Reid J. Epstein
Appearances
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
I mean, that is truly astonishing. Yeah, Musk had done a test run of this proposition during the presidential campaign in Pennsylvania, but we really haven't seen anything quite to the same scale as what we're witnessing in Wisconsin. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Elon Musk. On Sunday night, Elon Musk went to Green Bay... where he held a rally for Brad Schimel.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
He walked out wearing one of those big, yellow, oversized cheeseheads.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Like you see people wearing at Green Bay Packer games and other Wisconsin sporting events.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Musk went on to hand out oversized novelty checks to two winners for $1 million each.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
One of those just happened to be the chairman of the Wisconsin College Republicans. That brings a total to $3 million checks that he's given out just in the last week to Wisconsinites who share his support for Brad Schimel.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Yeah, this really began about a week after Trump was inaugurated in a state Senate election in eastern Iowa, in a rural Republican part of the state, where the Republican who had held the seat before had won by 22 points the last time the seat was up. Safe Republican seat. A safe Republican seat.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Well, they have pretty much turned their entire campaign into one against Elon Musk.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
They branded a statewide tour, The People versus Elon Musk.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Susan Crawford, the candidate, is going around the state telling people that when she was a little girl in Chippewa Falls, she never imagined... I never could have dreamed that I'd be running against the richest man in the world. ...being up against the richest man in the world. Their TV ads are trained on Brad Schimel and his...
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Genuflecting toward Musk and Trump, there's one ad that's in heavy circulation.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Where they call him Knee Pad Brad because of a quote that he gave where he said he was on his knees begging donors for money.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
They are working on a theory that is borne out somewhat by polling that Democratic voters hate Elon Musk so much that running against him is even more effective than running against Donald Trump, which is saying something given how much Democratic voters hate Trump these days. And there is, I mean, there is a real slice of voters in Wisconsin who voted for Trump who are not a fan of Musk.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
There's some evidence in the polling that bears that out, that there are voters who didn't like the way the country was going before. Last fall and weren't didn't like Joe Biden. And so they voted for Trump. But there's some evidence that they aren't thrilled with Elon Musk tearing the government apart or pouring 20 million dollars into the state.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And so the Democratic game plan is to find those people and get them to vote for Judge Crawford. while Republicans have been pretty transparent about their plan. Schimel has said this, the state Republican Party chairman has said this, that their goal is to get 60% of Trump's voters from November to come out and vote for him in this election.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And if they do that, they think they'll win, that that'll be enough of the voters to win. They think that no matter how angry Democrats are at Elon Musk, 60% of Trump's voters will be enough to carry the day.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And the Democrat prevailed by four points in an election that hadn't gotten a lot of attention or investment from the parties. Wow. But it was a sign that there was some grassroots organic enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in this new Trump era. And fast forward to a week ago, there was another special election campaign.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
I mean, we've seen some of that already. We've seen Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez out on tour. drawing crowds of tens of thousands of people a couple of weeks ago.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
I saw them in Las Vegas with a pretty sizable crowd that was energized and really buying into the argument about billionaires controlling the country.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
I think the Democrats in Washington who have gotten the most traction in opposition to Trump have adopted a message that hits that point, that billionaires are controlling the country for themselves at the expense of people who rely on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. And that is...
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
really going to be the democratic playbook for the foreseeable future especially as musk and other billionaires seek to influence these other races elsewhere in the country and if musk is able to snuff that out in wisconsin and then elsewhere in the midterms there's going to be a lot of hard questions for democrats to answer about how they can be a majority party in the country
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Well, they may have no choice but to start sounding like Bernie Sanders and making the case that they are the party in opposition to the billionaire oligarchs running the country. You know, the question is, how do they finance a party like that, that itself has been very dependent on wealthy donors that have many of which have tried to steer the party back toward the center?
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
It's hard for them to have it both ways, to both be the party of the masses of working people in the country and be the party that has to be financed by its own billionaires. And there may be a point in the near future where Democrats have to make a choice about which of those lanes that they want to travel on.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Musk may be making that choice for them where they decide they have no tolerance for billionaires, even those that are friendly to them. Well, Reid, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you, Michael.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
In Pennsylvania, for another state Senate seat, this one got a little bit more attention, but not really any money. And it was a district that Donald Trump had won by 15 points last fall. And again, the Democratic candidate won. In a district where Trump won by 15 points. By 15 points, yeah.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And the people in the party took it as evidence that there was some real anger bubbling up about what Trump was doing in the White House that was reaching all the way down to some of these local races.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Right. And that brings us to Florida, where we have a pair of special congressional elections today to fill seats held by former congressmen who were Trump loyalists in districts where Republicans win by 25 or 30 or 35 points typically. So these are not districts that even in a Democratic wave that the party would expect to be terribly competitive.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
But their candidates have outraised the Republican favorites in these races. Wow. And put a bit of a spook into House Republicans. We saw last week Elise Stefanik, the nominee to be the ambassador to the United Nations, have her nomination be pulled back in part because Republicans couldn't afford to have another seat vacant in case one of these special elections goes haywire.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Right. There is a lot of concern on the Republican side about these House seats. I should say the concern on the Republican side is not shared by optimism on the Democratic side. They do not think that they're going to win these seats, but they are enjoying watching Republicans fret about them.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And then there's the race that I've been focused on, which isn't one of these Florida elections, but the contest for the deciding seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Well, you may remember the court in Wisconsin has an outsized role in the state's politics. It was the place where Donald Trump, just by one vote on the court in 2020, failed to reopen the state's election count in his effort to overturn the results of the election. It's a court that, in upcoming months, will determine the fate of abortion rights in the state.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
It's also likely to have a case seeking to redraw congressional district lines in Wisconsin.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
It does. These are basically super legislators on the court who will have a lot of authority for making policy that impacts Wisconsin and eventually the rest of the country.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
So you have to remember, this is formally a nonpartisan election, but nobody's really fooled about which side the candidates belong to.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
The liberal candidate is a local judge in Dane County, which includes Madison, named Susan Crawford.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And she was a private practice lawyer who represented liberal causes like Planned Parenthood and the local teachers unions before she became a judge.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
She is about as milquetoast and bland as a political candidate gets in 2025.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
I've spent 35 years representing the people of Wisconsin during a large... The conservative candidate is a local judge in Waukesha County named Brad Schimmel.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
He was the Republican attorney general of the state a couple cycles ago.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
He has spent much of his career in politics and the judiciary demonstrating his loyalty to Trump and Republicans. And he's hoping that that pays off by energizing Trump's base to come out and vote for him today.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
It is the most partisan, nonpartisan race that we've had in quite a while. And Democrats really expected that this race would act like a lot of these races beforehand, where there is a reaction to the party in power and that their voters would be more energized to come out and make a statement against Democrats.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
the Trump administration than Republican voters would be in sort of confirming what was happening in Washington. Right, which is exactly what just happened in Iowa and Pennsylvania. Right, in a similar pattern to these other special elections. But then Elon Musk got involved.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And we saw something in Wisconsin that we've never seen in any race anywhere else in the country where a single donor who also happens to be the chief policy director of the White House with his own checkbook. basically built an entire campaign for one of the president's allies. And he, so far, has spent more than $20 million. Wow.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And he's also, you know, the largest single donor to the Wisconsin Republican Party, which can then give money directly to Schimel's campaign. He has given more than 25% of all of the money spent on this race from both sides combined. Hmm.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
You ready, Reed? I'm ready. My phone is on do not disturb. Get that last sip of Svendritin. I have a backup here, too. We have more water.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And that's made this election in Wisconsin the first real test of whether Elon Musk and the millions of dollars he can direct toward an election can snuff out Democratic anger that, for a lot of the country, is directed at him.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Or whether the Democratic enthusiasm to push back against what's happening in Washington can overcome Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and all of the money that Musk has directed toward them.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
First, it's the biggest, most important race on the calendar until November. So if he's going to get involved in something, it would be this. He has a non-trivial personal financial stake in the outcome. Tesla, the car company that he is the chief executive of.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
is suing the state of Wisconsin over a state law that forbids Tesla from opening its own car dealerships in the state without going through a franchisee. A lot of states have laws like this. Tesla has sued or maneuvered around them in many states where it operates. But Wisconsin had said no. And in January, Tesla filed a lawsuit.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And about a week later, Musk started tweeting about the Supreme Court race.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
It would, presuming that if Musk lost at the lower courts, he would appeal, and eventually those appeals would get to the Supreme Court, where a justice that he bankrolled would be in position to cast a deciding vote. That is probably not his biggest motivation. Musk has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in... his Tesla investment since Trump took over as president.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
He would be in position to sell more cars than he does now in Wisconsin, but probably not enough to make up a $20 million investment in the Supreme Court race. What's more likely is is that musk is doing this to place himself as the central banker of the maga movement that he is the cash behind candidates that are loyal to donald trump and by doing this if he wins
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
He sets a template for all of the future Republican candidates running later this year and in the midterms next year that if you're loyal to Trump and Musk, that you can expect him to come in and finance a television and ground game operation for your campaign.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Well, he has spent an unheard of amount of money in the state, even just on a canvassing operation for Brad Schimel. He has hired people to go door to door to pretty much hit every Trump voter in the state. to remind them that if they want to see Trump's agenda enacted in Wisconsin, that they need to vote for Brad Schimel.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And he is paying these people $25 an hour, which is really an unheard of amount in politics. It's more than three times the minimum wage in Wisconsin. It is a sum that, frankly, nobody else is able to match on the other side. He is also sending an unending stream of mail to Trump voters reminding them to vote for Brad Schimel to help President Trump.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And he, with a separate organization, is bankrolling television ads that hammer Susan Crawford as soft on crime.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And saying that during her time as a judge.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
That she was too lenient in sentencing violent criminals.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And again, he's also given money directly to the Republican Party of Wisconsin, which can then turn around and give it, all of it, to Brad Schimel's campaign. And all of this is just a precursor to Musk giving money directly to Wisconsin voters. To voters. To voters.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
He has engineered a plan where anybody who signs a petition saying that they oppose activist judges, which is the language that Republicans use to refer to judges who do anything that they don't like, gets $100 for signing the petition.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
He's paying them $100. Why? And he is paying other people money to refer people to sign this petition. I talked to a Republican mayor of a small town who said his own brother called him and asked him to sign the petition because his brother would get $45 for it.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
It is a perhaps extra legal plan to get voters engaged in the race because it's against the law to pay people to vote, but it's not against the law to pay people to sign a petition in favor of a particular policy. And so that is what Musk is doing.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And to top it off, among those who have signed this petition for which they receive $100, Musk has chosen winners who he has said will receive a million dollars.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
A real sort of publicity stunt to draw attention to his efforts to juice support for his candidate in this race.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
Is it legal? It's not clear if it's legal. The Attorney General of Wisconsin, who's a Democrat, suggested that it's not. And he asked the state's courts to intervene to stop Elon Musk from handing out these million-dollar checks.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
And in a bit of irony that's kind of perfect for this election, the judge the case was assigned to was Susan Crawford in Dane County, who probably set a land speed record in recusing herself from this whole episode. Eventually, the state Supreme Court declined to intervene. They allowed the event to go forward without making a ruling on whether it was legal or not.
The Daily
Is Elon Musk Buying Today’s Election in Wisconsin?
This whole scheme is the sort of thing that Musk can do because he has virtually unlimited money.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And some of that is because of actions that Trump has taken has so offended people like Chris Murphy. But some of it is because only in recent days has there been any attempt to organize Democratic voters to call Senate offices and tell them vote no.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
It's also worth remembering that I think the protest in front of the USAID building was on Monday, and the members of Congress who were there were all from the greater Washington area. And so, but a lot of the people who work in that building who are shut out are the constituents of the members of Congress from Northern Virginia and Maryland who were there.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And so that was as much of a local concern for those members of Congress speaking to their own voters as it was sort of a broader national brand. By the time there was a protest in front of the Treasury building on Tuesday night, there were dozens of members of Congress from all over the country who were there. It was a much bigger, sort of broader protest than
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
The USAID one, which to me has not seemed to be in the mainstream of what most of these Democrats are pushing to the center. It seems to be sort of the most engaged and, frankly, online Democrats are talking about and some people in Washington whose constituents work in that building.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
It's important to note that when Shane and I talked with Ken Martin after he won— The things that he said to us were like the party doesn't need to change any of its policies. It doesn't need to change its message. It needs to change how it distributes its message and how voters hear its message, but not the core of what the party is about.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And on the what happened in the election, he promised to conduct an after action review and make it public. But when we asked him if that review would address the question of whether Joe Biden should have run, he said, no, it would not.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
You know, I had somebody before the election tell me that if Trump won, that Democrats would be way more effed than they were last time, to sanitize that phrase a little bit. Thank you. And when I checked in with her... Last week, she said that it was worse than she anticipated, even more bad than they thought.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
I think, to be honest with you, it feels a little bit like we're all in a listless ship, kind of just spinning about. As a Democrat, it feels a little frustrating. We are a bit of a punching bag at the moment. We've lost sight of our values, and sometimes we get so overinvested into the policy differences that we end up separating ourselves.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And I think there's a difference between the people who look at this and say like they only need to win two or three seats to win back the majority and the people who look at what has happened in Washington and the country over the last two weeks and change, right? Like Trump does not have a mathematical advantage in the government system.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
That's requisite to the types of actions that he's taken place since he's been president. And that's, I think, where some of this bifurcation has taken place. And because a lot of the Democrats came into this new Trump administration, I think, with an unrealistic anticipation of what he would do once he became the president.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And they were clearly ill-prepared politically, certainly, for the types of actions that Trump has taken.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And the people who are making the case for freaking out, frankly, have been doing more freaking out over the last couple weeks, right? They were freaking out from the morning after the election, right? And their case is like not without merit, frankly. We saw what happened in the election. We saw kind of all of these demographics moving away from the party.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
What none of the people who have been moved toward sort of what we would call an autopsy or a post-election review have wanted to discuss – has been kind of the origin of why all those things went the wrong way. And none of them want to talk about the idea of the fact or the reality that they all got behind a very unpopular president and basically told the American people that he wasn't too old.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
that he wasn't too frail, and on and on and on, and backed him until they didn't, by which point, you know, lots of these voters didn't believe them when they said anything else because of what they had said about Biden.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
I think the bigger issue is that it's a vibes problem and what people think of Democrats. And that really goes back— farther than Biden, it goes back to Obama, when the party was seen as college professors drinking wine, being in urban enclaves, where the Democratic Party of FDR and Truman and Kennedy was much more of a working class party.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And there are so many affinity groups, sort of to use a phrase in vogue in some of these circles, in the Democratic coalition at this point. They had a discussion at the Democratic National Committee meeting over the weekend about whether to maintain a gender balance among their vice chair positions because some people might not consider themselves men or women.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And so like those types of discussions – sort of percolate out into the broader culture of what it means to be a Democrat. Right. You know, nobody was actually watching the Democratic Party's meeting over the weekend. You were. You know, nobody who was not being paid to do so, I think, was watching it.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
But for people who are not engaged in one of those groups, like they can get turned off by that, even if Democrats think their issues and agenda are in the interest of these very people who are turned off by the way they present themselves. Right.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
And when you look at the issues that sort of professional Democrats in Washington think of as their core issues – Like they're all very popular. Like abortion rights are popular. Raising the minimum wage is popular. Most of the economic agenda that they talk about, even if people aren't hearing them, is pretty popular.
The Daily
Where Are the Democrats?
The problem comes in that the actual Democrats who run for office themselves are less popular because they have to accede to all these various things that different groups want. But when any of these issues have been put on the ballot as standalone referenda, they almost always pass.