Wisconsin’s Campaign Finance Nightmare Is About to Go National

By Russ Feingold, Jeff Mandell, Rachel Snyder

Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that could fundamentally reshape American elections by dismantling one of the last significant limits on campaign spending. If the Court strikes down these limits, we don’t have to speculate about what will happen—we’ve already seen the damage in Wisconsin.

This challenge started during now-Vice President J.D. Vance’s bid for U.S. Senate and has made its way to our nation’s highest Court. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, party lawyers argue that federal limits on coordinated spending between political parties and candidates are unnecessary because other regulations provide adequate protection. The Supreme Court should reject this dangerous claim because it’s wrong — Wisconsin’s experience over the last decade proves it.

In 2015, Wisconsin eliminated both limits on individual contributions to political parties and restrictions on coordinated spending between parties and candidates. Wealthy donors immediately discovered they could nullify candidate contribution limits by routing money through political parties instead.

The numbers are staggering. Wisconsin limits individual contributions to gubernatorial candidates to $20,000 per election cycle. Before the 2022 election, at least 42 wealthy donors gave Governor Tony Evers the maximum. Those same donors also gave the Democratic Party of Wisconsin amounts totaling nearly $23 million. The party transferred over $18 million directly to Evers’s campaign committee over the course of the campaign—all of this was completely legal under current Wisconsin law.

Wisconsin’s nonpartisan judicial races tell an even starker story. The 2023 Supreme Court race cost $51 million, shattering nationwide records for spending in any judicial election. The 2025 race doubled that—with total expenditures exceeding $100 million. In both races, the established pattern held. Extremely wealthy individuals made maximum contributions directly to the candidates and also funneled significantly larger sums to the political party supporting their favored candidate. In turn, each political party transferred millions to the candidate it preferred. And with each election cycle, the ultra-wealthy are further emboldened. Elon Musk alone contributed nearly as much to the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race as had been spent by all four candidates, combined, in the 2023 Supreme Court race. When one billionaire can match an entire election cycle’s record-setting spending, how can average citizens believe they have any meaningful voice?

This isn’t partisan—both parties exploit these loopholes. It’s about rushing headlong into a system where candidates no longer need broad voter support, as long as they have a handful of mega-donors writing massive checks to a political party that will funnel cash into the campaign.

The petitioners want the U.S. Supreme Court to believe that current federal limits on contributions to political parties provide sufficient protection. But those limits are just as vulnerable to legal challenge. If the Court strikes down coordination limits, the next lawsuit will undoubtedly target party contribution limits themselves.

This is part of a decades-long campaign to dismantle all barriers against unlimited money in elections. McCain-Feingold—which one of us helped author—built guardrails to protect democracy. For twenty years, opponents have been dismantling those protections piece by piece, always claiming that remaining regulations will provide adequate protection. Each time, they were wrong. And still, each time, they came back for more.

Wisconsin’s experience shows exactly what happens when these guardrails fall. Contribution limits become symbolic, easily circumvented through political parties. Extraordinarily wealthy individuals exercise vastly disproportionate influence. The appearance—and reality—of corruption follows.

The Court should learn from Wisconsin’s cautionary tale and preserve these protections. Otherwise, Wisconsin’s nightmare becomes America’s reality: elections for sale to the highest bidder, and citizens’ voices drowned out by billionaires’ checkbooks.

As published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Tuesday, December 9, 2025.

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Russ Feingold represented Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate from 1993 to 2011 and co-authored the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly called McCain-Feingold. Jeff Mandell is President and General Counsel of Law Forward, which filed an amicus brief on Feingold’s behalf in this case. Rachel Snyder is Policy Counsel at Law Forward.