Susan Crawford met the moment
Much has been made about the larger forces at work in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, but the winning candidate deserves her share of credit for an undeniably impressive double-digit victory.
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time NINETEEN-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.
(Note for readers: Our typical post-election takeaways column is coming soon. We’ve got a lot more data to dive into, so consider this Part I of our post-election commentary and analysis.)
It was at the War Memorial Center along Milwaukee’s lakefront where things really seemed to click for Susan Crawford in her campaign to be Wisconsin’s next state Supreme Court justice.
There, on March 4, the Milwaukee Press Club and Rotary Club of Milwaukee held a panel interview discussion with Crawford before a room full of attendees and assembled press. The public events schedule for the campaign — luncheons, live interviews, get-to-know-the-candidate talks, etc. — was starting to ramp up after the Feb. 18 primary.
The public was still getting to know these candidates. A late February Marquette University Law School Poll found that nearly 60% of registered voters in Wisconsin did not yet have an opinion of Susan Crawford. That number was lower for Brad Schimel, the former state Attorney General, but still, nearly 40% of voters didn’t have an opinion of him, either.
So, March would be an important month for these candidates, and each of these public events allowed an opportunity to break through the onslaught of negative advertising that was also ramping up, as the race would be well on its way to potentially doubling the record for most expensive state court race in U.S. history, with more than $100 million in spending.
I’d seen a number of public events for Crawford, and watched and listened to interviews she’d given on various shows on the Civic Media network, but it was at this event that the Dane County judge seemed to really find her groove on the campaign. Fielding questions from WISN’s Matt Smith, CBS 58’s Emilee Fannon and the Journal Sentinel’s Alison Dirr, Crawford was in command of the room, nimble in responding to questions, providing substantive answers that went well beyond the headlines and the ads.
Eight days later, Crawford would bring that same energy to the race’s lone debate, delivering an exceptionally strong performance, clearly besting a seemingly overmatched Schimel. She was prepared, she was confident, she knew what she wanted to say and she knew how she wanted to say it. The Susan Crawford from the War Memorial Center event had shown up on the debate stage and owned the night.
Over this stretch in March, Crawford met with individual groups and various constituencies as part of her campaign, and the chatter coming out of those events is that people were coming away impressed with her as a candidate and confident she’d be a strong selection as the next justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The evening before Election Day, Crawford spoke on stage at the Majestic Theater in Madison for a canvass kickoff event, delivering a stump speech laden with memorable lines, and the crowd was into it. One, in particular that had clearly become a favorite of hers on the trail, was about Elon Musk.
“I never thought as a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, that I’d be going up against the richest man in the world to fight for justice in our state but here we are,” she said.
So many of the narratives of this race have been about Musk, about the astronomical spending in the race, about the national proxy battle that this race had become, happening just 71 days after Donald Trump’s return to the White House. And after election night, the analysis of realignment and how that now benefits Democratic-aligned candidates in non-presidential elections has headlined the conversation, as has this race as a referendum of sorts on Trump, and perhaps even more, on Elon Musk.
But Crawford herself deserves some real credit here. Her steady and unwavering presence throughout the race proved to be the ideal approach to the chaos of the campaign and the many unexpected twists and turns it took (and there were many, of course).
Patrick Guarasci, senior advisor for the campaign, described her as “focused, driven, and disciplined,” saying, “She believed in herself and believed she could win the race throughout”
The margins she posted in this race turned out to be truly remarkable and undeniably impressive. In many ways, the results resembled Janet Protasiewicz’s Wisconsin landslide of a victory in the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, but this one is looking even more impressive. Facing a candidate who’d been running for more than 16 months, who was backed by the state party in a way previous candidates had not been, and who was backed by the richest man in the world — whose spending went orders of magnitude further than any individual donor had ever spent on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race — Crawford managed to win by a surprisingly wide margin.
Her electoral performance far exceeded my expectations for the race. Even as many Democratic sources were telling me in the final week that she was the favorite and had good odds to win, I was quite skeptical, given what happened last November and given the unprecedented spending on the race.
But Crawford delivered, and then some. In a state where many statewide contests are decided by decimal-point margins, the Dane County judge matched several of her liberal-aligned state Supreme Court candidate predecessors and won by double digits. There’s a case to be made that this is the most impressive result of all of them.
So, kudos to Crawford. Amid a moment of widespread liberal fretting over, well, just about everything (guilty!), she proved to be the right candidate at the right moment and delivered a shot heard round the world with her undeniably impressive victory in Wisconsin’s Spring Election.
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 23 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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She’s a true jurist, with the kind of judicial temperament that makes for a great campaigner as well as an excellent judge.