Benches for Sale: How National Political Money Is Colonizing Your Local Courthouse

For most of American history, a race for a seat on a state appellate court or a county district bench was a quiet civic ritual. Candidates distributed modest pamphlets, local bar associations issued measured endorsements, and turnout hovered somewhere between negligible and embarrassing. The average voter could not name a single sitting judge in their jurisdiction, and nobody in Washington particularly cared who won.

That era is over.

In courthouses from Maricopa County to Allegheny County, from the Wisconsin Supreme Court to the Georgia Court of Appeals, judicial elections have been quietly reengineered into something far more consequential — and far more contentious — than their framers ever intended. National political organizations, ideologically driven nonprofits, and anonymous donors operating through layers of tax-exempt entities have discovered what legal scholars have long understood: control of the judiciary is control of policy, often more durable and more insulated from electoral reversal than any single legislative session.

The Numbers Tell the Story

The transformation is visible in the money. According to tracking by the Brennan Center for Justice, spending in state supreme court elections has increased by more than tenfold over the past two decades when adjusted for inflation. The 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court race — technically a nonpartisan contest — attracted over $42 million in total spending, making it the most expensive judicial election in American history at the time. That figure exceeded the combined spending in dozens of simultaneous state legislative races across the country.

The Wisconsin contest was not an anomaly. It was a signal. Both progressive and conservative legal networks understood that a single seat on that court would determine the fate of Wisconsin's legislative district maps, abortion access regulations, and voting law challenges for years to come. The national implications were explicit. Neither side pretended otherwise.

Similar dynamics have played out in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, and Ohio — states where supreme courts have become decisive arenas for disputes that Congress and state legislatures cannot or will not resolve cleanly. The judiciary, in this model, is not a check on political power. It has become an extension of it.

Dark Money Finds a Comfortable Home

What makes judicial elections particularly susceptible to outside influence is the informational vacuum in which they occur. Most voters arrive at the ballot with no meaningful knowledge of judicial candidates. They cannot evaluate legal philosophies, review written opinions, or assess temperament from a campaign mailer. This knowledge gap, which would be a liability in a congressional race, is an asset for well-funded outside groups.

When an electorate cannot independently evaluate candidates, it relies almost entirely on cues — party labels where they appear on ballots, endorsement signals, and advertising framing. Organizations that can saturate a market with targeted messaging in the final weeks of a judicial campaign hold disproportionate sway. And because judicial candidates are often bound by ethics rules that restrict how explicitly they can discuss their views on contested legal questions, they are limited in their ability to counter misleading characterizations.

The result is a structural advantage for outside money that does not exist in quite the same form in other electoral contexts. Dark money groups — organized under 501(c)(4) tax status and therefore not required to disclose their donors — have exploited this environment with considerable sophistication. They fund television and digital advertising that frames judicial races in the same culture-war vocabulary as congressional campaigns, often without any meaningful connection to the actual legal record of the candidate being targeted.

The Nationalization of Local Law

Beyond the money, there is a deeper structural shift underway. State and local courts handle the overwhelming majority of legal disputes that actually affect Americans' daily lives — landlord-tenant conflicts, criminal sentencing, family law, workers' compensation, zoning disputes, environmental enforcement. Federal courts, despite their prominence in national media coverage, touch a comparatively small slice of American legal experience.

This means that the ideological composition of state court systems has enormous practical consequences for ordinary people. A state supreme court that interprets its constitution's privacy provisions broadly will produce a different legal landscape on reproductive rights, search and seizure, and data privacy than one that reads the same text narrowly. These are not abstract differences. They are the conditions under which millions of people live.

National political movements have internalized this reality. Conservative legal organizations, led by networks affiliated with the Federalist Society, began investing systematically in state judicial races well before their progressive counterparts recognized the strategic stakes. The Judicial Crisis Network and affiliated entities spent heavily in state court races throughout the 2010s, building a pipeline of constitutionalist judges at every level of the state judiciary. Progressive groups, energized in part by the rightward shift of the federal courts, have since mobilized comparable resources — though with a shorter organizational history and, in many states, a structural disadvantage in the geographic distribution of their voter bases.

What Voters Don't Know Is Reshaping What the Law Says

The central irony of this nationalization is that it operates most effectively precisely because most voters remain disengaged from judicial elections. Turnout in down-ballot judicial contests frequently falls below fifty percent of the presidential electorate, and in off-cycle elections, it can drop far lower. The voters who do engage tend to be either politically sophisticated partisans who treat the race as an extension of the broader culture war, or civic-minded community members who lack the legal background to evaluate candidates on substantive grounds.

Neither group is well-served by the current environment. Partisan voters receive curated information designed to reinforce existing ideological commitments rather than illuminate judicial temperament or legal reasoning. Civic-minded voters are left navigating a landscape in which the most prominent voices — well-funded outside groups — have the least interest in providing honest assessments.

Some states have experimented with reforms. Missouri's nonpartisan merit selection system, often called the Missouri Plan, uses a commission of lawyers and citizens to screen candidates before gubernatorial appointment, with retention elections replacing competitive contests. Other states have moved toward public financing for judicial campaigns. But these reforms face persistent resistance from the very political actors who benefit from the current system's opacity.

The Courthouse as the New Capitol

The nationalization of judicial elections reflects a broader truth about American political life in the 21st century: the formal institutions of representative government — Congress, state legislatures, city councils — have become increasingly gridlocked, polarized, and distrusted. Courts, by contrast, retain a residual legitimacy rooted in their procedural formality and their insulation from the daily churn of electoral accountability.

That legitimacy is now being spent. When judicial elections become indistinguishable from partisan legislative races in their funding structures, their messaging, and their explicit policy stakes, the courts lose the thing that made them valuable as an alternative arena. A judiciary that is perceived — accurately or not — as an extension of party politics cannot perform the legitimizing function that courts have historically provided in American constitutional life.

The voters who are not paying attention to these races are not making a mistake born of ignorance alone. They are responding rationally to a system that has given them little reason to believe their participation will be informed or consequential. Reversing that dynamic will require more than better voter guides. It will require a reckoning with who benefits from an uninformed electorate — and why those beneficiaries have every incentive to keep things exactly as they are.