Elon Musk Is Drowning Out the Voices of Wisconsinites. That Should Worry Every American.
In every election cycle since the 2010 Citizens United ruling, the influence of billionaires and corporate interests has increased, muting the voices of regular voters.
By Adav Noti
Just under a month ago, I wrote here in The Contrarian that the $5 million Elon Musk had already spent trying to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court race was only the beginning.
Indeed, in the intervening weeks, Musk has tripled his investment in that judicial election, with his total spending now at $15 million and climbing. In a state of 6 million people, a single man who does not live there singlehandedly accounts for 20% of the unprecedented $76 million raised for the Wisconsin election in total.
Therein lies the problem: This election has become more about Musk and his millions than it has about the issues facing everyday Wisconsinites.
The Badger State was once a gleaming example of how to prevent money from unduly influencing politics—until a partisan legislature killed decades of legal guardrails.
More than 50 years ago, in creating those checks on election spending, state lawmakers delivered a prescient warning: “The Legislature finds and declares that our democratic system of government can be maintained only if the electorate is informed [and] that excessive spending on campaigns for public office jeopardizes the integrity of elections. ...When a candidate becomes overly dependent upon large private contributors, the democratic process is subjected to a potential corrupting influence.”
Musk is certainly a front-runner for the aforementioned “potential corrupting influence.” He has brought to Wisconsin a new version of a scheme he piloted in the 2024 presidential election, making eyebrow-raising promises to cut $100 checks for voters who say they oppose “activist justices.”
Of course, it is illegal to buy votes, both federally and in Wisconsin. But there were no consequences for Musk paying millions of dollars directly to swing-state voters in 2024. To the contrary, Musk has quite effectively (and lucratively) parlayed that spending into de facto control of the United States government. So, it should not be surprising that we are seeing a repeat.
The result is that the voices of Wisconsin voters are being drowned out by the record-breaking money pouring into their state.
Even worse, this is not an incident isolated to Wisconsin, or to the spending habits of the world’s richest man. The amount of money spent on all our elections is literally out of control—and it threatens to deprive Americans in every state of their First Amendment rights to have a say in their own governance.
This is the consequence of our fundamentally broken campaign finance system which, over the years, has steadily opened the door to megadonors tilting election outcomes in their favor. For more than 15 years since the Supreme Court decided Citizens United, these wealthy special interests have wielded ever-increasing financial power in campaigns.
Even as Musk works to gain judicial power in Wisconsin (amid an ongoing state legal dispute involving Tesla), President Donald Trump has also begun working in parallel to knock down the few remaining guardrails on money in federal elections.
Much of Trump’s effort focuses on the Federal Election Commission (FEC)—the sole agency charged with enforcing federal campaign finance laws. The FEC has a poor track record to begin with, having steadily and intentionally opened doors for special-interest election spending. And now Trump has moved to further cripple the agency, attempting to fire one of its commissioners and take direct control of the FEC’s legal determinations.
In the short term, there are glimmers of hope. Trump’s federal efforts might be turned back by the courts, and Musk’s Wisconsin spending might not ultimately buy him enough votes to achieve his goals there.
But the long-term trendline is grim: every election cycle since the 2010 Citizens United ruling—through 2024 and now into 2025—the influence of billionaires and corporate interests has increased, with the voices of regular voters being correspondingly muted.
No matter who wins the Wisconsin Supreme Court election next week, all Americans should see that campaign as a frightening case study of where our democracy is headed if we don’t undo the damage of Citizens United and restore the real power over our elections to the voters.
Adav Noti is executive director of the Campaign Legal Center.
We must end Citizens United.
While I agree that much of the blame should rest on Roberts and the billionaires, in the end most of the blame lies with ill- and uninformed voters and, especially, all those millions of non-voters.
Just in my circle of relatives, friends and acquaintances, there are several well-informed moaners and groaners about politics who did not vote or voted for third-party candidates whom they fully well knew had not chance whatsoever.
Just look at the hundreds of thousands who voted for RFK Jr. even though he dropped out before the election!