Republicans lost decisively in Tuesday night’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Elon Musk is still saying everything is going according to plan.
Musk catapulted the state Supreme Court election into national view, vocally backing conservative candidate Brad Schimel — who also clinched President Donald Trump’s endorsement — and pouring millions into the efforts to get him elected. The Wisconsin election, Musk claimed, would decide the trajectory of not only the whole country, but perhaps all of “Western civilization” and “the future of the world,” as he said in a Spaces conversation on X hours before polls closed Tuesday.
But despite Musk’s effort to land Schimel a win, Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford overwhelmingly won Tuesday night’s election, securing the court’s liberal majority.
After warning of the dire stakes for the election, Musk changed his tune in the hours following the crushing defeat, seemingly indicating that the loss was all part of a bigger plan.
“I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain,” Musk replied to an X user early Wednesday morning.
The tech entrepreneur, whose electric car company Tesla filed a lawsuit in the state earlier this year, had made Schimel’s campaign a personal project. Musk spent the last several weeks urgently campaigning on Schimel’s behalf, including a closing weekend appearance in the state, making the case that he needed to win to retake the majority on the court. (While technically a nonpartisan election, Schimel, a former state attorney general, was backed by Republicans and Crawford by Democrats.)
Following the election, the billionaire said that the biggest issue after all was Wisconsin’s Question 1, which added the state’s preexisting voter ID law to its constitution.
Early Wednesday morning, Musk reposted a graphic from his America PAC saying that the issue had passed.
“This was the most important thing,” Musk wrote.
Musk wasn’t the only one rewriting Republicans’ Wisconsin campaign efforts. Trump himself posted to his social media platform Truth Social shortly after the results came in, writing that the passage of the voter ID item was a “BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS, MAYBE THE BIGGEST WIN OF THE NIGHT.”
While Wisconsin has had a voter ID law requiring voters to bring a photo ID to the polls for nearly a decade, Tuesday night’s election enshrined the law in the state’s constitution, making it far more challenging for the state’s Democrats to change the law.
