Ad wars in the high-stakes race for the control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court are in full force as candidates race toward the April 1 election.
While Wisconsin Supreme Court races are officially nonpartisan, the race has become increasingly polarized in recent years as the two major political parties continue to back their preferred candidate. And with the election a little over a month away, both campaigns have seen large donations poured into their campaigns as the fight for a seat on Wisconsin’s highest court heats up.
Republican-backed candidate Brad Schimel, a Waukesha County judge, will face off against Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford, who seeks to maintain the court’s narrow liberal majority.
Crawford raised $4.47 million from individual donors so far in 2025 compared to Schimel’s $2.7 million, recent campaign finance reports showed. The most recent round of campaign finance reports showed that Crawford received $2 million in funding from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, while Schimel received $1.66 million from the Republican Party of Wisconsin.
Crawford campaign alleges AI nondisclosure
In early February, Crawford campaign filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission (WEC) after her image was digitally altered in a recent TV attack ad.
The five-page complaint alleged that Schimel’s campaign did not disclose the use of artificial intelligence, potentially violating a new Wisconsin law requiring the disclosure of the use of AI. Schimel's team has said the photo was "edited" but not using AI.
“Schimel will try to manipulate images and the facts because he’s desperate to hide his own record of failure,” campaign spokesman Derrick Honeyman told The Daily Cardinal in an email statement.
While the body of the complaint incorrectly references the statute which Schimel’s ad allegedly violates, the Crawford campaign’s deputy press secretary Maddie Moher told the Cardinal in an email statement the WEC noticed the “clerical error” but still deemed the complaint “good to move forward.”
“We do not believe this minor clerical error will affect the outcome of the complaint, as the context and substance of the filing make the intended citation clear, and the Ethics Commission is still investigating,” Moher said.
Schimel’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but campaign spokesman Jacob Fischer dismissed the complaint in a statement to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
"It's not an AI-generated image," Fischer said. "This is a desperate attempt to distract from Susan Crawford's record of releasing pedophiles and violent criminals."
The 30-second ad alleged that Crawford "didn't bother filing the appeal in time" to keep an alleged rapist behind bars in 2001, with the alleged victim calling Crawford’s conduct in the case “utter[ly] disgust[ing].”
However, it was the miscalculation of the lead secretary of the state’s Department of Justice (DOJ), Glenda Taplic, which led to the appeal being filed one day late, according to the Journal Sentinel. While Crawford at the time headed the DOJ’s criminal appeals office, she was not responsible for setting the deadline in the case.
The state Court of Appeals ordered a new trial and overturned the defendant’s original conviction and sentence after they determined that the defendant’s trial attorney was ineffective. The complainant of the case reacted to the missed deadline with “utter disgust” but did not direct her anger at Crawford in her statement, according to the Journal Sentinel.
Group backed by Elon Musk pours money into race as donors, PACs spend big
The race has also garnered national attention with Building America’s Future, a conservative nonprofit tied to Elon Musk, having spent about $1.6 million on TV attack ads backing Schimel’s campaign, according to the Associated Press. The ads started airing Thursday and will run for two weeks in Wisconsin’s five largest media markets.
A week after booking the seven-figure TV ad buy, an ad by the Musk-backed nonprofit attacking Crawford featured a photo of a different Susan Crawford, former Harvard Law School Professor Susan P. Crawford. The ad ran for four days on Facebook and cost about $3,000.
Honeyman called the attack ads “shameful” and a “fraud from start to finish” in a statement Monday.
“Schimel’s campaign has already been caught using AI to manipulate an image of Judge Crawford, and now Musk’s ad uses a photo of a completely different person to bolster his false attacks… Wisconsinites shouldn’t trust a single thing from these guys,” Honeyman said.
Additionally, Musk’s America PAC has begun a new $1 million canvassing campaign backing Schimel, according to WisPolitics.
On behalf of the Crawford campaign, A Better Wisconsin Together has spent $1 million on digital and television ads. In 2023, the group spent more than $6 million on behalf of liberal-leaning Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who flipped the court to a liberal majority for the first time in 15 years.
Schimel and groups backing him have an advantage of more than $7 million in future advertising reservations, with about $7.7 million in reservations supporting Schimel and about $572,000 in reservations supporting Crawford, according to AdImpact Politics.
State News Editor Anna Kleiber contributed reporting to this article.
