Elon Musk and his political operatives have tried to shape the closely watched Wisconsin Supreme Court race in ways that are not immediately obvious but could be critical to Tuesday’s outcome.

Musk’s America PAC has sent paid canvassers across Wisconsin since early February, before conservative Brad Schimel advanced in a nonpartisan primary to face liberal Susan Crawford for an open seat on the state’s highest court, where liberal justices hold a 4-3 majority and retirement this year of a liberal justice puts majority control of the court in play.

Over the eight weeks since, canvassers are expected to have reached hundreds of thousands of potential Schimel voters, based on the more than $4.3 million alone that spending records a week before the election showed America PAC had poured into this labor-intensive aspect of the campaign.

“As I travel around the state, I’ve been hearing from quite a few folks who say they’ve got America PAC knocks at their doors,” said Brian Schimming, the state Republican chairman. “And it’s not just in the big areas.”

Though the group has been aggressive in GOP-heavy Waukesha County in suburban Milwaukee, Schimming and others report hearing that America PAC canvassers have appeared in Racine County, a blue-collar area south of Milwaukee and areas such as Sauk County northwest of Madison.

“They have been on this more than anybody,” Schimming said.

Musk played up the stakes at an America PAC event Sunday night in Green Bay, saying Schimel was in danger of losing and calling for a movement to “dragnet the state.”

“Everybody’s going to mobilize everywhere like crazy for the next 48 hours,” he said. “And I think this will be important for the future of civilization. It’s that significant. You don’t hear me saying that very often. It’s a big deal.”

He encouraged attendees to sign up at America PAC’s website to be a “block captain,” for which they could earn $20 for knocking on doors in their neighborhoods and uploading a photo as proof.

“It’s … thumbs up and hold a picture of Judge Schimel. And that’s it, and you get $20,” he said.

Though America PAC declined to discuss details of its work, the group’s commitment confirms Musk’s uniquely powerful role in Republican politics as someone working closely with President Donald Trump and willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to boost Trump and his allies.

During the 2024 presidential election, Musk, the world’s richest person, committed more than $200 million to America PAC’s work on Trump’s behalf in the seven most competitive states, including Wisconsin, where Trump won by fewer than 30,000 votes, less than a percentage point.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court comes as the court is expected to rule on abortion rights, congressional redistricting, union power and voting rules that could affect the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Musk and America PAC are trying to elevate Schimel, who has attached himself publicly to Trump and Musk.

America PAC representatives were working the crowd Friday at a Schimel rally in Beaver Dam, northeast of Madison. They were seeking petition signatures to oppose “activist judges.” The political action committee promised $100 for each Wisconsin voter who signed the petition and another $100 for each signer they referred.

Musk has become a Democratic target and the center of the party’s messaging against Schimel. Crawford, who is backed by liberal billionaires including George Soros and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, referred to her opponent in their debate as “Elon Schimel.”

Many standing nearby waved signs in protest to Musk.

“Musk Hates Judges Who Do Their Job!,” said one man’s cardboard sign, held over his head. The man next to him held one that simply said, “NO DOGE,” referring to the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump’s government cost-cutting effort, which Musk directs.

Musk drew widespread attention with the Sunday rally in Green Bay and his $1 million giveaways to people who sign the petition decrying judicial activism. Groups linked to Musk have spent more than $17 million to support Schimel in what’s become the most expensive judicial race in American history.

A significant portion of that money is going into the tedious but critical work of voter turnout.

As of one week before the election, America PAC had spent $4.3 million on canvassing alone, according to figures compiled by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that advocates for transparency in campaign spending.

Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by anti-tax billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, is also canvassing in the supreme court race and also was active in Wisconsin during the 2024 campaign. But the group also was a distant second in the Supreme Court race, having spent only about a sixth of America PAC — $712,000 — on canvassing, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

While the millions America PAC has spent on canvassing are far beyond what other groups have committed, America PAC also had spent as of last week at least another $4 million on mail, printing, online advertising, phone-banking, text messaging and other organizing costs, also far ahead of other groups.

The group was canvassing this month in Sauk County, where the presidential candidate who took the state has won in five straight elections.

Trump last year won Sauk — split between Democratic-leaning areas closer to Madison and a more conservative rural northwest — by 626 votes after Democrat Joe Biden won the county by 615 votes in 2020.

America PAC canvassers were in Sauk County knocking on doors last fall, trying to reach voters who had voted Republican in the past but had not been reliably active.

“America PAC is in our neck of the woods,” said Jerry Helmer, the county’s Republican chairman. “They were up knocking on doors in the Wisconsin Dells this month. America PAC has been doing a really good job in our area. They are just killing it in Sauk County.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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A French court on Monday sentenced far-right leader Marine Le Pen to a five-year ban on running for office with immediate effect, throwing into doubt her bid to stand for president in 2027.

The judge also gave her a four-year prison term, which is to be served with an electronic tag, drawing immediate criticism from her party and other far-right leaders.

Including 56-year-old Le Pen, nine figures from her National Rally (RN) party were convicted over a scheme where they took advantage of European Parliament expenses to employ assistants who were actually working for the party.

Twelve assistants were also convicted of concealing a crime, with the court estimating the scheme was worth 2.9 million euros.

All the RN officials including Le Pen were banned from running for office, with the judge specifying that the sanction should come into force with immediate effect even if an appeal is lodged.

“The court took into consideration, in addition to the risk of reoffending, the major disturbance of public order if a person already convicted… was a candidate in the presidential election,” said presiding judge Benedicte de Perthuis.

Three-time presidential candidate Le Pen, who scents her best-ever chance of winning the French presidency in 2027, has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

She left the courtroom after her conviction and this sanction were announced, but before the judge announced rulings on a potential prison sentence and fine, an AFP correspondent said.

Le Pen said in a piece for the La Tribune Dimanche newspaper published on Sunday that the verdict gives the “judges the right of life or death over our movement”.

Young pretender

With her RN emerging as the single largest party in parliament after the 2024 legislative elections, Le Pen believed she has the momentum to finally take the Elysee in 2027 on the back of public concern over immigration and the cost of living.

Polls currently predict that she would easily top the first round of voting and make the second round two-candidate run-off.

The reaction from Moscow to the verdict was swift. “More and more European capitals are going down the path of violating democratic norms,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“Je suis Marine!” (“I am Marine”), wrote Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of her main allies in the EU, on X in support.

Waiting in the wings is her protege and RN party leader Jordan Bardella, just 29, who is not under investigation in the case.

Bardella, reacting to the verdict, said French democracy was “executed” with the “unjust” verdict.

In a documentary broadcast by BFMTV late on Sunday, Le Pen for the first time explicitly gave her blessing to Bardella becoming president. “Of course he has the capacity to become president of the republic,” she said.

But there are doubts even within the party over the so-called “Plan B” and whether he has the experience for a presidential campaign.

‘Very upset’

Le Pen took over as head of the then-National Front (FN) in 2011 but rapidly took steps towards making the party an electoral force and shaking off the controversial legacy of its co-founder and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who died earlier this year and who was often accused of making racist and anti-Semitic comments.

She renamed it the National Rally and embarked on a policy known as “dediabolisation” (de-demonisation) with the stated aim of making it acceptable to a wider range of voters.

Prosecutors accused the party of easing pressure on its own finances by using all of the 21,000-euro monthly allowance to which MEPs were entitled to pay “fictitious” parliamentary assistants, who actually worked for the party in France.

And prosecutors argue that its “organised” nature was “strengthened” when Marine Le Pen took over as party leader in 2011.

Given her current popularity, even some opponents have expressed discomfort over the prospect of Le Pen not making it to the starting line of an election.

“There are a very significant number of our fellow French citizens who identify with Marine Le Pen’s words and her struggle, and personally I would be very upset, to put it mildly, if she were unable to run to represent them,” France’s former EU commissioner Thierry Breton told French television at the weekend.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• President Trump is set to announce new tariffs on April 2, potentially escalating trade tensions with key allies and further impacting market volatility. Broad-based sanctions on “all countries” are now on the table. Analysts predict sector-wide tariffs averaging 15% across major U.S. trading partners, with potential recessionary and inflationary consequences.

‘Liberation Day’ is upon us. On Wednesday, April 2, the Trump administration is expected to make a raft of new tariff announcements, potentially escalating growing trade tensions with some of America’s closest allies.

Already, President Trump has caused market volatility by imposing tariffs on neighboring nations Canada and Mexico and two 10% tariffs on China. Hikes have also been placed on all autos and steel and aluminum products.

But he’s not done yet: This week, the Oval Office warned that further sanctions will begin on “all countries” rather than a specific list.

Markets are, perhaps unsurprisingly, volatile ahead of the announcement, which could escalate a trade war. At the time of writing the S&P500 is down 2.4% over the past five days, while the Dow Jones is also down 1.4% over the same period.

Much of this selloff happened over the weekend, when President Trump made his threat on “all” nations as well as stoking geopolitical tensions with criticism of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

Ahead of this week’s announcement, here’s a roundup of President Trump’s policy threats and Wall Street reaction.

The EU

While President Trump has previously said he likes the “nice little European countries” that make up the EU, he has also erroneously claimed the trade bloc was set up with the purpose of destroying the U.S.

In October, President Trump highlighted America’s trade deficit with the EU regarding autos—an issue already addressed by his vehicle tax—and the “farm products” that he said the EU doesn’t accept from the States.

They will have to pay a “big price,” Trump said at the time.

This threat has been heightened even within the last week, with President Trump saying that if the EU and Canada began working on an undisclosed deal to benefit themselves while hurting American interests, they will face sanctions “far larger than currently planned.”

As such, the EU—America’s second-largest import partner—could represent the largest shift in trade policy announced on April 2.

Previously, a Deutsche Bank survey of 400 analysts found that the medium-term expectation for EU tariffs would settle at around 18%, though this could be after a period of negotiation with hikes that initially started higher.

“We expect the administration to use a broader set of metrics to come up with country-specific tariff numbers, including the magnitude of trade imbalances, tariff differentials, VAT, digital service taxes and non-tariff barriers,” UBS economist Arend Kapteyn wrote in a note seen by Fortune this morning.

“Given that the time needed to analyze all this properly is not consistent with the April 1 deadline, this week is likely just the starting point of negotiations,” Kapteyn continued.

UBS’s base case is a 15% tariff on America’s 15 largest trade partners.

China

Despite a 60% tariff on China being the major talking point of President Trump’s campaign, so far, Bejing has only faced two hikes of 10% apiece.

Of course, this has been framed as a sanction against the flow of deadly drugs—such as fentanyl—coming into the U.S. from China. However, President Trump’s bid to rebalance trade with China could result in further sanctions this week.

“We had penciled in 60% tariffs for China because that was what Trump campaigned on, but there is clearly scope for tariffs to be lower,” Kapteyn added.

Having announced its own reciprocal tariffs, China has fared remarkably well despite the growing tensions with the U.S.

Bank of America economists Helen Qiao and Anna Zhou identified a number of factors for the boost in market sentiment. In a note seen by Fortune, the pair wrote: “China still managed to post a 2.3% yoy increase in exports in Jan-Feb … But even before the boost from macro data strength … investor sentiment had already recovered.

“A confluence of factors are at play, including: 1) a technology breakthrough (i.e. the introduction of DeepSeek-R1 and the rise of humanoid robots); 2) the unprecedented success of Chinese animation movie Ne Zha 2; and 3) the symposium between President Xi and tech leaders on February 17 that provided a measure of reassurance around incentive improvement.”

Russia

President Trump has also threatened further economic sanctions against Russia if the U.S.-brokered ceasefire talks between Putin’s nation and Ukraine do not go ahead.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” President Trump told NBC News on Sunday.

He doubled down: “That would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States. There will be a 25% tariff on all oil, a 25- to 50-point tariff on all oil.”

A universal tariff?

Thus far, Trump has targeted specific countries with their own tariff levels rather than announcing a blanket hike for all imports into the U.S.

A so-called universal tariff has been highlighted as potentially recessionary and inflationary by JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, but it is looking increasingly likely with Trump’s talk of an “all countries” policy.

Over the weekend, Goldman Sachs upped its tariff assumptions, per a note from economists Ronnie Walker, Alec Phillips, and David Mericle.

“We expect President Trump to announce reciprocal tariffs that average 15% across all U.S. trading partners on April 2, although we expect product and country exclusions to ultimately whittle the addition to the average U.S. tariff rate down to 9pp,” the note seen by Fortune reads.

The trio also increased their core PCE inflation forecast by 0.5pp to 3.5% year over year and shifted their recession expectation from 20% to 35%.

In late January, Thierry Wizman, global FX and rates strategist at Macquarie, suggested that sector-level universal tariffs are likelier than threats against allied nations because “permanent sector-level universal tariffs are more consistent with WTO rules than country-specific tariffs, and so are likelier to withstand legal challenge.”

He added in the note seen by Fortune: “To Trump, universal tariffs also serve the public-policy imperative of raising revenue for the U.S. government, thus perhaps justifying corporate tax rates to be cut, an important agenda item for the administration.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com