It’s up to us, Wisconsin
While the fight might not be coming from national Democrats, Wisconsin voters have a unique opportunity at this moment to send a message to the Trump-Musk administration.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. The Recombobulation Area is now part of Civic Media.
We are hurtling toward the endgame of another everything-on-the-line election in Wisconsin.
In the race for state Supreme Court between Susan Crawford and Brad Schimel, the first and only debate just occurred, ads are everywhere, early voting is about to begin, and spending on the race has already blown past the record amount of money spent on a state court race. It is indeed crunch time in this pressure cooker election, with majority control of the court on the line.
Meanwhile, in the nation’s capital, news broke Thursday evening that Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer would be caving on the brewing battle over the high-profile government funding bill, essentially supporting the Republicans’ stopgap funding measure to avoid a government shutdown, even after House Democrats voted almost unanimously against it.
Is this what Democratic voters want right now? For Democratic leadership to back down at this moment?
It hardly seems like it, and this is emerging as perhaps the prime example of a growing disconnect between Democratic leadership and Democratic voters. Even some of the most staunch, dyed-in-the-wool Democrats have been apoplectic over Schumer’s decision, which resulted Friday in 10 Democratic senators voting with Republicans to invoke cloture on the House-passed continuing resolution.
People can see the destruction and chaos coming from the Trump administration and from Elon Musk’s DOGE, and so many want to see some measure of accountability, as federal workers are fired indiscriminately, critical agencies are gutted, the economy is pushed toward a recession, the judiciary and constitution are stress-tested and threatened, and so much more. So many people do not want to see Republicans bulldoze laws and the constitution with such little public pushback. They want someone to stand up and send a message to the administration that they need to stop what they are doing. They want a fight. They want Democrats to be doing everything in their power — limited as it might be — to push back. This was seen as one of the few moments where Democrats had some modicum of leverage, and even as the House Democrats prepare to dig in, Schumer choosing not to continue the fight has many voters justifiably furious.
Democratic leaders on the national level are simply not meeting this moment. There’s a reason that, in the most recent Marquette University Law School Poll, the Democratic Party’s favorability rating stands at a staggeringly poor net minus-28, with more than 60% of voters having an unfavorable view of the party. There is a stark and seemingly growing disconnect unfolding, even as many in the same poll have favorable views of many policies backed by Democrats and certain individual politicians (Tony Evers, Tammy Baldwin) rank ahead of their Republican counterparts on favorability.
But it’s becoming quite clear that national Democrats aren’t going to be the ones standing up to Trump and the Republicans accountable at this moment — at least not in ways voters are hoping to see. Voters across the country will try, in the scant opportunities to do so at town hall meetings, but with Republican leaders running scared from holding more of those events, that might not be enough of an option right now, either.
So, it’s going to be up to us, Wisconsin. It’s going to be up to the voters here in this state to be the ones to send a message to Donald Trump and to Elon Musk in the upcoming Spring Election on April 1 in the race between Susan Crawford and Brad Schimel for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
This is a critical statewide election happening in the most closely contested swing state in the nation, just 71 days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Everything in the political universe right now is being viewed through the prism of Trump’s scorched earth return to the White House and the wrecking ball that Elon Musk and DOGE are taking to the federal government. The results of this election — in Wisconsin, of all places – are going to reverberate nationally as the first major state-level electoral test happening in the Trump 2.0 era.
That’s become all the more clear with every additional dollar that Elon Musk-backed groups pump into this race. There are many billionaires on both sides who have long funded these types of races, but in this race, Musk’s money has been dwarfing them all. This, at a time when Musk has assumed a central position in the Trump administration — given truly frightening levels of unchecked power — is like nothing we’ve ever seen.
This past week, Ari Berman of Mother Jones wrote a piece saying this race is shaping up to be a referendum on Elon Musk. In the first and only debate between Crawford and Schimel, Musk was a prominent topic, and Crawford’s “Elon Schimel” line emerged as one of the viral moments of the night. A Musk-backed group is distributing flyers that say Schimel will “support President Trump’s agenda” from his seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, if elected. Musk’s name has come up in nearly every conversation I’ve had about this race the past few months. It is the dominant topic in the campaign right now.
Because if Musk is successful in his efforts to back Brad Schimel and flip the balance of power on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to a right-wing majority, what’s to stop him from jumping in and throwing his money around in any race at any level in any state?
This race has always been a tremendously important one for Wisconsin. This will determine the future of reproductive rights, of labor rights, education, the economy, and redistricting — which connects to the way we make decisions on any issue in this state. That was the case two years ago, too, when Janet Protasiewicz won, flipping the balance of power on the court to a liberal majority.
While that was a seismic event for Wisconsin politics, the eventual results of this race has the potential to reverberate even further. What the results will mean for Wisconsinites will be enormously consequential, but what this might mean on a national scale will have symbolic resonance to a truly extraordinary degree.
Polls and approval ratings are one thing. Media chatter is another. Actual votes are far more powerful and carry much more weight. What happens on April 1 will carry a tremendous amount of weight.
Because if Wisconsin voters stand up and deliver a message by electing Susan Crawford on April 1, it will be a sign to the nation and the world that people are rejecting the destruction and chaos of this new administration, that they are not satisfied with the direction they are taking the country, and want to see a real check on the Trump-Musk administration.
“There are rules and laws of political gravity,” said Joe Zepecki, a Democratic strategist in Wisconsin, during a panel discussion on the Wisconsin Supreme Court race that I moderated (watch it here). “The extraordinary opportunity that we have in Wisconsin in just two and a half weeks is to be the first voters anywhere in the United States — and we’re in a battleground state — to send a message that is, ‘STOP! That’s enough. This is not what people voted for.’ … If we turn out on April 1 and get a big win for the candidate we’re all supporting, that isn’t just good for the next 10 years in Wisconsin, it sends a message to some people in Washington.”
Wisconsin is exhausted, politically. Every candidate got the message from 2016 that it’s pretty important to be campaigning here, and 2024 featured more campaign events than we could even comprehend — and that’s before even factoring in the political convention held in the state’s largest city last summer. And that was just the beginning, as the statewide race for U.S. Senate and the many more competitive legislative races (because new maps new maps and the way many of those races were run made for a toxic, nauseating political environment. That campaign ads that have returned this winter and spring have focused on the most revolting of topics has made this yet another race to the bottom. We’re so sick of this.
But we cannot let that exhaustion get us down. We have to pick ourselves up and make this happen. What’s waiting on the other side with a potential Schimel victory is too perilous to even fathom.
The cavalry is not coming. It’s up to us. As the perennial canary in the coal mine of every political issue, of course it’s up to us here in Wisconsin.
But we’re used to this by now, aren’t we? Our state’s voters are consistently having to show up, election after election, to pull ourselves back from the brink of disaster, to save our own democracy. Being at the center of so many political battles, time and time again? This is the space our state currently occupies in the political universe. We can’t say we haven’t been here before. Maybe we’re ready for this.
Because Wisconsin, we have a very unique opportunity at this pivotal moment in our history, and we cannot squander it. It is imperative for our state, for the nation, and for the future of democracy that Susan Crawford win this race for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he became the Political Editor of Civic Media. He’s also written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 18 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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