His failure in Wisconsin could provide a model for the defeatist Democrats. Instead of fearing him, they should make him a symbol
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.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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