(LifeSiteNews) — A former attorney for abortion giant Planned Parenthood won an important Wisconsin Supreme Court race last night.
Judge Susan Crawford defeated Judge Brad Schimel in the widely watched race by about eight points, according to the Associated Press.
Crawford said the state supreme court was “threatened by an all-out effort to politicize the court to drive a right-wing agenda,” prior to the election. She is a former prosecutor and current circuit court judge in Dane County. Previously, she represented Planned Parenthood as an attorney.
Schimel is a Waukesha County judge and former attorney general for Wisconsin.
Prior to last night’s vote, the Wisconsin Supreme Court had three conservatives and four liberals. The winner will hold the seat for 10 years.
The election drew national attention, with Elon Musk spending millions of dollars to encourage voters to come out for Schimel. Meanwhile, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former President Barack Obama encouraged voters to back Crawford, as reported by CNN.
More than $90 million had been spent on the election as of April 1, according to New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.
Although officially a nonpartisan election, the spending mirrored a normal election. Liberal groups like the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and unions spent money to elect Crawford, while conservative groups, such as the National Rifle Association and American Principles Project, backed Schimel.
Crawford’s ties to Planned Parenthood, which she proudly states on her campaign website, could raise concerns about her judicial independence when it comes to abortion cases before the state supreme court.
NBC News noted:
The state Supreme Court heard a challenge to the ban in November and is widely expected to overturn the law, but before Crawford is sworn in in August. Abortion providers in the state resumed the procedure in 2023 after a judge ruled that the 175-year-old law didn’t apply to consensual medical abortions, but the state Supreme Court is reviewing whether to entirely invalidate it.
There is also a separate case in which Planned Parenthood has directly asked the court to establish whether the state constitution established a right to an abortion. The court Crawford will sit on could hear that case.
While Crawford and her supporters made an issue of Elon Musk’s support for Schimel, she was heavily backed by moneyed interests, as pointed out by former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
“Crawford and her allies had the advantage,” Walker, now the president of Young America’s Foundation, wrote on X. “Even more than the overall gap, Crawford had an even bigger advantage as her billionaires gave to the party which gave to her campaign which gets the best rate on ads.”
