department mishandled the maintenance of thousands of rape kits under his watch as attorney general.
Apart from Musk, groups on the left made Crawford’s support of reproductive rights a central theme in their ads and messaging. Abortion rights and the fate of the state’s 1849 abortion ban were hot topics because of a pair of cases already before the court.
The state Supreme Court heard a challenge to the ban in November and is widely expected to overturn the law, but before Crawford is sworn in in August. Abortion providers in the state resumed the procedure in 2023 after a judge ruled that the 175-year-old law didn’t apply to consensual medical abortions, but the state Supreme Court is reviewing whether to entirely invalidate it.
There is also a separate case in which Planned Parenthood has directly asked the court to establish whether the state constitution established a right to an abortion. The court Crawford will sit on could hear that case.
In addition, the court is also likely to end up ruling on a case challenging landmark legislation during the administration of Republican Gov. Scott Walker that eliminated collective bargaining for most public workers, known as Act 10.
And the court could end up deciding cases challenging the state’s congressional maps, which favor Republicans.
After liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz joined the court in 2023, it overturned the state’s gerrymandered legislative maps. The court declined last year to hear a suit that sought to redraw the congressional maps.
But many Republicans have expressed fear that similar suits could be accepted in the future, pointing to an email from a Democratic-aligned group that suggested a Crawford victory might “put two more House seats in play.” The topic, as well as that email, became a theme in some of the ads run by Schimel-aligned outside groups.
Liberals won a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court for the first time in 15 years in 2023. The majority was again on the line this year after liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley announced her retirement. State Supreme Court elections are also scheduled in Wisconsin each year from 2026 to 2030.
Further down the Wisconsin ballot
Meanwhile, in the state’s nominally nonpartisan school superintendent race, incumbent Jill Underly, who was backed by the state Democratic Party, defeated Brittany Kinser, who had the backing of conservative groups, NBC News projects.
That race was also largely defined by the role Musk has played in downsizing the federal government, and the contest took on increased importance in the weeks since Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the U.S. Education Department.
Wisconsin voters also approved a proposed amendment to enshrine an existing voter ID law into the state constitution, NBC News projects.
The measure will add language to the constitution from a 2011 measure requiring voters to provide photo ID when they vote or request absentee ballots.
Conservatives said they sought to enshrine the law in the state constitution to make it more difficult to strike down in the future. Republicans also hoped it would help boost voter turnout for the state Supreme Court race.
