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Voting got underway this week in the race for a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Between now and the end of the election on April 1, the contest, already the most expensive judicial race in American history at about $60 million, could see spending levels akin to a battleground Senate race in a presidential year, with rhetoric just as mean and nasty.

The election is putatively nonpartisan but, a careful fact-check reveals: lolz.

The Republican-backed candidate is a trial judge in a red county in suburban Milwaukee and former state attorney general, Brad Schimel. He’s a longtime booster of President Trump, and already has the loud backing and heavy spending of Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk, as well as the princes of MAGA, Donald Trump Jr. and the movement’s youth leader, Charlie Kirk. But it was Musk who laid down a marker on the contest very early on and has become the face of the race.

The Democrats are all in for Susan Crawford. She’s a trial judge in Madison, the home to the state’s flagship university, state capital and most reliable progressive voters. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and a growing list of Democrats looking to elevate their national reputations have boosted the liberal jurist, and the blue team’s mega-donors have dumped bales of cash on the pro-Crawford effort.

The stakes for the race are significant if you’re a Wisconsin resident. Seats on the seven-member court don’t come up very often, and in 2023, the last time one did, a Democratic-backed judge replaced a retiring conservative, nudging the majority to the left. Now it’s a liberal justice who is retiring, so Republicans are hoping to tip the court back in their favor. And because Wisconsin is so narrowly divided and bitterly partisan, the court often ends up breaking political deadlocks.

But if you don’t live in Wisconsin, so what? The Badger State is great and everything, but everybody has their own state stuff to sort out, so why not let the cheeseheads do their own thing?

Here are three reasons you should give this race a moment of your time:

1) Prestige points: Sometimes a race is important just because the right person says it is. When John Kennedy’s 1960 campaign picked the West Virginia Democratic primary to show it could win in the Protestant South (even though West Virginia is not Southern and wasn’t all that Protestant), it was Kennedy picking his battle. A loss there would have meant that the premise of Kennedy’s candidacy was flawed, even in a contest of his own choosing. That’s what Musk is doing in Wisconsin. He’s called his shot and means to prove that his social media company and his massive fortune can mobilize lower-propensity Trump voters — lots of younger men — for typically low-turnout elections. Walz is trying to rally Democrats to prove Musk wrong, which amounts to an acceptance of the White House adviser’s challenge.

If Schimel wins, Musk will have hard evidence to suggest that he can swing an election, something that will reap him big rewards, particularly when it comes to keeping anxious Republicans in line with primary threats. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is not exaggerating the fear congressional Republicans have of Musk. If Musk misses, GOPers may feel emboldened in their pushback. A loss for the Musk-backed candidate would also certainly offer Democrats some ray of hope in an otherwise dismal moment for the party.

2) Bellwether of the ball: Sometimes a state race takes on national implications because the state is a good reflection of the nation as a whole. Wisconsin is surely that, having picked the winner of every presidential election since 2008 and closely matched the national popular vote in 2020 and 2024. Last year, Trump won 49.6 percent of the vote in Wisconsin and 49.7 percent nationally. We’ll........

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