Is Elon Musk destroying his political career already?

Analyzing the reasons and fallout.

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Elon Musk is the LeBron James of being unlikeable, a generational figure who combines off-the-charts natural detestability with single-minded dedication to maximizing every ounce of that unparalleled loathsomeness.

His latest feat of defective personality may be his most impressive: to spend $20 million on a state supreme court campaign and emerge not only significantly less popular but also shouldering the blame for your candidate’s blowout loss is the stuff of legends.

To inspire that much revulsion even after giving away two oversized million-dollar checks on national TV simply transcends any existing notions of personal loathsomeness.

Democrat Susan Crawford’s double-digit victory over Republican Brad Schimel in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race has widely been portrayed as a bruising referendum on Musk’s recent wrecking ball incursion into politics. The AP called it a “big loss for Elon Musk,” CNN framed the loss as “a warning sign for GOP over Musk’s campaign role,” and the Wall Street Journal reported that Republicans had to “confront Elon Musk quandary” after the shellacking.

After the past six months, there’s little that compares to the schadenfreude that comes from watching middle and working class voters in Wisconsin force the world’s richest and most annoying man to eat this much shit. But does he actually deserve this much of the blame given some of the other pressing local issues at play and the national political temperature?

Exit polls of the race have yet to materialize, and there were only a few trustworthy voter surveys in the lead-up to election day. But between the limited data and plentiful anecdotal evidence available, a pretty convincing case can be made that Elon Musk played a very significant role in the Republicans’ Midwestern face plant.

This is what happens when your best friend is named Cat Turd

For More Perfect Union, I sent a videographer to interview voters at polling places in Outagamie County, a mostly blue collar exurban county outside of Green Bay. Built on the paper mill industry, Outagamie has suffered from concentrated capital — mills have been bought up by private equity companies — and billionaire elites.

For the most part, voters resented Musk for his profligate spending on the campaign, including the $100 he gave to anyone who signed a petition against “activist judges.” The big million dollar check stunt, conducted just two days earlier in Green Bay, also got people fired up.

We didn’t ask people who they voted for, but it became clear that a handful of the respondents who disliked Musk’s role in the campaign probably voted for Schimel anyway.

The most spirited defenses of his spending were hardly justifications: “I don't feel it's right, but I don't care either,” one shrugging voter told us. Several others pointed to big liberal donors to “justify” Musk’s spending, conspiracy-aided cynicism that has overtaken the political sphere.

It also became clear that some Republicans were disgusted enough by Musk’s involvement that they either stayed home or voted for Crawford, vindicating the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s decision to depict Elon as the real mad king in the GOP power structure.

What do the numbers say?

Making Elon the real villain in the story made sense during this (now-shortened) honeymoon period for Donald Trump, who won the state by a very small margin in November.

In early March, Milwaukee’s Marquette Law School released its most recent survey of Wisconsin voters. Donald Trump’s approval rate sat at 48-51%, which far outpaced the 41-47% deficit where he found himself in March 2018.

Even bigger than the gap between Trump then and now is Musk’s dismal 41-53% ratio. Musk’s work with DOGE was not popular, either, with 53% of voters in Wisconsin saying that he was destroying programs that were required by law. It’s only gotten worse since, with DOGE in the midst of a blitz of attacks on public health, Social Security, and Medicaid.

Our interviewees hated the thought of those programs getting raided, with some expressing anger at Musk’s unwillingness to consider the difficult lives of working class people. People were also mad about his haphazard chainsaw approach to cost-cutting — “there’s a right way and wrong way to fire somebody” — and nobody bought his chaotic class of “rooting out waste."

Above all else, it was heartening to hear people refer to the government as key to providing services, not a business that has to make profit.

Several voters who agreed that the government needed to tighten its belt suggested that DOGE was a more of a dog and pony show than any real cost-cutting. Here’s what the firm Blueprint found when they asked people what they feared about DOGE’s defenestration of federal agencies.

This indicates the soft limits to attacking Musk’s very polarizing work with DOGE, as some cuts are seen as less consequential than others. Nobody seems to be moved by the personal attacks against his character, but if you pair Elon’s unbearable personality with his insatiable need to hurt working class people and break the law, it may just be a formula for success.

Wisconsin made that clear, and now Elon is supposedly going to begin the transition back to ruining his businesses full-time. Democrats were motivated and defiant, they flogged local issues like gerrymandering and abortion, and made sure to hammer their designated villain until the end. Not a bad way to stop it.

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