How Susan Crawford Pulled It Off— Despite Musk’s $20-30 Million

Wisconsin Voters Turned On Trump Yesterday

Yesterday, Wisconsin voters elected Susan Crawford to the open state Supreme Court seat, a stunning repudiation of Trump, Musk and their toxic agenda. According to Lakshya Jain and Giacomo Pensa it was an election that will decide the ideological balance of the court until 2028. The early vote data suggested that Crawford was a clear favorite despite the tens of millions of dollars Musk threw into the race or— possibly— because of that obscene, offensive spending.

Early voting, as well as polling, indicated that MAGA Republican Brad Schimel was going to lose and he went into election day “staring down the barrel of an immense deficit” that he was unlikely to overturn yesterday. The early vote data showed that even relative to 2024, Democrats were significantly more likely to show up than Republicans were— and in a state that Donald Trump won by less than a percentage point in 2024, making the GOP’s job much harder.

“Across the board,” they wrote, “Democrats are simply showing up more. For instance, among voters who cast mail ballots in 2024, Democrats are more likely to have cast a mail ballot in 2025 than Republicans are. It’s a similar story with in-person early voting, where among those who voted early in 2024, Democrats seem much more likely to vote early in 2025 than Republicans are. Schimel would have needed a massive amount of persuasion in order to flip this race, because he was facing an electorate that backed Kamala by double digits. 

Why?

An election like this generally comes mostly down to turnout. Crawford’s victory came from gains over Kamala alone. (See above) “And in the Trump era,” they wrote, “Republicans have bled massively with higher-propensity white voters, replacing them with lower-propensity ones in the process. While this is fine for presidential elections, it has major consequences in every other election, when only the most engaged voters tend to show up. Increasingly, those voters are backing Democrats, thanks to the party’s firm edge with white, college-educated voters. It is abundantly clear from even a cursory look at county-level data that education drives turnout— and this suddenly makes the Democratic turnout edge in Wisconsin extremely easy to understand. This fits in with a broader trend, where areas that are high-income, high-education, and high-employment all tend to vote more, especially in off-cycle elections. While this would have spelled doom for Democrats just a decade ago, it has turned into a net benefit for them in the Trump era. At a geographic level, the places that tend to show up the most in elections are areas like Dane County (Madison) and the Milwaukee suburbs (also known as the WOW counties— Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington). These regions are some of the most highly-educated and affluent ones in the entire state. They are also uniquely repelled by Trump and his brand, and the last eight years have seen these types of areas drift steadily towards Democrats, with Kamala actually gaining on Biden’s margins in the WOW counties.”

This created a math problem for Republicans. When GOP voters in the Northern Wisconsin and the Driftless failed to show up, their share of the electorate got swallowed up by the Madison and Milwaukee suburbs—and the Madison suburbs, in particular, punch above their weight the most in off-year elections, yielding tens of thousands of “buffer” votes for Democrats. In 2024, Madison was just 16.5% of the electorate— but in 2023, it was 18.8%. That 2% gap, creating a boost in Democratic votes, is something Republicans can ill afford to see if they want to win in Wisconsin with their current coalition.

Here are 9 counties that Trump won in 2024 and that Crawford flipped blue to win outright yesterday:

• Racine- Trump 2024 (52.3%) to Crawford 2025 (50.6%)

• Kenosha- Trump 2024 (52.4%) to Crawford 2025 (52.7%)

• Brown- Trump 2024 (53.0%) to Crawford 2025 (51.6%) 

• Outagamie- Trump 2024 (54.3%) to Crawford 2025 (50.7%)

• Winnebago- Trump 2024 (51.6%) to Crawford 2025 (53.5%)

• Vernon- Trump 2024 (53.0%) to Crawford 2025 (53.7%)

• Crawford- Trump 2024 (56.2%) to Crawford 2025 (51.2%)

• Richland- Trump 2024 (55.9%) to Crawford 2025 (52.1%)

• Sauk- Trump 2024 (50.0%) to Crawford 2025 (56.9%)

“Republican gains have been disproportionately concentrated among non-college, low-income whites, and while those voters turn the area red in presidential elections, they simply don’t show up in off-cycle years. This is why Trump’s 2024 gains were greatest in this area, whether compared to 2022 or 2023. The Democrats in these areas are much more high-propensity than the Republicans are, and so the voters who do show up in non-presidential races, like ones held for the state Supreme Court, tend to be a lot bluer than the region as a whole. Add on the factor of downballot lag (these counties are ancestrally much more Democratic) and it explains why, between 2022 and 2023, the Democratic gains in the Driftless were some of the largest in the entire state. The combination of poor turnout dynamics and renewed Democratic enthusiasm, fueled by anger over Elon Musk and Trump’s recent actions, create a very difficult environment for Republicans… Looking ahead to 2026, Republicans might find themselves in an even tougher spot for the gubernatorial race and the election for the third Congressional District, located in the Driftless Area… They will likely need to make substantial persuasion gains to offset the unfavorable turnout dynamics they face, because the Wisconsin GOP’s coalition doesn’t seem to show up in off-cycle elections.”

It was the MAGA Movement’s first statewide test since Trump’s narrow victory— narrow nationally and even narrower in Wisconsin— last November. And the movement failed spectacularly, damaging both Trump and Musk who had gone all in on Schimel. Many see Musk as last night's biggest loser. This morning, Jack Blanchard wrote that Musk played right into Dems’ hands— plowing not just millions of dollars into the race in Wisconsin, but huge amounts of personal and political capital, making himself the most visible GOP campaigner on the election trail. Musk had said the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin “might decide the future of America and Western civilization.” … He tweeted dozens of times about the race in the final few days… He did telerallies and a primetime Fox News interview to urge people to get out and vote… He handed out actual million-dollar checks to voters… And, iconically, he donned a cheesehead hat as he took to the stage in Green Bay for a big televised rally on Sunday. All of which is great… if you win. But he got crushed. Crawford won by 10 points in a state that has been decided by less than a single percentage point in each of the last three presidential campaigns. She even won Brown County itself, where Musk held his rally on Sunday night. (Trump won it by eight points in November.) The question now: What will the election results mean for Musk’s political capital in the White House, and in GOP circles on Capitol Hill?”

After midnight, Irie Senter put the 10 point GOP loss into some context. “Over the past 10 weeks, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have worked to hobble the federal government, pummel into submission the country’s most powerful independent institutions and enact a sweeping nationalist agenda with little regard— and often disdain— for political norms and the Constitution itself. And they’ve done so with near-universal support from the GOP in Washington. Then the voters got the chance to speak. In two deep-red House districts in Florida, Republicans had lower-than-expected margins as they clinched the safe seats vacated by ‘America First’ royalty only after sending in national and state reinforcements, including Trump himself, to drum up support. And in Wisconsin, they suffered a crushing defeat in a record-breakingly expensive Supreme Court race. After Musk’s money and personality dominated the contest, liberal judge Susan Crawford secured a 10-point victory against Trump’s endorsed candidate, Brad Schimel… Rohn Bishop, the mayor of Waupun, Wisconsin, and former chairman of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County, admitted that the race ‘throws up a bunch of warning signs for the midterm election. I thought maybe Elon coming could turn these people to go out and vote,’ Bishop said. Instead, he added, ‘I think [Musk] helped get out voters in that he may have turned out more voters against [Schimel].’”

The FL-06 race was much closer than an R+14 district should be for a Republican but last minute spending my the GOP-aligned crypto-cartel and Musk gave Fine a 4 to 1 edge on TV. Had the DCCC not sat  on its hands and just bad mouth Josh as too progressive, he probably would have had a better chance to have won. As is, he did twice as well as Kamala did in the district. But the New Dem-controlled DCCC always prefers a Republican win than a progressive.