Everytown Dumping Money into Wisconsin Supreme Court Race

While the US Supreme Court is filled with judges who are presidential nominees confirmed by the Senate, states tend to have their supreme courts filled with elected jurists. There are upsides and downsides to each arrangement, but what it ultimately means is that a lot of state supreme court judges are politicians who have to win elections.

That means money is going to play a role.

In Wisconsin, a battle is underway that has gotten a lot of attention–and money–from a lot of people. One group throwing a pile of cash into is none other than Everytown for Gun Safety. In fact, about $600,000 worth.

Last week, Everytown for Gun Safety announced an ad buy in the Wisconsin race that will determine the ideological balance of the state’s Supreme Court. The group is targeting Republican-backed candidate Brad Schimel. The ad, titled 87, attacks Schimel over what Everytown describes as his “extreme agenda,” but while it mentions gun background checks, it leads with other issues.

“There have been 87 justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and Brad Schimel would be the most extreme,” the ad said. “He wants to bring back the 1849 law that bans abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest. He let domestic abusers walk with no jail time.”

For its part, the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Political Victory Fund has endorsed Schimel. But it is spending at a much smaller scale. It has spent just $1,575 in a race that’s racked up a nearly $67 million price tag thus far, according to a tracker from the Brennan Center.

The Wisconsin race is one of the first major elections in the wake of Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s successes in 2024, and the ad buy suggests Everytown is willing to spend big despite setbacks in the 2024 race. It also indicates they still retain an election spending advantage over the NRA, which is just emerging from its six-year corruption scandal. However, Everytown, long funded in large part by billionaire Michael Bloomberg, lags well behind other major groups involved in the race and still leans on issues beyond gun policy in its messaging. That includes Elon Musk’s newly-dominant political operation, which has dumbed over $10 million into the race to boost Schimel.

The race’s outcome will determine whether the Wisconsin Supreme Court will retain its slim liberal majority or flip to a narrow conservative majority, likely impacting how it views challenges to state gun laws. That was the focus of the NRA’s endorsement of Schimel.

I always find it funny to see a gun control group that tries to say it’s not partisan at all using an issue like abortion to try and oppose a candidate. That just tells me they know their gun control stance isn’t as popular as they like to think it is.

It’s also funny that they’ll dump this kind of money in a state supreme court race while also still pretending that pro-gun politicians are only supportive of gun rights because they’re bought and paid for.

Yet that’s about the only thing funny here.

The most recent polling I’ve found on the race has it neck-and-neck. I don’t mean that the difference is within the margin of error, either. I mean both candidates are at 47 percent, so it’s going to be a hard push to win as much of the remaining six percent as humanly possible.

So it’s not surprising that Everytown is throwing so much into this race.

However, this is also a state that Donald Trump won, though narrowly. That means Schimel has a strong shot, though polling also suggests that Wisconsin isn’t really a big fan of how Trump has done so far.

It looks like Schimel will need to gather up as much cash as he can as he tries to counter his opponent and the anti-gun forces that are trying to buy the election.