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Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

Spending on the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court race approached $100 million or more – in total – according to reports leading up to Election Day.

The WisPolitics news outlet tally was $107 million, including $2 million contributed by billionaire George Soros to the Wisconsin Democratic Party.

The party, in turn, funneled donations to the liberal candidate, Susan Crawford. 

The Brennan Center for Justice tally was $98.6 million, enough to make the nonpartisan Wisconsin contest the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history.

According to the center, a program at New York University Law School that tracks campaign spending:

The largest amount spent, $28.3 million, was by Crawford’s campaign.

Crawford defeated conservative Brad Schimel, whose campaign spent $15 million.

Schimel was backed by billionaire Elon Musk. The Musk-founded America PAC spent $12.3 million. That’s also a national record for outside spending in a judicial race.

Social media posts claimed that Soros spent $100 million supporting Crawford.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

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Tom Kertscher joined Wisconsin Watch as a full-time Milwaukee-based reporter in October 2024 after starting as a freelance Fact Briefs reporter in January 2023. In addition to contributing to Wisconsin Watch’s collaboration with The Gigafact Project to combat online misinformation, he reports on Wisconsin policy, labor, energy and the rapid expansion of data centers across the state. Kertscher is a former longtime reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a contributing writer for Milwaukee Magazine and the author of two sports books, on Al McGuire and Brett Favre.