Wisconsin shows us that hard work beats reckless bullsh*t every time.
Musk’s reckless, showy and ignorant approach to Wisconsin mirrored his effort to cut our government. It failed to achieve its mission.
There’s a lesson for Trump and DOGE in their failed effort to buy the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, but they won’t learn it.
The people of Wisconsin are Republicans and Democrats and decent and patriotic. They differ about many things, but love for our country is not one of them. In that, they are like the rest of the country.
Politically, the Republican Party controlled the state through a radical gerrymander that was only recently broken. They want it back, and the path to getting it runs through the state supreme court.
Elon Musk made the election his cause, spending upwards of $20 million and deploying the same vote buying tricks he used last year in Pennsylvania. He cut million dollar checks to voters. He paid people for selfies outside the polling places. He personally led rallies. The world’s richest man, a storied engineer, a builder of rockets and neural implants and electric cars, thought he could build a machine to engineer our votes.
He told the everyone that American’s future depended on this election. The good people of Wisconsin thought so too… and by an unheard-of margin in that blue-red state, proved Musk’s hastily built machine no better than a rocket that explodes on takeoff.
The election pitted Susan Crawford, a serious jurist, against Brad Schimel, who may or may not be a serious jurist, but who nevertheless traffics in election denialism. Partisan judicial races are now common, as decades of GOP radicalization undermined the rule of law across the country. Republican controlled State Supreme Courts have upheld gerrymandered maps, overturned protections for workers, undermined civil rights and environmental laws.
The Wisconsin court is especially important to the GOP. Control of the United States Congress is at stake. If the court strikes down the still-gerrymandered Congressional districts and orders new lines drawn, the GOP could lose a couple of seats. MAGA radicals have even suggested that, if they were in control, the court could change the way electors are chosen to allow the legislature rather than the voters to decide the next presidential race. After all, the last time the GOP controlled the Wisconsin Supreme Court it did not just okay the most partisan gerrymander in the nation, it came closer than any other court in America to joining Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Wisconsin is, after all the state whose Senator, Ron Johnson, was the bag man for the fake elector scheme.
It's no wonder that Musk and Trump wanted it so badly. But they made a couple of big mistakes. They assumed the people of Wisconsin were stupid. They aren’t. They assumed the people of Wisconsin were so in thrall of Musk’s billions that he could sway the election. They aren’t. They assumed Musk can just engineer victory in everything he does. He can’t. They took the fight to Ben Wikler and the Wisconsin Dems. Turns out, the Wis Dems are among the toughest bunch of freedom fighters in country. And, like many billionaires, Trump and Musk assumed having money means you don’t have to work.
And that brings me to the lesson Trump and Musk won’t learn: Real change requires real work. You can’t just drop in and transform complicated systems.
Decades ago, during the Clinton administration, Al Gore led an effort to improve and shrink the federal government. He didn’t bring in fools with chainsaws. Instead, the administration worked with people who knew how the departments and agencies accomplish their missions. They worked with the unions and the employees. They worked with Republicans as well as Democrats. They worked with people who understood how to manage change. They worked diligently and carefully. And they got the job done. The government kept its promises, it was leaner, more efficient, and the budget was balanced.
Musk’s reckless, showy and ignorant approach to Wisconsin mirrored his effort to cut our government. It failed to achieve its mission. His effort to shrink the federal government may succeed in breaking things, but it cannot succeed in improving them. That takes the kind of patient, hard work that we saw in the reinventing government effort a generation ago.
The lesson applies to politics too. It took years of effort to organize and educate voters in Wisconsin. That effort broke the GOP gerrymander, flipped the state’s Supreme Court, and protected its majority when Musk came gunning for it.
But Musk and Trump won’t learn. For them, working is for suckers and losers.
*Photo credit: Robin LEGRAND / AFP