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Bice: An Elon Musk-backed group buys at least $670,000 of TV time to support Brad Schimel [1]
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Date: 2025-02-17
Elon Musk-backed group Building America's Future purchased over $670,000 in TV ads supporting conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel.
Super PAC Fair Courts America, primarily funded by GOP mega-donor Richard Uihlein, also bought nearly $200,000 in airtime for Schimel.
Conservative Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel said just recently he was hoping conservative third-party groups would start buying up TV time in the state "very soon."
Ask and you shall receive.
Federal records show Building America's Future, an Elon Musk-backed dark money group, began buying TV time in Wisconsin on Monday. The ads are expected to be in support of conservative Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, who is running against liberal Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford in the high-stakes April 1 election.
The conservative nonprofit has already purchased more than $670,000 of air time for the next two weeks on TV stations throughout the state, according the Federal Communications Commission. That includes $255,000 in the Milwaukee market, $136,000 in Madison and $104,000 in Green Bay, plus lesser amounts in La Crosse and Wausau.
Building America's Future's commercials are scheduled to begin airing Thursday and run through March 5. The amount of the group's buy is expected to rise in upcoming days.
Also purchasing air time on Monday was Fair Courts America, a super PAC largely funded by GOP mega-donor Richard Uihlein. His wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, has already donated $650,000 to the state Republican Party, money that was transferred to Schimel's campaign.
FCC records show the group has bought nearly $200,000 worth of air time between Feb. 24 and March 10 in Milwwaukee. Of that sum, $79,000 will be spent on WITI-TV (Channel 6), a Fox affiliate, and $49,375 on WTMJ-TV (Channel 4), an NBC affiliate.
Fair Courts is also buying time in Green Bay and Madison, but totals are not yet available.
"Musk is trying to buy off Brad Schimel and take over control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court so that Schimel can rubber-stamp an extreme agenda of banning abortion and cozying up to corporations," said Crawford campaign spokesman Derrick Honeyman. "It’s not surprising that Schimel is groveling for the support of shady special interests — he’s already been caught begging on his knees for far-right donors to give him cash, and now Elon seems to be answering his pleas."
The Schimel campaign declined comment on the outside spending in the race.
All these TV buys come just days after Schimel told a Jefferson County group that he was hoping — very strongly — that conservative groups, including Fair Courts and the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, would begin running ads on his race.
He noted that Crawford's campaign is also benefiting from outside help, particularly attack ads paid for by A Better Wisconsin Together. That liberal group spent more than $6.3 million in the 2023 Supreme Court race, and its political action committee has dropped $258,075 in opposing Schimel.
"I'm hoping that very soon we're going to start seeing friends like Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Fair Courts America, other groups like that — that very soon they're going to get on the airwaves and help take some pressure off," Schimel said, according to a recording obtained by the Journal Sentinel.
Schimel complained about how costly the race had gotten. He said his campaign is spending $600,000 to $700,000 a week to make "a thousand-point statewide TV buy." That's TV talk for airing an ad enough times that an average voter sees it 10 times.
"That's crazy money, and that's going to go up to a million dollars a week very soon," Schimel said at Hi-Way Harry's in Johnson Creek. "As more ads are bought, the price will go up. We've raised a lot of money, but we aren't saving any. We're all in."
The entry of Building America's Future into the race is not a surprise.
Musk, President Trump's right-hand man and the wealthiest man in the world, already called attention to the election on X, the social media platform he owns. He urged people to vote for Schimel, who is backed by Republicans.
Musk's group, which does not identify its donors, spent $23 million helping conservative candidates in 2023. The Wall Street Journal reported that Building America’s Future, organized under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, has a dozen individual and corporate backers, including Musk.
Fair Courts was one of the biggest spenders in the state's last Supreme Court race. In 2023, the super PAC dropped $5.4 million on the contest between liberal Janet Protasiewicz and conservative Dan Kelly.
Earlier this year, Schimel told a conservative radio host on WISN-AM (1130) that he personally knew a lot of outside groups are committed to making sure conservatives get control of the Supreme Court. Elsewhere, he estimated these groups would spend $10 million to $15 million on the race.
"I do have national relationships with donors, well beyond Wisconsin," he said. "I've met with many of them already, and I'm confident that we're going to, we're going to see them come in the race."
Contact Daniel Bice at (414) 313-6684 or
[email protected]. Follow him on X at @DanielBice or on Facebook at fb.me/daniel.bice.
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[1] Url:
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/02/17/elon-musk-group-buys-tv-ads-backing-brad-schimel-for-supreme-court/78976985007/
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