What The Hell America!

Last night’s Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which saw the candidate backed by President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk lose to his liberal, Democratic-backed opponent, has swiftly become the political topic of the week. For some, it’s a delicious bit of schadenfreude regarding Musk and tangible proof of how badly he is disliked by the public. For others, it’s a story about the possible electoral comeback of a demoralized and badly damaged Democratic Party. Both are possible. But it also could be something more important: a modest but encouraging victory for democracy over organized super-wealth, a popular rejection of oligarchic rule and the way it has been rubbed in the public’s face the past few months.

The state Supreme Court race loomed for months as a symbolic battle for the next four years, an early referendum on Trump’s first term so far and, as he became more prominently involved in it, on Musk himself. With so much at stake, Musk carried out a series of unseemly antics to swing the election toward the GOP-favored candidate that served as a stark reminder of the alarming and increasingly bare-faced influence of big money in US elections.

Musk and his various groups poured a record total of $25 million into the race, an amount never before seen in a state Supreme Court election. Just as in the general election last November, Musk funded the kind of work usually done by grassroots volunteers, putting $6 million behind door-to-door canvassers, and offered to pay $20 to anyone who signed up to knock doors, as well as an extra $20 for anyone else they recruited and a bonus $200 if they referred ten people.

“It’s easy money,” Musk said.

Even more obscenely, Musk offered to pay people $100 to sign a petition hawked by one of his organizations calling on voters to reject “activist judges.” He then invited people who had voted to a campaign event in Wisconsin promising to give $1 million to two attendees, resulting in the tasteless spectacle of the billionaire on a stage handing giant checks inscribed “one million dollars” to people who had voted for his preferred candidate.

“I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign a petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars,” one beaming recipient said in a video posted by one of Musk’s PACs, a poster blaring “VOTE SCHIMEL ON APRIL 1” — referring to Brad Schimel, the conservative supreme court candidate Musk was backing — behind her.

Wisconsin law is pretty clear that you’re not allowed to bribe someone into turning out to vote, and Musk’s actions were in clear violation of it — which is probably why his PAC ended up deleting that video and editing it so that the recipient of one of his $1 million checks no longer says the word “vote.”

This is an appalling and almost cartoonish mockery of both election laws and American democracy, made worse by the fact that Wisconsin’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously it would refuse to stop him from doing it. Even one Republican voter who backed Schimel told the Associated Press he was put off by the fact that it had become a “financial race” and that “it’s a shame that we have to spend this much money.”

Many Wisconsinites seemed to agree. A month after a largely older crowd packed out a Kenosha basketball stadium to hear Bernie Sanders warn about encroaching oligarchy, the state handily rejected the Musk-backed Schimel campaign, which lost by 10 points. According to the Associated Press, Schimel’s liberal opponent, Susan Crawford, actually posted larger winning margins in places where Musk’s PAC had been particularly active.

Even Trump supporters and Republican voters should be cheered by this outcome. It should go without saying how corrosive it is to the basic idea of democracy if the world’s richest man can simply strut around in the open, cheerfully paying people to vote, let alone doing it grinning on stage in front of thousands of people while handing out a comically oversize check. If elections simply become a matter of which billionaire can bribe more people to vote or even knock on doors, then democracy loses its meaning.

Trump and his allies seem to have been trying the last few months to find out how far the US public would accept oligarchic governance, from appointing a cabinet of thirteen billionaires and inviting several others to stand behind him as he took the oath of office, to handing another billionaire, Musk, the power to unilaterally dismantle a variety of core government functions that Americans rely on like the Social Security Administration. This race suggests that the public has hit its limit.

Common sense and democratic values prevailed here. But the very fact that we could arrive at this point, where the world’s richest man felt like he had enough breathing room to even attempt such a shameless and open purchasing of an election, should give us all serious pause. It points to the need to urgently eliminate all the noxious ways that money infects the US political system, but also to prevent someone like Musk from amassing the grotesque level of wealth that let him think he could pull this stunt in the first place.