Democrats just won their biggest electoral victory of the second Trump era. And Elon Musk lost big.

Democratic voters came out in force on Tuesday in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, a sign that the once-latent resistance is raring to go. Musk put in a ton of money — but so did Democrats, amping turnout to midterm-level performance and showing the party’s strength outside of low turnout specials elections. And Democrats now have a legal bulwark to defend their positions on abortion rights and congressional maps in the closely divided state.

By defeating Republican-aligned candidate Brad Schimel, Susan Crawford secured a seat on the state’s highest court — and rejuvenated Democrats nationwide as they cast Musk as the No.1 villain of the second Trump era. Democrats framed the result as an explicit rejection of President Donald Trump, who endorsed Schimel.

Republicans, meanwhile, still haven’t cracked the code for how to turn out Trump voters without the president on the ballot.

“Donald Trump does two things wonderfully: He gets people to turn out to vote for him and he gets liberals to turn out and vote against anyone he supports,” said Rohn W. Bishop, the Republican mayor of Waupun, Wisconsin and former chair of the Fond du Lac County GOP. “The problem is that he can never turn out conservatives to vote for his candidate when he’s not on the ballot.”

Here’s what we learned about this moment in U.S. politics from the results in Wisconsin, which were called late Tuesday evening.

What does this mean for Musk?

The GOP losing a statewide race in a crucial battleground where Trump and Musk loomed large is a warning sign for the White House. Democrats hammered away at how DOGE’s cost-cutting could hurt Wisconsinites as Musk and his allies expel thousands of federal workers and curtail government services.

Republicans — who have broadly defended DOGE’s mission — could become wary of standing by Musk now that his move-fast-and-break-things ethos clearly poses an electoral risk.

Musk’s time in government may be limited — Trump indicated this week that the Tesla founder eventually will return to the private sector. But his efforts to downsize government will live on: Agencies across government are preparing wide scale reductions in force that will result in the layoffs of even more federal employees.

Musk injected a pay-to-play element to the race by initially dangling a million dollar reward to Wisconsinites who voted in the election. He quickly backtracked, in the face of legal opposition in part from Wisconsin’s Democratic Attorney General, instead choosing to give six-figure checks to two Republicans who signed a pledge saying they oppose judicial activism.

But in the end, all his millions proved insufficient to win the contest for Republicans.

Where do Democrats go from here?

Democrats are all-but-guaranteed to continue with their anti-Musk messaging. The biggest opportunity to test that strategy ahead of the midterms comes in November, when voters in Virginia and New Jersey will elect new governors and state lawmakers.

Wisconsin’s result builds on a string of successes Democrats have enjoyed in special elections so far this cycle by racking up wins in Iowa and Pennsylvania in heavy GOP areas. On Tuesday night, Democrats also over-performed in a pair of Florida House special elections, improving their margins by double-digits in deeply conservative districts.

The DOGE factor is likely to prove especially potent in Virginia’s gubernatorial and state legislative races, where thousands of federal workers live. Likely Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger, a former member of Congress and CIA officer, has seized on the economic repercussions of DOGE as a key theme of her gubernatorial campaign.

Musk is “becoming electoral poison,” said Evan Roth Smith, a Democratic pollster. “The Democratic Party is going to make Elon a central issue in its messaging, as it should, and Democrats are getting better at focusing on what matters to voters, which is the threat he poses to entitlements.”

Even though Democratic base voters are frustrated by the party’s congressional leadership, seen in town halls across the country in recent weeks, that didn’t stop them from showing up in Wisconsin.

What’s on deck for the Wisconsin Supreme Court?

The Wisconsin Supreme Court — which will remain tilted toward Democrats with Crawford on the panel — will likely answer several major legal questions with wide-reaching implications on abortion, labor rights and congressional maps.

The court is expected to hear a case later this year on whether the Wisconsin constitution guarantees the right to abortion. And the justices are already mulling, after holding arguments in November, whether to revive an abortion ban from 1849, though that is set to be decided before Crawford is seated.

Both candidates sidestepped questions on the campaign trail about how they would rule on those cases. Crawford said she believes in the right for women to “make their own choices about their bodies and their health care,” while Schimel voiced support for the 1849 abortion ban and argued the issue should be left to voters — though Wisconsin lacks the citizen-led ballot initiative process other states have used to enact protections since Dobbs.

Both abortion-rights and anti-abortion groups deployed volunteers, sent out mailers, cut ads and poured funds into the race. Ultimately, progressives were able to achieve a repeat of 2023 — when an abortion-rights centered campaign and a surge in off-year turnout delivered progressives a narrow majority on Wisconsin’s high court for the first time in 15 years.

Making abortion rights the leading issue, however, did not help Democrats in 2024 — and it did not dominate the Wisconsin Supreme Court race the way it did two years ago, raising questions about how effectively the party can run on the issue to win crucial battleground contests going forward.

Should the Supreme Court revisit Wisconsin’s congressional maps, Republicans in Congress are frank about how they may fare in a shakeup of the delegation. Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden warned he could lose his competitive district along with GOP Rep. Bryan Steil. Six of the state’s eight congressional seats are held by Republicans in what is typically a 50/50 state.

“Being a member of Congress is not my identity,” Van Orden said in an interview after Crawford’s win. “So if through all these crazy machinations I don’t get reelected because far-leftists on the court decide to redistrict and make it nearly impossible for me to get reelected — I can accept that without any malice or bitterness.”

Van Orden said he would still “work doggedly” on his re-elect bid and framed Crawford’s victory as “a disaster for the nation.”

How did Democrats pull it off?

Turnout was high after record spending — roughly $90 million — flowed into the race. While ballots were still being counted on Tuesday night, preliminary results suggested turnout would substantially exceed the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race — more comparable to a midterm election, although still well short of presidential turnout.

And the results from a handful of counties reporting nearly complete results showed Crawford’s win looked a lot like how other Democrats have won in Wisconsin in recent years. She outperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris’s narrow 2024 loss in the state by losing by less in rural red counties, running up the numbers in blue urban areas and flipping the purple and light red suburban counties that solidified Trump’s victory last year.

In Kenosha County, south of Milwaukee, Crawford won roughly 53 percent of the vote, according to unofficial results Tuesday night. Trump won the county by 6 points in November.

Crawford also performed better than Harris in deep-red areas. In Fond du Lac County, a historic GOP stronghold, she performed roughly 4.5 points better than Harris, according to preliminary results. And in Adams County — an Obama-Trump county now firmly in the GOP column — she ran 6.5 points ahead of Harris.

It’s a formula that other Democrats will certainly be looking to replicate.

“The [Republican] party has to worry about the position they’ll be in with voters in Virginia and New Jersey, and then looking down the road, where they’ll be going into the midterms,” said Charles Franklin, who leads Marquette University’s Law School poll. “It’s not an auspicious start, coupled with the accumulating polling data about how unpopular Trump’s most prominent policies, tariffs, are.”

What worked with voters of color?

Some Democrats were worried the party hadn’t learned its lesson on mobilizing voters of color. Now they’re breathing a sigh of relief.

Heading into Election Day, there was trepidation among progressive activists that centering Musk might not work. Some were skeptical that message would resonate with voters of color, especially compared with economic arguments that could be more compelling with low-propensity voters. Some compared it to Harris making saving democracy central to her closing argument.

But on Election Day, turnout among Black and Latino voters in the Milwaukee area didn’t plummet the way they feared. Instead, nervous organizers and elected officials saw unexpectedly high numbers.

“There has been a lot of activity. We’re expecting historic turnout,” Paulina Gutierrez, executive director of Milwaukee’s Election Commission, proclaimed during a news conference hours before polls closed. Seven polling sites in the area even temporarily ran out of ballots.

The message appeared to be working, activists said — Musk’s role in dismantling pieces of the federal government appeared to be energizing voters of color, too.

“This is a new dynamic we never felt,” said Milwaukee-based grassroots organizer Angela Lang, who leads Black Leaders Organizing for Communities. “And it felt like the whole resistance movement was looking to us to see if we could stop this.”

Shia Kapos, Meredith Lee Hill and Jessica Piper contributed to this report.