The recent Wisconsin Supreme Court elections represented the first significant electoral test since the beginning of the new Trump era of American politics. Conservative Brad Schimel, backed by the wealthiest person on earth and Donald Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, was soundly defeated. Liberal candidate Susan Crawford was elected with 54% of the vote, as many voters breathed a sigh of relief with the refrain “you can’t buy Wisconsin.” This is just months after Trump, yet again, broke through the “blue wall” of Wisconsin and flipped the historically reliable blue state in November. 

As Trump, Musk, and DOGE ruthlessly attack the jobs and collective bargaining of hundreds of thousands of federal workers, and economic recession looms amidst Trump’s tariff offensive, millions of working people are anxious to fight back against Trump and Musk’s aggressive right-wing agenda everywhere it manifests. It is important that the anti-Trump resistance be clear on both what this election signals about Trump’s level of current support and what it will take to defeat his policies for good.

Battle of the Billionaires

This was no run-of-the-mill state judicial election, and no one knew that fact more than the billionaire class. With a whopping $100 million of billionaire spending coming in on both sides, this election became the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history, nearly doubling the previous record. Elon Musk alone chipped in a cool $25 million, even throwing on a cheesehead hat and bribing Republican voters with giant $1 million checks. On the Democrat side, known billionaire mega-donor George Soros and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker headed up a coalition of wealthy liberal philanthropists to dump millions to try to match Musk’s contributions. In many ways, this election served as a proxy battleground for the MAGA billionaires and the Trump opposition within the billionaire class. This helped contribute to the record-high voter turnout for an April election of over 50%, which Musk and right-wing conspirators Alex Jones are now twisting to make claims of a stolen election. 

But while the parties of big business wrestle over holding a majority in the state’s highest court, many thousands of working and young people saw their most important upcoming political battles reflected upon this race. Abortion rights became a central issue, as an 1849 Wisconsin law banning abortion without exceptions for rape or incest has been making it’s way through the state courts since the Supreme Court’s overturn of Roe v. Wade. 

Wisconsin workers have also vigilantly sought to overturn the vicious anti-union Act 10 legislation signed by former Republican Governor Scott Walker. Act 10 prevents public-sector unions from bargaining over anything but wages, subjects any wage increases to a “reverse COLA” where they’re capped at the rate of inflation, and forces them to hold annual recertification votes to maintain the limited rights they’re allowed. In the context of Trump’s venomous right-wing rhetoric and attacks on women, LGBTQ+ people, and public-sector workers, it is no shock that thousands saw in this election an opportunity to register their disdain for Trump’s agenda and stave off the continued whittling away of their basic protections. 

MAGA billionaires and Republicans have been seeking the total decimation of movements opposing right-wing attacks on several fronts. In Wisconsin, the MAGA right cohered around the anti-abortion, law-and-order Republican judge Brad Schimel, aiming to blow open any governmental or judicial barriers that may stand in the way of continuing to squeeze the working class and the oppressed in the name of profits and U.S. imperialist domination.

Liberal candidate Susan Crawford’s victory ultimately says less about her own campaign and more about opposition to the way billionaire Musk has used his astronomical wealth to place his thumbs on the scales of politics, and a growing mood to oppose Trump’s administration. While the Democratic Party leaned into this dynamic and fashioned their campaign as “the people vs. Elon Musk”, Crawford cannot be seriously considered a “people’s” representative. Even setting aside the millions of corporate dollars that flooded into her campaign, polls ahead of the election indicated that nearly three out of five people didn’t know enough about her to have an opinion on her. 

Her campaign was an emblem of the Democratic Party’s current strategy to defeat Trump by trying to pose as more of a “grounded” option, while putting forward a similar right-wing agenda for billionaires. She refused to say anything about stopping deportations or protecting sanctuary cities. She refused to answer questions about whether trans people have any specific protections under the law, whereas Brad Schimel took the same opportunity to voice his “respect” for trans people seeking name changes in the courts. While this should paint no illusions that Schimel and the Republicans are any friend to the trans community, even they recognize the utter void left by Democrats like Crawford who refuse to link up with some of the most pressing demands of immigrants, trans people, and workers.

The Way Forward For Fighting The Right

After the election results came in, Patrick Guarasci, a top Democratic Party adviser to the Crawford campaign, said that the election showed that “the Republicans need to come back to the center.” Far from using the defeat of Musk as a platform to fight the right, Democrats are using it to make appeals for pro-business, status-quo politics—the same approach that drove workers into Trump’s arms. 

Building a serious movement to fight Trump and the right-wing cannot run through the Democrats. Instead of supporting parties funded by billionaires who undemocratically pour reckless amounts of money into elections and continually try to buy our votes, workers and young people need an independent party that our movements can truly call home. We need a party that unabashedly fights for a working-class program like universal healthcare with full reproductive and gender-affirming care, a $25/hour minimum wage, and union jobs for U.S.-born and immigrant workers.
We should also be clear that the courts offer no serious avenue to protesting Trump and the right-wing. Even after liberals gained a majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023 around a similar call to “pack the court” with more liberal judges, Act 10, the 1849 abortion ban, and countless other right-wing laws have remained on the books unchallenged. The reality is that, however liberal or conservative a court may lean, under capitalism, the courts and the political establishment are designed to work hand-in-hand to defend the interests of the wealthy. 

The only force capable of pushing the courts to rule on the side of working people and the oppressed exists in social movements and the labor movement. Last Saturday, April 5, saw estimates of over 5 million people protesting against Trump and Musk on the streets, with many unions endorsing and mobilizing their members. This is the kind of movement that can actually beat Trump if it escalates to occupations, walkouts, and strikes to shut things down. 

All movements protesting Trump’s agenda must link up going forward—from the anti-war movement on campus to the attacks on federal workers to attacks on trans people and immigrants— building for the broadest possible mobilization to May Day protests across the country. Only such an independent movement will be capable of defeating Trump and Musk in the new Trump era.