You can gather a lot about someone by the company she keeps. And Dane County Circuit Judge Susan Crawford has surrounded her campaign for Wisconsin Supreme Court justice with a lot of leftist friends. 

The former prosecutor, government bureaucrat, and attorney for a far-left Madison law firm prides herself on being a “fair and impartial” jurist, guided by “common sense.” But a long lineup of big-money liberal donors and endorsers  — from advocates of defunding the police and for abortion on demand to activists for sterilization and mutilation surgeries for children — suggests otherwise. 

“When I seek and accept endorsements from any group, I make it really clear that this is not a quid pro quo,” Crawford said this week during a candidate meet-and-greet at a southern Wisconsin coffeehouse, according to the Wisconsin Examiner, a left-wing publication. The Kickback Cafe certainly seems an interestingly named establishment for a Supreme Court candidate who has raked in record amounts of campaign contributions from billionaire socialists to hold a campaign event. 

Crawford, running against conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, says she’s not making any promises to the people and groups backing her campaign. 

“I am not taking a position on any of their, you know, pet cases or causes that they might be trying to get from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and so they have to accept the fact that, you know, I’m going to be fair and impartial and call the cases like I see them based on the full record at the time,” she told her supporters. 

But Crawford’s friends — groups like Planned Parenthood, the AFL-CIO, and the Working Families Party — are heavily invested in her campaign to keep liberals in control of the state’s highest court. And make no mistake, these leftists expect a substantial return on investment. 

‘Trying to Buy’

Technically, Wisconsin Supreme Court justice is a “nonpartisan” position, but everyone paying a speck of attention to Wisconsin politics knows the ideaological divide on this bench. Right now, liberals hold a slim 4-3 majority heading into the April 1 election. They took back control of the court nearly two years ago in what remains, for the time being, the most expensive state judicial race in U.S. history. The record $50 million-plus in spending is likely to be dwarfed by the Crawford v. Schimel contest. 

As The Federalist reported last week, Crawford’s campaign has raised more than $7.7 million since launching in June. 

Schimel has taken in more than $5 million since entering the race in late 2023. Beloit businesswoman Diane Hendricks and Illinois businesswoman Liz Uihlein contributed a combined $1.675 million to the Republican Party of Wisconsin, which in turn funded Schimel’s campaign, according to campaign finance reports. Building America’s Future, a political action committee backed by billionaire businessman and bloated government reckoner Elon Musk, reportedly has inked contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV ads in the state’s largest markets. 

Crawford campaign spokesman Derrick Honeyman accused Musk of “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.”

It’s an interesting take from a campaign that has richly benefitted from socialist megadonor George Soros, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and super leftist LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, who have collectively kicked in nearly $3 million to Crawford’s campaign via the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, according to the latest campaign finance reports.  

‘Everything Leftism’

Crawford’s endorsement list is a who’s who of far-left players, including Emily’s List, Indivisible, a host of Big Labor organizations, and many more. 

“That is pretty much bread-and-butter, everything leftism right there,” Parker Thayer, investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based government and nonprofits tracker, told The Federalist in an interview. “You have pro-abortion groups, climate change and labor groups all coming together to support a candidate.” 

CRC operates InfluenceWatch, the online database dictionary of public policy influencers. It describes Emily’s List, for example, as a “federal PAC that bundles and gives contributions to pro-abortion, female Democratic candidates for office.” The group reportedly has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars to fund abortion-on-demand causes and candidates, boasting of raising $460 million in the 2020 election cycle. Emily’s List also supports so-called “gender-affirming care” — medical mutilation — of children and deranged trans bathroom policies. 

Police Defunders

Crawford seems to have no better friend than the radical leftists at Indivisible, a project launched in 2016 “to provide liberals a practical guide for ‘Resisting the Trump Agenda,” according to InfluenceWatch. Indivisible is a vehement backer of the Green New Deal and other extreme climate change cult policies. It’s also a proponent of the divisive critical race theory movement, asserting police officers are inherently racist in an inherently racist America.

“Structural racism persists across every facet of American life and is perhaps most evident in the way that law enforcement interacts with communities of color,” Indivisible asserts on its website, offering “actions that you can take right now in your own community.”

Like Indivisible, the Wisconsin Working Families Party is part of a group of national activists calling for defunding the police. The national Working Families Party, tied to leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has called for the immediate abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Nelini Stamp, the national organizing director for the organization, in 2018 told CBS News, “Any Democrats who want to be the nominee need to stand on the right side of this … Even if they don’t say ‘abolish ICE,’ they can’t not address it.”

Leftist outside group A Better Wisconsin Together has already spent at least $1 million on ads backing Crawford for the high court. In the 2023 race, the activist group dumped in $6 million in support of the liberal candidate, according to the Associated Press. A Better Wisconsin has championed boys in girls sports and has protested ICE. 

Crawford has earned the backing of Citizen Action of Wisconsin, which has advocated for halving the state’s prison population, decriminalizing all drugs and prostitution, and barring criminal prosecutions for individuals under 25. In essence, “Think of the children!” The organization is another peddler of the far-left belief that the United States and its prison system are systemically racist and need to be replaced with “an antiracist system that improves community safety by shifting from an exclusive emphasis on force and punishment and instead creates a balanced system that invests, to scale, in alternatives to incarceration, harm reduction, mental health and substance abuse treatment, rehabilitation, and dramatically reducing racial, economic, and social inequality.”

Union Dues

Citizen Action also wants to do away with Wisconsin’s successful and popular school choice program and dismantle Act 10, the public sector collective-bargaining reform law that has saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $30 billion, according to the MacIver Institute.  

Crawford’s generous union allies have long fought against Act 10, leading the 2011 protests at the State Capitol as the bill was being debated and spearheading 2012’s unsuccessful recall campaign against the driver of the reforms, then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Crawford, too, has fought against Act 10. 

The judge served as lead attorney in a lawsuit challenging the law, a challenge that the state Supreme Court ultimately rejected. “I fought against Act 10. The draconian voter ID law,” Crawford wrote in a plug for her 2018 campaign for judge in leftist enclave Madison. In her quest for a seat on the Supreme Court, Crawford has danced around questions about whether she would recuse herself when constitutional challenges over Act 10 and other controversial issues come before the Supreme Court. Her would-be, far-left colleague, Justice Janet Protasiewicz has said she will not recuse on Act 10, to the rejoicing of the union sugar daddies that richly funded her campaign. But, as liberal spin machine Politifact notes, Wisconsin’s judicial code of conduct on the topic of recusal is quite liberal in its allowances.  

The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), the state’s public teachers union, says Crawford “shares” its values. Those values include lobbying for biological boys and girls who identify as the opposite sex sharing locker rooms and bathrooms “of their choice”, opposing bans on boys competing in girls’ sports, and rallying against parental rights in education. 

Big Election, Bigger Dividends

The Crawford campaign has not returned The Federalist’s multiple requests for comment. 

Wisconsin’s April 1 Supreme Court election is the first battleground contest since November’s sea change election that swept Republican into control of Congress and the White House. The state court race is nationally watched and funded for not only its implications on Wisconsin policy, but for the court’s influence on federal elections and control ahead. 

As The Federalist has reported, Crawford was featured at a fundraiser with Dem donors billed as a “Chance to put two more House seats in play for 2026.” Guess who reportedly organized the fundraising mixer, according to the New York Times: Reid Hoffman and Democratic Party of Wisconsin chairman Ben Wikler.  

The radical left is investing a lot of time and money in this pivotal state Supreme Court election, and they expect their preferred candidate to pay big dividends should she win.

“If Crawford wins, she would continue to force-feed us her dangerous, Soros-backed agenda. We must stop her from destroying Wisconsin,” Schimel campaign spokesman Jacob Fischer wrote in a statement to The Federalist.