Why Elon Musk can spend obscenely in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race
"If Democrats gain control of the Wisconsin state legislature in 2026 and hold on to the governorship, they could — and must — restore a semblance of fairness to our state’s campaign finance law."
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.
Wisconsin is drowning in big money for the pivotal April 1 state Supreme Court race, which will determine the ideological balance on the court.
Elon Musk himself has already spent around $2.5 million on outside groups that are supporting conservative candidate Brad Schimel. Other big Republican donors have also ponied up, including Diane Hendricks and Richard Uihlein.
And big Democratic donors like George Soros, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, and Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) are also pouring obscene amounts into our state to support liberal judge Susan Crawford.
It’s likely that this race will shatter the previous national record for spending on a state Supreme Court race — a record set just two years ago, right here in Wisconsin, when Justice Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Justice Dan Kelly. The amount spent by the candidates and the outside groups in that race came to about $51 million, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
So how come Elon Musk and other billionaires can flaunt their wealth and splatter our screens with endless streams of mud at election time? Is there no limit at all in Wisconsin anymore?
The short answer is: There is no limit.
And the reason for that is two-fold: First, a long history of disastrous U.S. Supreme Court decisions on campaign finance. And second, a disgusting rewrite of Wisconsin’s own campaign finance law in 2015 by the Republican-dominated legislature and then-Governor Scott Walker.
The ruinous U.S. Supreme Court rulings relating to campaign finance date back as far as 1886 in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. An employee of the Court, but not a single justice, appended a head note on the decision that said “corporations are persons,” and from then on, subsequent Supreme Courts reiterated that absurd equation.
Then in 1976 in Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court announced, with a wave of its magic gavel, that “money equals speech.”
And in 2010, in the Citizens United case, the Court ruled that corporations and other groups could spend unlimited amounts of money in federal campaigns so long as they weren’t coordinating with candidates.
Finally, in 2014, in the McCutcheon case, the Court said that aggregate limits on what a rich person could spend on federal elections are a violation of the First Amendment.
For Wisconsin, these rulings meant trouble. We used to have relatively clean elections here with sensible limits on what any single person could spend. In fact, up until 2015, no one could spend more than $10,000 on any race for governor or state Supreme Court in Wisconsin. If you wanted to give your favorite candidate $10,000, you could do that. But then you couldn’t give another dime to any other candidate in any other race or to any political party or to any outside electioneering group.
Walker and leading Republicans in the legislature didn’t like these restrictions. Nor did they like the high-minded rationale for them. When they rewrote Wisconsin’s campaign finance law in 2015, they deleted the preface to the old law, which stated that “excessive spending on campaigns for public office jeopardizes the integrity of elections.”
That was a big clue.
Then they made it vastly easier for the super wealthy, like Elon Musk, to dominate our elections.
They doubled the amount that individual donors could give directly to state Supreme Court candidates, from $10,000 to $20,000. They tore down the $10,000 limit on donations to political parties and set no upward limit on those donations anymore. They tore down the limit on donations to outside electioneering groups and set no upward limit on those donations, either. And they instituted a kind of shell game by allowing candidate committees, political parties, and outside groups to shuffle funds among themselves.
Dan Shafer joined Matt Rothschild on the latest episode of the Wisconsin Forward podcast. Listen here on Civic Media, or stream below.
Until the 2015 rewrite of our campaign finance law, Elon Musk could only have spent $10,000 to try to influence the outcome of this Wisconsin Supreme Court race. But now the sky is the limit for Elon Musk — and for any other billionaire, for that matter.
These changes make a mockery of any limit on individual donations to candidates. Why give a candidate $20,000 if you can give the candidate’s political party or an outside group supporting that candidate $2 million or $20 million and then that party or that group can just shovel that money back over to the candidate?
This has got to change.
Fortunately, there is a movement — nationally and in Wisconsin — to make this change happen. Last month, the DePere Common Council became the 179th public body in Wisconsin to affirm that its citizens want to overturn Citizens United and to have sensible limits on campaign spending here. Thanks to the work of grassroots activists and a group called Wisconsin United to Amend, Wisconsin is second only to Massachusetts in the number of communities that have signed on to this effort to pass a constitutional amendment that overturns Citizens United and the other U.S. Supreme Court decisions that hamper our ability to curb the outsized influence of big money in our politics.
And if Democrats gain control of the Wisconsin state legislature in 2026 and hold on to the governorship, they could — and must — restore a semblance of fairness to our state’s campaign finance law.
They should lower the individual limits on donations to candidates. They should set a low ceiling on individual donations to the political parties and to outside groups. And they should prohibit the shifting of funds from one entity to another.
State Sen. Chris Larson of Milwaukee has been introducing such a bill in the last several sessions of the state legislature.
Once Democrats gain the majority, they can use his bill to pass this crucial reform and to once again assert that we don’t want “excessive spending” in our political campaigns here in Wisconsin.
Matt Rothschild is the host of the Wisconsin Forward podcast on the Civic Media Network. He formerly was the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
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This makes too much sense to ever get passed by our GOP legislature.