Susan Crawford wins Wisconsin election despite Elon Musk donations
Susan Crawford beat out Republican Brad Schimel in Wisconsin’s judicial race despite massive donations from Elon Musk.
Elon Musk’s big play in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race and resounding defeat is raising questions about whether he has become a liability for Republicans amid the turmoil surrounding the Department of Government Efficiency, and whether he could soon leave his job in President Donald Trump’s White House.
Liberal candidate Susan Crawford won the Wisconsin race by 10 points Tuesday despite Musk, the world’s richest man, pouring millions into the battleground state’s special election – the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history – on behalf of her conservative opponent. Democrats also over performed in two special elections for U.S. House seats in Florida to replace two Republicans who left Congress to join Trump’s second term team.
Those three off-cycle elections took on national significance as an early test of Trump’s popularity and Democratic enthusiasm to push back against his second-term presidency, in which Musk has played a key role in shuttering entire federal agencies and firing tens of thousands of workers in a bid to cut costs and dramatically reshape America’s government.
Democrats campaigned in the three races by focusing their ire on Musk and Trump and crowed afterward that the results were a rebuke to the two men who have been frequently side-by-side during the opening months of the new administration.
“Yesterday’s elections affirmed that the American people won’t tolerate Trump and Musk’s chaos,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said Wednesday in a press call.
Musk was front and center in the Wisconsin race, traveling to Green Bay on Sunday for a town hall where he donned a cheesehead hat and handed out a pair of $1 million checks to two Wisconsin voters. His political action committee spent heavily in the race, which he declared at the weekend rally could “effect the entire destiny of humanity.”
His tactics may have backfired, though, and have increased speculation about how long he will remain at Trump’s side as a special government employee steering DOGE as it blitzes through the federal government, instituting mass layoffs and working to dismantle agencies including the Department of Education and U.S. Agency for International Development.
Trump carried Wisconsin by a percentage point in 2024 after losing the state to Joe Biden in 2020 by a similar narrow margin. The big swing back to the Democrats and against Republicans in the Supreme Court race was a warning sign for the GOP that also has practical implications, allowing liberals to maintain control of the court in a key swing state.
Trump ally Steve Bannon, who served in the White House as chief strategist during the first Trump administration, said on his podcast that the Wisconsin Supreme Court outcome was a “massive defeat” that will “resonate down through the next couple of years.”
The extent that Trump blames Musk and his work at DOGE for the loss could impact how their partnership proceeds. A Trump adviser said Musk hasn’t become a liability.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also pushed back Wednesday against a Politico report that Trump has told people Musk will be stepping back from his DOGE work soon.
“This ‘scoop’ is garbage,” Leavitt wrote on X, the social media platform owned by Musk. “Elon Musk and President Trump have both *publicly* stated that Elon will depart from public service as a special government employee when his incredible work at DOGE is complete.”
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about Musk Thursday.
If Musk steps back, it’s not clear how it will impact DOGE’s work going forward. DOGE staffers have embedded at federal agencies, where they’ve asserted authority on everything from shrinking the workforce to shelving research grants, soliciting weekly check-ins, and taking away government credit cards. Trump said this week that he eventually wants Cabinet secretaries to start performing DOGE’s cost-cutting work themselves.
“At a certain point, I think it will end, but they have also gotten a big education,” Trump said in discussing DOGE on Monday during an Oval Office event. “There’ll be a point at which the secretaries will be able to do this work and do it very, you know, as we say, with the scalpel, and that’s what we want.”
An administration official noted that Republicans have long been interested in government cost-cutting, arguing that DOGE has simply accelerated that process while providing a playbook for agencies to continue their work.
Speaking before Tuesday’s elections, Trump said he wants Musk to stay on with DOGE as long as he’s willing but suggested that work could be coming to an end.
There is growing backlash against Musk’s efforts, including protests targeting his electric car company Tesla. Some Tesla locations have been vandalized, which Attorney General Pam Bondi has described as “domestic terrorism” while pursuing stiff penalties for those involved.
Democrats are clamoring for investigations into DOGE. The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan watchdog agency, opened an inquiry in response to a March 6 letter from 11 Democrats led by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Many DOGE actions also are being challenged in court.
“I think he’s been amazing, but I also think he’s got a big company to run,” Trump said of Musk Monday in the Oval Office before signing an executive order targeting ticket-scalping at live events. “And at some point, he’s going to be going back. He wants to.”
Musk is authorized to work at the White House for 130 days under his designation as a special government employee. The executive order creating DOGE sets a July 4, 2026 deadline for it to cease operations, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Asked in a Fox News interview last week about whether he’d stick to 130 days or continue past that, Musk said: “I think we will have accomplished most of the work required to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars within that time frame.”
Mike DuHaime, a Republican consultant and former political director for the Republican National Committee, said he doesn’t see any reason for Musk to leave his White House job right now.
“Musk was incredibly helpful to Trump winning the presidency and is playing a role the president clearly finds valuable, cutting government spending and taking the blame from the left,” DuHaime said.
Musk had his own response Wednesday to the report he could be on the way out.
“Fake news,” he said on X.
Contributing: Joey Garrison