It’s important to relish the little pleasures in life, like the knowledge that somewhere, Elon Musk is sad. On Tuesday, the world’s richest person faced an unmistakable rebuke from the public when voters in Wisconsin rejected his preferred candidate for a vacant state supreme court seat there: Brad Schimel, the former state attorney general, on whose campaign Musk had spent more than $25m – lost in a landslide to the liberal Susan Crawford. He must have been devastated, a thought which liberal Americans greeted with relish. The Democratic party’s official account on Musk’s X posted a photo of Musk with the caption “loser”. All that money wasted. Maybe he cried.
In addition to his lavish expenditures, Musk had made himself the center of the race in a deliberate and ill-advised fashion. He appeared at a rally in Green Bay wearing a cheese hat – a deliberately silly article donned by fans of sports teams in the dairy-producing state. He paid for in-person canvassers at a rate of $25 an hour, three times the minimum wage. And in an illegal gesture that the Wisconsin supreme court declined to stop, he handed out giant, novelty $1m checks to voters who signed a petition against “activist” judges – a thinly veiled cash-for-votes scheme, something he also did in Pennsylvania ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Because of Musk’s unrelenting visibility, the race became largely a referendum on his character and on his Doge project of draconian and indiscriminate federal government program cuts in Washington. The result was decisive: Crawford, the liberal, branded her campaign “the people vs Elon Musk”, and won by about 10 points.
As Donald Trump and his allies tighten their grip over executive bureaucracy and entrench their influence on the federal judiciary, state level politics – and particularly state courts – have become one of the few available venues where liberal activism can hold sway. The state supreme court race in Wisconsin is an uncommonly influential one, with Crawford now poised to join a bench of colleagues who will rule on abortion access, congressional redistricting for the state’s US House seats and on a case in which Musk has a personal financial stake, regarding how Tesla can operate dealerships there. (Schimel, Musk’s beneficiary, refused to say that he would recuse himself if seated for this last case.) The high stakes – both for his personal fortune and for the Republican party for which he is now one of the largest financial sponsors – led Musk to cast the race as a battle for “western civilization” and “the future of the world”. Democrats have not won quite so much as that in Crawford’s victory, but her vote on the court will be indispensable to efforts to restore and protect women’s rights, and to re-establish fair elections in Wisconsin, a state where most of the congressional districts have long been gerrymandered out of competitiveness. Her victory also offers a road map to other judges and politicians, who may have once feared that Musk’s billions meant they could not oppose him and survive an election. Crawford’s example proves that they can.
But perhaps more usefully, the race may offer a model for the sclerotic, beleaguered, and lately largely defeatist national Democratic party, which so far has mostly responded to Trump’s return to Washington with a mixture of fear, anger at their base and a kind of cowing submission I can only describe as canine. In Wisconsin, Musk proved to be a useful target, an elegant distillation of everything that is wrong and repulsive about the rightwing worldview into one man. His person became a symbol of corruption, of oligarchal seizure of political power, of the rich’s cavalier insult to the little people they feel entitled to control, and of the singularly off-putting quality of a too-online techno-reactionary elite, a group of men who believe themselves much smarter than everybody else but seem to have no grasp on how they appear to others.
Musk has been feared, by Democrats, for his bottomless money. But perhaps they should embrace him as a symbol for his sheer odiousness. Voter motivations are hard to track and the data about them is easy to manipulate; just ask any of the Democratic strategists currently squabbling over their various preferred theories of why the party lost in 2024. But anecdotal evidence out of Wisconsin suggests that voters were angered at Musk’s Doge cuts to government programs and creeped out by him personally. He seems eager for the spotlight, eager to be the center of attention, eager to make it clear that he has bought the presidency, bought the Republican party and wants to buy you, too. And voters, to their credit, do not particularly like the idea of being owned and dominated by such an annoying and repulsive nerd.
To observers, part of what has been so frustrating about the Democrats’ inaction in the face of Trump’s authoritarian takeover is how easy it would be to make a case against those who are destroying our country for their own gain. Musk, deputized to effectively run the executive branch while Trump himself spends his time deploying law enforcement against his enemies and golfing, has presented a grim spectacle, heavy handed with symbolism: the world’s richest person, in a fit of irrepressible arrogance and greed, is stealing from the people, dismantling the programs that give them food and medicine and security in their old age – stealing their educations, their health, their food, their warmth, their art, their science, their futures. It is a morally repugnant operation, shameless and gruesome, and it is carried out by a man who is a personal vacuum of charisma, who laughs, stupidly and at himself, while he steals from us. He is an easy character to hate.
Hate has its uses. The Republican party has organized itself almost solely around hatred since 2016. Trump rallies his followers in hatred of immigrants, of women, of transgender people, of a nebulous and imprecise “elite” who seem to be winning in a world where everyone else can only lose. This is a misdirected hate, targeting people who are not responsible for Americans’ suffering and whose punishment cannot end it. But it has been a very politically effective hate, one that has restored Trump to power he may never relinquish.
The Democrats have been reluctant to embrace their own brand of hate in return, and understandably so. But Musk represents a unique opportunity to turn Americans’ anger where it belongs: towards the oligarchs, the smug rich, the arrogant and stupid men who are ruining our lives in order to further enrich their own. Perhaps this anger can become a new rallying point for the beleaguered Democrats. There has rarely been a more deserving target.
#Elon #Musk #Democrats #hope #Moira #Donegan
