The Race for American Democracy
Why Elon Musk is right about Wisconsin
Americans just spent over $100 million in the race to elect one of seven members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. It is a safe bet that most American voters have no idea that there even is a supreme court in Wisconsin (I didn’t). Yet Elon Musk alone spent $25 million dollars to support the conservative in the race, while high-profile donors on the other side contributed many millions to support the liberal. In justifying the enormous time and resources he devoted to this seemingly obscure race, Musk noted, “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.”
Loathe as I am to agree with Elon Musk before I’ve had my morning ketamine, he may have a point. But the reason we both think so extends well beyond a court in Wisconsin.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court election is merely an early battle in what will become a four-year race to determine the future of American democracy and therefore, with only the usual dose of American solipsism, the destiny of humanity. It is thus easily worth tens of millions of dollars, even if you are not the richest man in the world. Let me explain.
A Finely Poised Electorate
Trump and the Republican party he owns face an essential problem: incumbency. In recent years, the sour political mood in the country, has made incumbency a huge burden for Presidents. The incumbent party has lost the last three presidential elections, the first time that has happened since the 1890s.
Nate Cohn of the New York Times notes that, according to approval polls, President Trump has already squandered his post-election honeymoon. Cohn expects this trend of falling popularity to continue: “There are good reasons to think his ratings will continue to slip. One of the better rules of thumb in American politics is that public opinion tends to shift against the direction of policy change. Some political scientists call this ‘thermostatic public opinion,’ in which the public turns up the A.C. to cool things down when the government starts running too hot. Few presidents have run the government as hot as Mr. Trump, and there isn’t much reason to think he’ll turn anything down on his own.”
In other words, to govern is to choose and in today’s political environment, to choose is to lose support. Trump probably has a floor to his popularity – his base is unlikely to turn on him unless he causes a nuclear war or deports Taylor Swift. But all of the recent elections have been very close: Trump won the popular vote in 2024 by 1.5% of the electorate; Biden won the electoral college in 2020 by about 44,000 votes across three states (Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin); Trump won the electoral college, while losing the popular vote, in 2016 by about 80,000 votes in three states (Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania). In the context of a very evenly divided electorate, a President cannot lose much support without threatening his and his party’s chances in the next election.
Tilting the Field
If you or I faced this problem of eroding popularity, we would probably try to tailor our policies to stem the losses and more broadly seek to expand our coalition beyond our base. But this is why neither of us is president of the United States.
Trump’s Republican party has a much more creative approach to maintaining popularity. It follows the famous Bertold Brecht poem, “The Solution”, which suggests that in the face of a disconnect between the government and the people, the government can most easily address the problem by finding a new electorate.
And with an evenly divided country, they don’t need to find an entirely new electorate. They just need to tilt the playing field a little, to scratch back the perhaps 3 to 5 percent of popularity that they will lose in the next four years by actually making policy choices to, say, start a trade war or deport someone’s neighbor.
This is the broader context for the fight over the Wisconsin Supreme Court. That court will approve the voting rules in a critical swing state and serve as the court of last instance if there are any disputes over the 2028 election. The US presidential election, after all, is actually 51 state-level elections, run by and adjudicated by local and state officials. Ever since the disputed 2020 election, it has been the Republican strategy to put Trump loyalists into key local positions that will decide voting rules and voting disputes, such as secretaries of state, county electoral boards, and state supreme courts. A few strategic changes in the Wisconsin election rules can perhaps make up for whatever popularity losses Trump will suffer in the state over the next four years.
With the victory of the liberal candidate, the Democrats seemed to have fended off that particular threat in Wisconsin. But it is only one battle in what is certain to be a four-year war to try to tilt the electoral playing field across the country and especially in the swing states. Even in Wisconsin, on the very day that Wisconsin voters rejected Musk’s candidate for the Supreme Court, they approved a referendum adding a voter identification requirement to the state constitution.
Indeed, while Washington was obsessing over Musk’s million dollar giveaways in Wisconsin, Trump issued a fairly sweeping executive order that uses many other methods to alter the electorate. It demands, for example, that all states conform to certain standards on voting machines, only count absentee votes received by election day and that they require voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. His administration has also already eliminated the federal agencies, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which helps state and local officials keep elections safe and secure.
These may seem like small measures, but they can make a big difference in a close election. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, for example, more than 9% of U.S. citizens of voting age lack proof of citizenship. As one election analyst told the Washington Post, the goal of the executive order “is to reduce turnout by people he thinks won’t vote for him.”
Four years is not a lot of time
In essence, we are in a race for American democracy, a race between the President’s declining popularity and his effort to tilt the electoral playing field to make up for those inevitable losses. The Trump administration seems to intuitively understand that four years is not a lot of time to alter the byzantine U.S. electoral system. So, they are moving fast and breaking things.
If Trump manages to find a way to run for and win a third term, or if his acolyte wins in 2028, the Trumpian Republican party will then have another four years to further change the electorate to their advantage. As in the case of other backsliding democracies such as Turkey and Hungary, every election loss allows a would-be authoritarian to further burrow into the institutions of government and civil society. After a couple of such wins, the damage to American democracy will likely be irreversible. In other words, the entire destiny of humanity is at stake.