Politics
Susan Crawford Wins Wisconsin Supreme Court Election, Despite Elon Musk’s Millions
A liberal candidate for a pivotal seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court overcame $25 million in spending from Elon Musk and defeated her conservative opponent on Tuesday, The Associated Press reported, in a contest that became a kind of referendum on Mr. Musk and his slashing of the federal government.
With turnout extraordinarily high for a spring election in an off year, Judge Susan Crawford handily beat Judge Brad Schimel, who ran on his loyalty to President Trump and was aided by Mr. Musk, the president’s billionaire policy aide.
Mr. Musk not only poured money into the race but also campaigned personally in the state, even donning a cheesehead. But his starring role seemed to inflame Democratic anger against him even more than it helped Judge Schimel.
The barrage of spending in the race may nearly double the previous record for a single judicial election. With about 95 percent of the vote counted on Tuesday evening, Judge Crawford held a lead of roughly 9 points.
“Today, Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections and our Supreme Court,” she said in her victory speech on Tuesday night. “Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.”
For Democrats, the result is a jolt of momentum. They have been engaged in a coast-to-coast rhetorical rending of garments since Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January and embarked with Mr. Musk on an effort to drastically shrink federal agencies, set aside international alliances and alter the government’s relationships with the nation’s universities, minority groups, immigrants and corporate world.
Coming on the heels of Democratic triumphs in special elections for state legislative seats in Iowa and Pennsylvania and the defeat of four Republican-backed state referendums in Louisiana, Judge Crawford’s victory puts the party on its front foot for the first time since last November. Her win showed that, at least in one instance, Mr. Musk’s seemingly endless reserves of political cash had energized more Democrats than Republicans.
The race could also have implications for control of Congress, where Republicans’ razor-thin edge was fortified on Tuesday when the party held on to two Florida seats in special elections. Democrats have quietly argued for months that a Crawford victory would pave the way for a liberal-tilting Wisconsin Supreme Court to order new congressional maps, which could help Democrats defeat one or two of the state’s Republican Congress members.
Judge Crawford, of Dane County, herself participated in a meeting with liberal donors in January that was pitched as a chance to put two House seats in play, a prospect echoed last week by Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chamber’s Democratic leader. And Republicans, led by Mr. Musk, sought to make that possibility the central focus of their campaign to defeat her.
Mr. Musk, describing the stakes of the contest in near-apocalyptic terms, seemed to personify the campaign on Judge Schimel’s behalf even more than the candidate himself. Never before had a single donor sought to influence an American judicial race to such a degree, and few had invested comparable sums in an election in which they were not themselves running. Through his super PAC, Mr. Musk underwrote an $11.5 million ground game that targeted voters with messages urging them to help Mr. Trump by supporting Judge Schimel. A separate organization with Musk ties spent $7.7 million on television advertising, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.
Mr. Musk also offered Wisconsinites $100 each to sign a petition in opposition to “activist judges.”
By Tuesday, his super PAC was offering voters $50 to post a picture of a Wisconsin resident outside a polling place.
The victory for Judge Crawford, 60, who won a 10-year term, maintains a 4-to-3 majority for liberals on the court, which in coming months is poised to deliver key decisions on abortion and labor rights. It may soon determine the legality of the state’s congressional district lines, which were drawn by the Republican-controlled State Legislature and have delivered six of eight House seats to the G.O.P. in the evenly divided state.
Liberals are likely to maintain a court majority until at least 2028. Conservative justices on the court face re-election in each of the next two years. Unless a liberal justice vacates her seat and is replaced by the governor, conservatives cannot flip a seat until 2028.
With control of the court on the line, the formally nonpartisan election was always going to be expensive and hard-fought, but Mr. Musk’s investment beginning in mid-February supercharged the stakes, attention and cash flowing into the state. The involvement of the billionaire, whose electric-vehicle company, Tesla, sued Wisconsin in January for the right to open dealerships in the state, turned what would have been a state contest into something approaching a national bat signal for Democrats to support Judge Crawford.
“This is a test, and the whole world is watching,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, told supporters at Judge Crawford’s closing rally on Monday. “This is a chance for us to show that in a moment that is so terrifying nationally that we still believe in democracy.”
Backed by the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and the Democratic National Committee, and with visits from prominent liberals and Democrats including Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Judge Crawford raised $17 million in the fund-raising period ending March 17, a stunning figure for a state judicial candidate with little profile inside her state, let alone nationally.
Judge Schimel, 60, of Waukesha County, a longtime Trump loyalist who last year dressed up as Mr. Trump for Halloween, embraced the president and Mr. Musk with gusto in the campaign’s final weeks. He wore the president’s signature Make America Great Again hat to campaign stops and appeared with both Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk on livestreams in late March.
Wisconsin Republicans made no secret of their effort to make Judge Schimel, who served one term as the state’s attorney general before losing re-election in 2018, an avatar of the Trump movement. Brian Schimming, the Republican Party of Wisconsin chairman, said his goal was merely to get 60 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters from last November to turn out for Judge Schimel by Tuesday.
Judge Schimel, like Judge Crawford, framed the race as an existential threat to the state and the nation.
“If we don’t restore the court, our Republic will not survive, right?” he told supporters last week at a rally in Stoughton, Wis. “Frankly, they’re taking away one of the branches, right, by legislating from the bench.”
In Mr. Musk’s foray into campaigning on behalf of Judge Schimel, he made a show of his wealth but frequently digressed from the contest at hand.
On Sunday night, he traveled to Green Bay, where he came bearing a pair of $1 million checks to voters, winners, he said, of a contest among those who had signed his petition. One recipient just happened to be the chairman of the College Republicans of Wisconsin, who joined a third person to whom Mr. Musk’s super PAC had given a $1 million check a few days earlier.
But Mr. Musk spent just a couple of minutes out of his two hours of remarks addressing Judge Schimel and the coming election. In what came across as an unedited TED Talk, Mr. Musk delivered extended monologues about immigration policy, alleged fraud in the Social Security system and the future of artificial intelligence, in addition to taking a series of questions from the audience that also did not address the court race.
When Mr. Musk did address the reason for his visit, he framed the election in maximally important terms — suggesting Wisconsin voters were the first domino in a process that could change the future of civilization.
“What’s happening on Tuesday is a vote for which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives — that is why it is so significant,” Mr. Musk said. “And whichever party controls the House to a significant degree controls the country, which then steers the course of Western civilization. I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”
Wisconsin Democrats and others tied to Judge Crawford’s campaign found the whole episode confusing. Mr. Musk, while popular with conservative voters because of his ties to Mr. Trump, had not emphasized public safety or even affinity with the president — issues that Democrats believed had the potential to help Judge Schimel sway Republicans to vote.
Instead, they believed, it was the latest evidence that the one general-election candidate Mr. Trump can truly drive to victory is himself.
Jess Bidgood contributed reporting from Stoughton, Wis.
Politics
FBI arrests protester who threatened to kill ICE officer’s family at NJ detention center protest, Blanche says
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Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche on Friday said that a man who made death threats against a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer and his family at a protest in New Jersey Thursday night had been arrested.
The arrest came just hours after Blanche promised the protester, who was captured on video, would be found and arrested.
“That’s a federal crime,” Blanche said on Fox News’ “The Will Cain Show” on Thursday. “Not only threatening the ICE officer — but think about how disgusting this individual is by threatening his wife and his children with death.
In the video, the protester can be heard taunting the officer: “I will kill your whole f—ing family. Your whole f—ing family is dead. Your children and wife all dead. I have your face mother—er! All dead!”
ANTI-ICE AGITATOR SCREAMS ‘I’LL KILL YOUR WHOLE F- FAMILY’ DAY AFTER DEM GOV PRAISES ‘PEACEFUL PROTESTING’
Federal immigration officers clashed with protesters outside Delaney Hall in Newark, N.J., on Thursday. (Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu)
Blanche said the officer was just doing his job and “standing there.”
On Friday evening, Blanche wrote on X: Told you. @FBI just arrested the man who threatened to kill ICE officers and their families. FAFO.”
He has not yet been identified.
ANTI-ICE PROTESTERS CLASH WITH AGENTS OUTSIDE NEW JERSEY DETENTION CENTER AS GOV. SHERRILL DENIED ENTRY
The clash occurred Thursday evening outside of Newark’s Delaney Hall detention center where protesters were accused of biting, kicking and punching agents.
The protests were in their sixth night by Thursday. (Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu)
Agents responded by deploying pepper spray and beating back agitators as the protest continued into its sixth night.
Nine rioters were arrested during the clashes Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security told Fox News Digital.
ANTI-ICE AGITATORS THROW WOODEN PALLETS, MATTRESSES AT FEDERAL AGENTS DURING CHAOTIC NJ DETENTION CENTER CLASH
Approximately 100 protesters mobbed the area surrounding the detention center, chanting “F— ICE” and brandishing black umbrellas, gas masks and other gear to protect themselves from pepper spray and various anti-riot measures.
On Wednesday evening, DHS reported that approximately 100 anti-ICE protesters gathered around the Delaney Hall ICE facility. While rioters assaulted and threw objects at law enforcement, DHS said “local police refused to help our officers.” Six rioters were arrested Wednesday night for allegedly assaulting law enforcement officers.
ICE agents use chemical irritants during clashes with protestors outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, N.J., on Thursday. (Adam Gray/Getty Images)
“We called local police, we called state police multiple times. Listen, I know the law enforcement there would love to respond, but because of Governor Sherrill’s behavior what the governor is doing, she’s not allowing public officers and state officers to respond,” Mullin said during a Thursday morning appearance on Fox & Friends.
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Demonstrations over conditions for detainees began Friday, May 22, after detainees penned an open letter claiming they were being denied access to medical care, being insufficiently fed and detained without due process.
DHS has denied those claims.
Fox News’ Charles Creitz and Robert McGreevy contributed to this report.
With California facing increasingly destructive wildfires, experts and officials have long urged the strategic removal of dense, flammable vegetation that can erupt into particularly destructive flames from a lightning bolt or the spark of a power line.
But after years of record investment by the state in such wildfire risk mitigation, two key money sources are drying up, potentially reducing the state’s annual budget for vegetation removal by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Wildfire resiliency advocates are warning that the loss of these funds will leave the state vulnerable to devastation, and are calling on California’s next governor to take that threat seriously.
Currently, California relies heavily on two funding sources for wildfire mitigation work: A state program that charges polluters for their emissions and a climate bond approved by voters in 2024.
Late Friday, however, state officials adopted a new structure for the emissions program, called cap-and-invest, that analysts say will likely reduce wildfire mitigation funding by $200 million per year. At the same time, the governor’s latest budget proposal puts the state on track to allocate the majority of the climate bond’s $1.5 billion in wildfire prevention money within just three years.
As a result, California could go from routinely pulling more than $600 million a year from these sources, to just $150 million, according to an estimate from the Wildfire Solutions Coalition — a group of more than 80 organizations representing conservationists, business owners, fire officials and tribal leaders.
The coalition is urging the state to find new sources of funding for the work.
“We have the scientists, we have the technicians, we have the advocates,” said Michelle Decker, who is on the coalition’s executive committee and serves as president and CEO of the Inland Empire Community Foundation. “We see this problem. We can get ahead of this problem. It is a revenue issue.”
California wildfires have become increasingly costly. The 2025 L.A. fires alone caused an estimated $250 billion in damage and economic loss. Insurance companies have already paid out $22.4 billion.
In attempt to reduce the risk of damage to communities and ecosystems, the state has employed a wide range of tactics. These includes fortifying homes against wildfires, replanting fire-ravaged forests and thinning out vegetation with prescribed burns, goat grazing and manual thinning with heavy machinery to reduce the intensity of potential fires.
Research suggests wildfire mitigation work pays off. A recent analysis of 285 fires in the western U.S. found that every dollar spent on landscape projects saved about $3.75 in wildfire damage.
But as funding from cap-and-invest and the climate bond dwindle, the state must increasingly turn to Cal Fire, which devotes only a small portion of its budget to mitigation work.
“This is not an issue that can be pushed off to a timeline based solely on politics,” said Steve Frisch, a founding member of the coalition and president of the Sierra Business Council. “Fire happens whether we want it to or not.”
After a series of destructive wildfires in Northern California and the 2017 Thomas fire in Southern California, the state legislature began to explicitly focus on funding wildfire mitigation.
In 2018, lawmakers directed $200 million per year of cap-and-invest funds to wildfire mitigation projects.
As the Woolsey fire in Southern California and the Camp fire in Paradise raged later that fall, Trump accused the state of “gross mismanagement” of forest lands and threatened to cut off federal funds unless it was corrected.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and the legislature, with a significant budget surplus, began earmarking even more funds, leading to a peak of $1.1 billion in wildfire mitigation investments during the 2021-2022 fiscal year.
After the surplus dwindled, the legislature opted in 2024 to put a $10-billion climate bond in front of voters — $1.5 billion of which was dedicated specifically for wildfire mitigation work.
Newsom has since pointed to this high state funding to call on the federal government to step up its own investments into forest management work.
The federal government manages 57% of all forests in the state. While the U.S. Forest Service spent $3.1 billion mitigating wildfire conditions in the state over the last few years, California spent $4.3 billion, according to the California Forest Resilience and Wildfire Task Force.
However, the state has already allocated about $600 million of the climate bond’s wildfire mitigation pot for the 2024-2025 and current fiscal years. The latest budget proposal would allocate more than $300 million for this upcoming fiscal year. While many advocates support allocating the money quickly, it leaves little for future years.
Once that money is spent, California has to pay off the $10 billion bond with interest. The result is an estimated price tag of $16 billion, paid in roughly $400 million increments every year, for 40 years, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.
As for the cap-and-invest funds, a fraught months-long debate at the California Air Resources Board on how to extend the program beyond 2030 resulted in a compromise that will cut the revenue it generates in half, the Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates.
Since other projects get priority — including $1 billion every year for California’s high-speed rail project — the new proposal would “likely leave no funding” for the wildfire and forest resilience line item, the Legislative Analyst’s Office found.
Cal Fire still holds a modest annual budget for wildfire mitigation work. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the agency had $500 million for forest management and fire prevention that was not directly tied to cap-and-invest or the bond — up from about $65 million two decades prior.
As for the federal government, independent analyses by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and NPR found that Forest Service wildfire mitigation work is on the decline amid federal staffing cuts. The Forest Service claims the decrease in work was primarily due to poor weather conditions for activities like prescribed burns and staff being occupied with firefighting.
Both the state and federal government’s investments pale in comparison to the spending of California’s investor-owned utilities. In 2025 alone, the utilities planned to spend more than $9.2 billion on preventing their equipment from sparking the next devastating wildfire, primarily funded by Californians’ electricity bills.
Times staff writer Hayley Smith contributed to this report.
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