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Ten years ago, when Wisconsin lawmakers approved a bill to allow unlimited spending in state elections, only one Republican voted no.
“I just thought big money was an evil, a curse on our politics,” former state Sen. Robert Cowles said recently of his 2015 decision to buck his party.
As Wisconsin voters head to the polls next week to choose a new state Supreme Court justice, Cowles stands by his assessment. Voters have been hit with a barrage of attack ads from special interest groups, and record-setting sums of money have been spent to sway residents. What’s more, Cowles said, there’s been little discussion of major issues. The candidates debated only once.
“I definitely think that that piece of legislation made things worse,” Cowles said in an interview. “Our public discourse is basically who can inflame things in the most clever way with some terrible TV ad that’s probably not even true.”
More than $80 million has been funneled into the race as of March 25, according to two groups that have been tracking spending in the contest — the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy group that follows judicial races, and the news outlet WisPolitics. That surpasses the previous costliest judicial race in the country’s history, approximately $56 million spent two years ago on the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.
Money is pouring into this swing state election so fast and so many ads have been reserved that political observers now believe the current race is likely to reach $100 million by Tuesday, which is election day.
“People are thoroughly disgusted, I think, across the political spectrum with just the sheer amount of money being spent on a spring Supreme Court election in Wisconsin,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which has long advocated for campaign finance reform.
But the elected officials who could revamp the campaign finance system on both sides of the aisle or create pressure for change have been largely silent. No bills introduced this session. No press conferences from legislators. The Senate no longer even has a designated elections committee.
The current election pits former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, now a circuit court judge in conservative-leaning Waukesha County, against Susan Crawford, a judge in Dane County, the state’s liberal bastion.
Though the race technically is nonpartisan, the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama, has endorsed Crawford; the party has received financial support from liberal billionaire George Soros. On the other side, President Donald Trump posted a message on his social media platform on March 21 urging his supporters to vote for Schimel, and much of Schimel’s money comes from political organizations tied to Elon Musk.
The stakes are high. Whoever wins will determine the ideological bent of the seven-member court just two years after Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the court and swung it to the liberals. With Protasiewicz on the court, the majority struck down state legislative maps, which had been drawn to favor Republicans, and reinstated the use of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots.
A Schimel victory could resurrect those and other voting issues, as well as determine whether women in the state will continue to be able to access abortion.
Two pro-Schimel groups linked to Musk — America PAC and Building America’s Future — had disclosed spending about $17 million, as of March 25. Musk himself donated $3 million this year to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In the final stretch of the campaign, news reports revealed that Musk’s America PAC plans to give Wisconsin voters $100 to sign petitions rejecting the actions of “activist judges.”
That has raised concerns among some election watchdog groups, which have been exploring whether the offer from Musk amounts to an illegal inducement to get people to vote.
On Wednesday night, Musk went further, announcing on X a $1 million award to a Green Bay voter he identified only as “Scott A” for “supporting our petition against activist judges in Wisconsin!” Musk promised to hand out other million-dollar prizes before the election.
Musk has a personal interest in the direction of the Wisconsin courts. His electric car company, Tesla Inc., is suing the state over a law requiring manufacturers to sell automobiles through independent dealerships. Musk and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement in the race.
Also on Schimel’s side: billionaires Diane Hendricks and Richard Uihlein and Americans for Prosperity, a dark-money group founded by billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. Americans for Prosperity has reported spending about $3 million, primarily for digital ads, canvassing, mailers and door hangers.
Campaign mailers sent to Wisconsin residents during the state’s Supreme Court election. (Photo collage edited for legibility and privacy by ProPublica. Obtained by ProPublica.)A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, a union-supported electioneering group, has ponied up over $6 million to advance Crawford. In other big outlays, Soros has given $2 million to the state Democratic Party, while Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another billionaire, gave $1.5 million. And California venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, donated $250,000.
In Wisconsin, political parties can steer unlimited amounts to candidates.
State Sen. Jeff Smith, a Democrat and a minority leader, called the spending frenzy “obscene.”
“There’s no reason why campaigns should cost as much as they do,” he said.
Asked for comment about the vast amount of money in the race, Crawford told ProPublica: “I’m grateful for the historic outpouring of grassroots support across Wisconsin from folks who don’t want Elon Musk controlling our Supreme Court.”
Schimel’s campaign called Crawford a “hypocrite,” saying she “is playing the victim while receiving more money than any judicial candidate in American history thanks to George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and JB Pritzker funneling money to her campaign.”
Quizzed Monday by a TV reporter on whether he would recuse himself if the Tesla case got to the state’s high court, Schimel did not commit, saying: “I’ll do the same thing I do in every case. I will examine whether I can truly hear that case objectively.”
A decade after Wisconsin opened the floodgates to unlimited money in campaigns in 2015, some good government activists are wondering if the state has reached a tipping point. Is there any amount, they ask, at which the state’s political leaders can be persuaded to impose controls?
“I honestly believe that folks have their eyes open around the money in a way that they have not previously,” Nick Ramos, executive director of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks campaign spending, told reporters during a briefing on spending in the race.
A loosely organized group of campaign reformers is beginning to lay the groundwork for change. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign recently called a Zoom meeting that included representatives of public interest groups inside and outside of Wisconsin, dark-money researchers and an election security expert.
They were looking for ways to champion reform during the current legislative session. In particular, they are studying and considering what models make sense and may be achievable, including greater disclosure requirements, public financing and restricting candidates from coordinating with dark-money groups on issue ads.
But Republicans say that the spending is a natural byproduct of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which equated campaign spending with free speech and opened the spigots for big-money races.
“For the most part, we don’t really, as Republicans, want to see the brakes on free speech,” said Ken Brown, past chair of the GOP Party of Racine, a city south of Milwaukee. Noting he was not speaking for the party, Brown said he does not favor spending limits. “I believe in the First Amendment. It is what it is. I believe the Citizens United decision was correct.”
Asked to comment on the current system of unlimited money, Anika Rickard, a spokesperson for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, did not answer the question but instead criticized Crawford and her funders.
Post-Reform Bill Opened FloodgatesAt one point, Wisconsin was seen as providing a roadmap for reform. In 2009, the state passed the Impartial Justice Act. The legislation, enacted with bipartisan support, provided for public financing of state Supreme Court races, so candidates could run without turning to special interests for money.
The push for the measure came after increased spending by outside special interests and the candidates in two state Supreme Court races: the 2007 election that cost an estimated $5.8 million and the 2008 contest that neared $6 million, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Candidates who agreed in 2009 to public financing and spending limits received grants of up to $400,000 for the race. The money came from the Democracy Trust Fund, which was supported by a $2 income tax check-off.
“Reformers win a fight to clean up court races,” the headline on an editorial in The Capital Times read at the time.
But the law was in place for only one election, in April 2011. Both candidates in the court’s general election that year agreed to take public funding, and incumbent Justice David Prosser, a conservative, narrowly won reelection. Then Republicans eliminated funding for the measure that summer. Instead, the money was earmarked to implement a stringent voter ID law.
By 2015, GOP leaders had completely overhauled the state’s campaign finance law, with Democrats in the Assembly refusing to even vote on the measure in protest.
“This Republican bill opens the floodgates to unlimited spending by billionaires, by big corporations and by monied, special interests to influence our elections,” Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, said in the floor debate.
Wisconsin is no longer cited as a model. Activists point to other states, including Arizona, Oregon and Rhode Island. Arizona and Oregon established disclosure measures to trace the flow of dark money, requiring campaign spenders to reveal the original source of donations. Rhode Island required ads to name not only the sponsor but the organization’s top donors so voters can better assess the message and its credibility.
Amid skepticism that Wisconsin will rein in campaign spending, there may be some reason for optimism.
A year ago, a proposed joint resolution in Wisconsin’s Legislature bemoaned Citizens United and the spending it had unleashed. The resolution noted that “this spending has the potential to drown out speech rights for all citizens, narrow debate, weaken federalism and self-governance in the states, and increase the risk of systemic corruption.”
The resolution called for a constitutional amendment clarifying that “states may regulate the spending of money to influence federal elections.”
And though it never came to a vote, 17 members of the Legislature signed on to it, a dozen of them Republicans. Eight of them are still in the Legislature, including Sen. Van Wanggaard, who voted for the 2015 bill weakening Wisconsin’s campaign finance rules.
Wanggaard did not respond to a request for comment. But an aide expressed surprise — and disbelief — seeing the lawmaker’s name on the resolution.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.
For years, North Carolina’s Republican-majority Legislature has taken steps big and small to wrench power from Democratic governors and the agencies under their control.
One move that didn’t get much attention — tucked into a 628-page budget bill four years ago — was to direct $15 million in funding for sexual assault victims away from Democratic-led agencies that had long overseen such money. The money instead would be funneled through the North Carolina Human Trafficking Commission, an obscure group that’s part of the state’s GOP-helmed courts system.
What happened next illuminates how efforts to consolidate power in one branch of government can help political insiders and hurt vulnerable populations. With President Donald Trump executing a similar but far more drastic power grab in Washington, the events in North Carolina provide a glimpse of the longer-term outcomes when a branch of government assumes unprecedented control.
The Human Trafficking Commission — which at that time was a two-person operation — was an unusual choice for distributing funding to the dozens of local service providers that assist survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. Prior to 2021, two state agencies had effectively carried out that task.
People who worked for the Human Trafficking Commission and for the Legislature warned their bosses that redirecting the funds could overwhelm the commission and harm survivors, according to multiple sources with knowledge of discussions. They said the commission was not equipped to handle more than $28 million in grants over two years, given that it previously had an annual budget of about $250,000.
This ultimately proved true, according to the commission’s former top grants administrator, Kathy Estrada.
“We just did not have the capabilities to do it,” said Estrada, who recalled informing her leadership repeatedly in 2024 that her staff was overwhelmed and underresourced, relying on makeshift Excel spreadsheets instead of industry-standard grants management software. “Even if we worked all day overtime, it was just impossible to get done.”
Staffers at 18 crisis centers told ProPublica that payments were delayed for months. The money was supposed to be allocated by June 2023, but in April of that year the Legislature revised the law to remove that deadline. The earliest initial installment for services to reach any of those 18 centers came in May, according to records ProPublica received from the commission. Some had to wait until February 2024. The majority are still waiting for their full funding.
Leaders of some of those centers say that, even today, the disruptions in funding continue to limit the services they can offer to women who come to them for urgent, potentially life-saving help.
The events at the Human Trafficking Commission are part of a pattern by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and judiciary to deprive elected Democrats of resources and powers. Shortly after Democrat Roy Cooper was elected governor in 2016, lawmakers passed sweeping legislation that stripped him of various powers, including removing his ability to hire and fire over 1,000 key government positions. (Many of these changes were contested in court, and some were reversed.) Shortly after Democrat Josh Stein was elected to succeed Cooper last fall, the Legislature passed another law that stripped him and other Democratic officials of numerous powers, including control of the board that manages the state’s elections, which is now the subject of multiple lawsuits.
When lawmakers created the budget that redirected funds to the Human Trafficking Commission, they specifically set aside additional money for political allies. One particular faith-based group was prioritized in the budget bill to receive the most funding — $640,000. That group had been created by the former head of the state GOP about two months before its name showed up in the budget bill in 2021. By October 2024, the group had reported to the Human Trafficking Commission that it had helped only four victims, and its executive director said that at least three of those women had been given just food and gas and no long-term services. (The executive director told ProPublica that as of March 2025 the group had helped about two dozen victims.)
Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics at Catawba College, has studied the North Carolina Legislature’s power grabs over the past decade. He said the state’s Republican legislators have been “very willing to try new and innovative things based on simple power politics that may call into question basic principles of a democratic republic.” And he said such actions can have repercussions for a large swath of people in North Carolina.
“If elected officials are only working for their respective political bases, and citizens aren’t getting the benefits they are eligible for based on partisanship,” Bitzer said, “then public policy making has gone off the rails.”
Graham Wilson, the communications director for the court system and Human Trafficking Commission, said there wasn’t anything unusual about the Legislature sending money to the commission or making the commission “the legislatively mandated leader” in the state for funding anti-human-trafficking work. He also disputed that any payments were delayed. In response to ProPublica’s questions, he wrote that the recipients must comply with all terms of their grant agreement before the commission releases funds. He would not elaborate on whether or how recipients failed to comply with those terms.
“Our experience is that support for fighting human trafficking is nonpartisan in the legislature,” Wilson said, “as it is in the Judicial Branch.”
Ted Alexander, the North Carolina state senator primarily responsible for redirecting funds to the Human Trafficking Commission (Via North Carolina General Assembly)Ted Alexander, the Republican state senator who was primarily responsible for empowering the Human Trafficking Commission, declined to comment for this story. He previously said the idea stemmed from his concern that Christian groups had too few resources compared to secular groups. To address that, the budget bill included money specifically for 25 mostly faith-based service providers, each cited by name.
“You look at these other groups, like Planned Parenthood and other groups out there, and they just, the money just pours in on those groups, and it makes me sick,” he said during a 2023 speech. “So we Christians, we’ve got to be able to support these kinds of organizations” that are “doing the Lord’s work.”
After accepting an award at a Human Trafficking Commission event in 2024, he declared, “Our goal was to help those organizations that are kind of low on the ground, that are trying to do God’s work” and “take them to a higher level.”
In May 2023, the leader of the Orange County Rape Crisis Center sent an email to the deputy director of the North Carolina court system warning that because the commission had been months late in releasing promised payments the center was in crisis.
“Absent an immediate disbursement of funds in the next 2 weeks our agency will furlough core services staff,” wrote Rachel Valentine, warning that victims would lose legal, medical, and housing services. She said that due to delayed payments her organization had to stop paying for a hotel for one human trafficking victim, after which the woman went back to her trafficker.
“I am speaking on the experience of my own agency, but I know there are at least a dozen” other domestic violence and sexual assault service providers “that are on the brink of outright crisis,” she wrote. “Any further delay will destabilize victim’s services in this state for years to come.”
Valentine had been appealing for months to get the funds. After her emails to commission staff went unanswered, she reached out in March to her Democratic state senator, who was unable to help her get the money. Emails show that it was only after she enlisted the help of a high-ranking GOP House member that the commission released the first payment, about $95,000 of $236,000, a few days before her May email warning of the coming crisis. But she still needed the rest of the funds that the Legislature had originally promised by the end of the next month.
The deputy director of the state court system wrote back to Valentine, “We are working to disburse” the remainder of the “funds as soon as possible and appreciate your patience.”
But no more funds had come by the fall, though they were supposed to be disbursed quarterly. Valentine made a personal loan to the crisis center to ensure that her staff was paid.
Ultimately, she had to cut two staffers, one who handled the cases of Black women and another who served the Latino community. After those positions were cut, the number of Black and Hispanic clients at the center dropped over the following six months by 76% and 63%, respectively, according to Valentine. She also had to cut a program educating over 1,300 Spanish-speaking participants in how to respond to sexual violence.
Wilson, the court system’s communications director, denied that “the timing of Commission grant disbursements has any causal relationship to internal OCRCC issues.” Wilson also suggested that if organizations did not get timely quarterly payments, it could have been because they weren’t in compliance with the terms of their grant. But emails between the commission and Valentine showed the director of the commission attributed delays to “an extremely heavy workload with grants and report reviewing” and explained that commission staff had long known that “this would be a heavy lift to start” the program.
Of 18 crisis centers whose employees ProPublica spoke with, all but three reported that they experienced delays in funding that harmed their work. The commission’s grants were supposed to help bridge recent dramatic decreases in federal funds for such agencies, which had already put them in precarious financial positions — but the delays ended up compounding some of the agencies’ woes.
In addition to Valentine, leaders of two centers said funding delays forced them to lay off employees who focused on minorities, resulting in severe drop-offs in those communities receiving services. One of them had to lay off so many staffers that it could no longer immediately evacuate women from unsafe situations, sometimes being unable to offer any help for days, according to its director. Other centers said they did not have to lay off staff but did have to cut services like therapy or paying for the first month of rent for women moving out of shelters.
Some of the faith-based groups singled out for funding also experienced payment delays. Brianna Racchini, the director of Triad Ladder of Hope, a faith-based provider, said she had been forced to cut her only employee the month after a Human Trafficking Commission grant failed to come through and some churches reduced their funding. Racchini also had to scale back other expenses, like paying for medical appointments or lawyers for the women.
“It is frustrating that funding wasn’t given at the time it was supposed to be given,” Racchini said.
Once Racchini was finally paid in the summer of 2024, she used the grant to cover medical debt for one woman. She said that ultimately she understood that the commission’s delays were because they were “drowning” due to administrative issues.
“They are still doing good work,” she said. “And we are going to partner with them whenever we can.”
When Valentine was finally paid out in November 2023, she decided that she would not seek more funding through the commission. She has not been able to afford to rehire the two positions she cut, and she says the Legislature’s decision to redirect the funds to the commission is part of the reason her agency now serves fewer survivors.
“When people are playing political games with the money, it might seem like small administrative choices, but it creates really malignant impacts,” Valentine said.
While organizations like Valentine’s were struggling to even get their emails answered by the Human Trafficking Commission, two organizations that were promised substantial funding from lawmakers were gearing up.
The Legislature had mandated in its budget bill that over $1 million be sent to two groups.
The first, Compassion to Act, describes itself as a “faith-based ministry” that had not reported taxable income or activity since 2016, when it had $28,006 in revenue. It was awarded $500,000. Alexander, the state senator who’d been instrumental in shifting power to the commission, has described his interest in the issue of human trafficking as having come from meeting the leader of Compassion to Act. He said the leader inspired him to realize that it was part of his job as a pro-life senator to help women in these situations.
Another $640,000, followed by an additional $100,000 in a subsequent bill, was directed to the North Carolina Institute Against Human Trafficking, a faith-based organization that had been created just two months before lawmakers named it in the bill. The paperwork to create the institute was filed by the former head of the North Carolina Republican Party and the chair of the NC Faith and Freedom Coalition, the state affiliate of one of the nation’s largest evangelical get-out-the-vote operations, which worked to elect Trump and other Republicans. The institute is led by Shannon Williams, the wife of the executive director of the NC Faith and Freedom Coalition, who is paid $70,000 a year, according to financial documents.
The institute and Compassion to Act also experienced delays in payments from the Human Trafficking Commission. In the summer of 2024, after paying the institute about $160,000, the commission temporarily paused the institute’s funding and initiated a review of its finances.
“The delay in funding has caused numerous victims of human trafficking to be continually victimized,” the institute wrote in its July 2024 report to the commission. In August 2024, the institute received another $160,000 from the Human Trafficking Commission. Nonetheless, in its October report, the institute said the delay in funding had forced it “to scale back operations.” By January 2025, records show that the Human Trafficking Commission had paid the institute over $500,000.
Compassion to Act also repeatedly criticized the commission for delays.
The funding directed to the Human Trafficking Commission was part of a massive shift in how the state Legislature was allocating money — and part of a pattern of legislators writing laws that direct funds to their political allies through grants or similar noncompetitive means.
According to the state budget office, there were 81 directed grants for about $17.5 million in the 2019-2020 fiscal year. That grew to 627 grants for $1.2 billion in the next full budget year, much of that from the influx of federal pandemic money. A federal grand jury is investigating $3.5 million sent to a domestic violence monitoring agency with political connections and little track record, The Raleigh News and Observer has reported. (No one has been charged.) Separately, a Republican ex-judge’s company was paid over $400,000 after the Legislature sent more than $50 million to two organizations seeking to bring the Olympics to North Carolina, the Assembly has reported.
After ProPublica first asked the Human Trafficking Commission in 2024 about delayed payments and financial management, it began working to rectify some of the problems it had been warned about for years, according to sources and records. In November, the court system completed a three-page internal audit of the commission that concluded that “all active grants adhere with applicable federal and state statutes and regulations.”
However, the commission has also taken numerous steps to block or obscure public information about its actions, including rejecting a 2024 monitoring visit by the state agency that oversees its spending of federal funds — becoming the only such entity to do so out of more than 90 of them, according to the state budget office. In records obtained by ProPublica, the court system argued the state agency lacked the authority to monitor the commission.
The vast majority of the commission’s millions of dollars had been flowing to the state from federal pandemic recovery funds. That federal money now has stopped. Some groups, like Valentine’s Orange County Rape Crisis Center, will continue to get funding from other state agencies, which disburse other federal funds. As for the commission itself, the Legislature in its most recent budget set aside $500,000 in permanent annual funding. The commission can give that money only to agencies working exclusively on human trafficking, which excludes groups like the Orange County Rape Crisis Center.
Valentine said it’s unfortunate that the significant sum of money that had been flowing through the commission didn’t do enough to help bolster groups like hers.
“There was an opportunity to use this funding to enhance services and increase collaboration” between traditional service providers and the human trafficking community, she said. “But that got lost.”
Clarification, April 4, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify how many crisis centers ProPublica spoke to.
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