"I'll buy you a diamond ring my friend if it makes you feel alright
I'll get you anything my friend if it makes you feel alright
'Cause I don't care too much for money
But money can't buy me love
Can't buy me love
Everybody tells me so
Can't buy me love
No no no, no"
Paul McCartney and John Lennon, 1964
Wisconsin voters elected Susan Crawford to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating the Donald Trump and Elon Musk-backed Brad Schimel by about 10 points.
This Rolling Stone headline has it backwards:
Crawford did not win despite Musk's money blitz. She won because of it.
Or, to be more precise, Schimel lost because of it.
An ongoing theme of this blog is that political messages often backfire. The messenger intends one message but voters receive a very different one. Sometimes that is because the message is flawed. Sometimes the medium of the message is flawed. And sometimes the message is completely shaped by the identity of the messenger and the messenger is flawed. This is a case of all three.
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| Powerful images from the Wisconsin campaign |
Voters in judicial races cast votes based on a general impression of the candidates. We evaluate judges based on their reputation and the reputation of their public supporters. Judicial races in Wisconsin have become partisan races. Everyone knew that Crawford was the Democratic-aligned candidate and Schimel was the Republican-aligned one.
Schimel was not blindsided by Elon Musk's sabotage of his campaign. He willingly walked into the trap. News stories about Schimel describe him as being openly and proudly part of the Trump/MAGA team.
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| From: Wisconsin Examiner |
Wisconsin is a purple state, nearly perfectly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. It was not crazy for Schimel to let the world know he liked Trump, agreed with Trump, and was supported by Trump. But it turned out to be disastrous because he tied himself to a political anchor.
Popularity is the engine behind Trump's power. It is also the Achilles heel in the Trump MAGA movement. Trump was a powerful demagogue at the high tide of popularity in January because he looked like a man of action, taking up arms against the sea of troubles facing America. The idea of a strong leader is popular, but that leader loses the power to intimidate others if and when he takes unpopular actions. Trump and DOGE immediately began doing so. Elon Musk -- ever the child genius showboat -- waded into the Supreme Court race and made it a referendum on himself and his ability to throw his money around and get results. He grabbed center stage. The implicit message in front of Wisconsin voters was whether or not they supported a fabulously wealthy outsider openly trying to buy their Supreme Court with patently insincere cheese-head hats and million-dollar vote-buying schemes. Musk hijacked the Schimel race. Schimel perhaps would have lost organically, in the normal course of politics in a closely-divided polity, but he lost big because of Musk.
Political consultants guide candidates to the proverb attributed to Napoleon: that God is on the side of the army with the big battalions. It is true. Big-spending campaigns with lots of ads can overwhelm small ones. "Free" money from a giant donor like Musk, or from a large state party "Majority Fund" in a local race, is a hard-to-resist temptation. Raising money $50 or $500 at a time from local supporters is hard and slow, and sometimes sacrificial for the donor. Isn't it better for everyone to let the outsider raise the money so the candidate can concentrate on his message and meet voters without hounding them for money? So tempting.
The problem is that outside money shapes the message. In the Wisconsin case, the message was that manic billionaire Elon Musk wants to buy your vote. Are you okay with that, yes or no? The same dynamic happened in a local state Senate race I have written about in the past between a Medford mayor, Randy Sparacino, running as a Republican against an incumbent Democrat, Jeff Golden (and coincidently, yet another college classmate). The upstate Republican state Senate PAC spent over a million dollars on attack ads against Golden on behalf of Sparacino. The intended message was that Sparacino was the better candidate. The received message was that if elected to the state Senate Sparacino would be a reliable errand boy puppet of his upstate handlers. They hijacked his message. He was a victim -- but he let them do it to him.
The election results in Wisconsin sends new messages into the zeitgeist. Musk and DOGE are, indeed, unpopular at the ballot box, fatally so in purple polities. GOP officeholders are refiguring whether they dare openly advocate for anything other than total acquiescence to DOGE cuts. Maybe they can, after all. Billionaires are observing Wisconsin and protests against Musk and Tesla, and recalculating the perils of open support of Trump. Association with Trump may be bad for business. Donating to Republican candidates may be bad for business. The zeitgeist is now questioning whether Trump's tariff activity has changed the story on Trump. Maybe he is a loser, after all. Maybe MAGA is a powerful minority, but, at bottom, a minority.
Most importantly, the renewed idea floating in the zeitgeist is that Democrats can win elections.
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5 comments:
Musk had no business trying to throw his weight around in a Wisconsin judicial race in the first place. On stage in that cheesehead hat it's clear he's let his recent notoriety, er, go to his head. Talk about overexposure....
45% still voted MAGA...nothing to celebrate IMHO...
Even so the cheese hat was so over the top hilarious and revealing. I can't decide which is funnier; that he likely got the idea from someone else, or that he thought it was clever.
There’s another factor that may have been at work here. Besides being bought and paid for by Musk, Schimel also told supporters that Trump had been “screwed over” by the Wisconsin Supreme Court when it ruled against his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It looks like Wisconsin ‘woke’ to the fact that election-denying, Trump-groveling whack jobs are no substitute for people who know how to do their job. Hopefully it’s a harbinger of things to come.
One thing we know about Trump is that if Musk gets too powerful, Trump will let his loose. No one is allowed to trump Trump. He's okay as a sidekick, but not the leader. Musk's power is going to his head and Trump is watching.
Money cannot buy everything. And as Peter notes, Wisconsin is Purple.
In 2024, Eric Hovde (R) also lost.
Several good things remain in Wisconsin: the Voter ID requirement passed, and the makeup of their Supreme Court remains 4-3, the same it was before Trump was elected in 2024.
It would be great, though, to remove money from elections. A lot was spent here in Florida to try to get the D candidates elected to replace Waltz and Gaetz.
Fine and Petronis won, but with lower winning margins than Trump achieved in 2024.
Rs remain in control of the Florida Legislature, but DeSantis is not very happy right now with his Republican majority in the State Legislature. He would like to see a lot more accomplished.
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