Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Republicans have a message for all the Elon Musk-haters out there: He isn’t going away.
That’s even after Musk put himself center-stage in Wisconsin and poured $25 million into the race for a Supreme Court seat only to see his preferred candidate lose by nine points to Democratic-backed candidate, and after a pair of special congressional elections in Florida revealed a worsening national political environment for the GOP. “This is one of the moments when we separate the men from the boys,” says one longtime advisor to President Donald Trump. “These are battles worth fighting. And anybody that wants to go against Elon or the president is going to reveal what side of the line they are on.”
The result of Tuesday’s elections left Democrats crowing about what an increasing drag Musk is on Republican fortunes, especially after a series of polls over the past several weeks showed how precisely unpopular Musk and his DOGE initiative to reduce the size of government are. A survey by the Democratic polling outfit Blueprint earlier this month showed Musk’s favorability is 16 points underwater, ten points worse than Trump’s, as voters fret that he will move to cut Social Security and Medicare.
“Elon Musk turned what should have been a pretty run-of-the-mill judicial election into a referendum on him and he is the least popular thing in the Republican Party right now,” says Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, who pointed out that even 20 percent of voters who approve of the job Trump is doing also disapprove of the job Musk is doing.
“His favorability is dropping at the rate of around five points every two weeks,” Roth Smith says. “It is not sustainable. He is a drag on the national party, he is a drag on the White House and now somehow he has made himself a drag on state and local candidates and at some point the Republicans are going to have to ask themselves some serious questions about how willing they are to tie themselves to the rock of Elon Musk and let themselves sink to the bottom of the ocean.”
Despite that, Republicans say this amounts to Democratic psy-ops to cashier him and it won’t work. Musk is the richest person in the world and he is willing to spend that money to get Republicans elected. Republicans have struggled in off–year elections for a decade now, their thinking goes, especially when Trump is in the White House. For all of the attention on Musk this year, Crawford ran only one point ahead of Janet Protasiewicz, the 2023 Democratic-backed candidate for a judgeship in Wisconsin in a race that also attracted a torrent of national attention. And while in Florida, Democrat Josh Weil ran roughly 16 points ahead of Kamala Harris in a race that attracted over $10 million in Democratic, mostly small-dollar donations, he still lost the deep red district to Trump-backed Randy Fine. His performance was not as strong as Democrat Gay Valimont, who ran roughly 23 points ahead of Harris in nearby, and even deeper red district in a race that attracted far less interest from the media or out-of-district partisans.
The lesson for Republicans is that the more attention they can bring to these off-cycle elections, the better they do, and no one besides Trump is better at getting attention than Musk. The billionaire admitted that his stunt of giving away $1 million checks to voters who sign his PAC’s petitions–a stunt of questionable legality, it should be noted–was because “we need to get attention.”
“It causes the legacy media to, like, kind of lose their minds, and then they’ll run it on every news channel,” Musk said at a Sunday night town hall in Wisconsin. “And I’m like, I couldn’t pay them to, it would cost, like, 10 times more… to get the kind of coverage that we get.”
Musk, who only took a late interest in the race, grew to be so invested that he called it existential, telling a rally crowd that the previously sleepy affair could determine who controls the House after the latest round of redistricting, “which then steers the course of Western civilization,” adding that “I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it’s going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.”
It was a Trumpian-like raising of the stakes, only without Donald Trump, who only committed to a tele-town hall in the race, but otherwise mostly steered clear of what looked like a likely Republican defeat.
Trump recently told his inner circle that Musk would soon be stepping away from his White House role. Musk’s status as a “special government employee” only allows him to work as the de facto head of DOGE for 130 days, which means he and the cost-cutting outfit he runs will likely only last until the end of May. He may step away from the government, but not, Republicans hope, from the greater cause of electing more Republicans.
“We have one big problem, which is that when Donald Trump is on the ballot our voters come out to fucking vote, and when he is not, they don’t,” says another Republican strategist close to Trump. “So how do we solve that problem? We let Elon Musk be our sugar daddy and get our voters out.”
