EDITORIAL: Even the richest man in the world couldn’t buy an election

Elon Musk must be a smart guy, what with leading a company that develops cars that drive themselves and rockets that fly into space and turn around and land themselves back on Earth as he became the first trillionaire on this planet. Yet he was not bright enough to learn the lesson Wisconsin voters tried to teach him in 2025.

He spent $47 million to buy votes in the last Wisconsin Supreme Court election. Wisconsin voters said no sale and dealt the Musk-financed candidate a defeat of near landslide proportions.

Undeterred, he spent roughly half a billion dollars through his super PAC, and probably millions more funneled through dark money groups that do not have to disclose the source of their funds, to buy votes in the midterm elections. The result? Thirty-four of the 37 candidates Musk financed lost.

The Nov. 3 election will be remembered for more than its countrywide repudiation of Republican rule. History will record that it was a popular uprising against the avalanches of dollars that have buried American elections and the malign political influence of the tech oligarchs and others of the super-rich class.

Such is the arrogance of the head of that class that he flaunts his ability to spend without limit to support his chosen candidates as a perk of his status as the richest person in the world. In the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, Musk made a brazen show of buying votes, getting up on a stage to present a check for $1 million blown up to about the size of a bathroom door to a voter who signed a petition aimed at defeating the liberal candidate, Susan Crawford. He gave $1 million checks to each to two other voters and made an untold number of $100 payments to voters who signed his petition.

Musk’s candidate, Brad Schimel, lost by 10 points.

A huge chunk of the more than $470 million Musk spent in the 2026 midterm elections went to Ken Paxton, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Texas, who used a lot of that cash to pay for some of the most obnoxious attack ads seen in the midterms. One of them used artificial intelligence to impersonate his opponent, James Talarico, showing him wearing a dress and singing about transgender children. Another Musk-financed AI ad depicted the fake Talarico using a crayon to deface a Bible.

The real Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian studying to be a pastor, defeated Paxton, the scandal-ridden former attorney general of Texas, by more than a million votes.

No discussion of disgusting political ads is complete without mentioning Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, who authorized an ad so appalling it was met with bipartisan condemnation in Ohio and across the country.

The ad featured the elderly mother of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. Ramaswamy’s people found her living in a car with cats in a church parking lot and put her in front of a video camera to say her daughter was a liar. Acton had not seen the woman since she was removed from her obviously dangerous home by social workers at age 12 after she was raped by her father.

Ramaswamy didn’t need Musk’s money—he is a billionaire in his own right—but Musk gave him some anyway, perhaps assuming that a little influence buying can’t hurt.

What did hurt Ramaswamy was the awful ad that exploited the sexual abuse of a child. He actually took credit for it, announcing he would spend $4 million to air it on TV and social media, and no doubt was pleased when President Trump and Vice President Vance said they approved. But voters hated it so much that it was seen as one of the key reasons Ramaswamy was defeated in a landslide.

Political scientists have rich material to study in the results of the 2026 midterm elections in which, contrary to conventional wisdom, lavish spending not only failed in many cases to produce winners, but caused a reverse reaction from fed-up voters.

That wasn’t necessarily the case in Wisconsin, but it is worth noting that in the last four moths of the campaign alone Tom Tiffany was funded by donations totaling $24 million, almost three times as much as David Crowley raised in the same period. Most of Tiffany’s campaign money came from three Wisconsin billionaires.

Crowley won by the largest margin in a Wisconsin governor’s race in the last 28 years.

None of this means that mountains of money will no longer be spent to empower candidates in American elections. The floodgates opened in 2010 when the Supreme Court ruled there were no limits on campaign contributions super PACs could give candidates are not likely to be closed any time soon.

Generous campaign funding will still be an advantage for most candidates, but voters have the ultimate say about that, and they said it loudly in last week’s elections.