By Evan Vorpahl

Charles Koch’s field operation,  “Americans for Prosperity” (AFP), has spent at least $2.3 million on digital ads and a door-knocking campaign backing Brad Schimel in Wisconsin’s 2025 supreme court race. AFP has a record of supporting extremist right-wing operatives for the courts while claiming they are “rule of law” judges, such as U.S. Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, who were hand-picked by Leonard Leo for the vacancies Trump filled. AFP is making similar claims in Wisconsin in its get-out-the-vote effort for Schimel. 

Koch, a fossil fuel billionaire, and his network of nonprofits have long worked to attack laws that hold corporations accountable for the harms their products or practices cause, which could limit the massive profits of his multi-billion dollar private conglomerate, Koch Industries. He has also invested in Leonard Leo’s court-packing operations for years, using both his personal fortune and Koch Industries to fund the Federalist Society, which is a pipeline to power on the courts and other levers for far-right lawyers. Schimel is closely tied to Leo’s operation. The outcome of April’s election will have major ramifications for laws in Wisconsin that would protect the states’ recently adopted fairer maps for elections, union bargaining rights, access to abortion care, and more.

What You Should Know about Americans for Prosperity

AFP Has Backed Extremists For the Courts While Portraying Them as “Rule of Law” or “Fair” Judges

• AFP’s ads in 2025 tout Schimel as a “fair” or “rule of law” judge who would “support and defend the constitution.”
  
• AFP made the same claims about Donald Trump’s nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – who ignored the rule of law when they combined to overturn Roe v. Wade and nearly 50 years of legal precedents in 2022 and also gave Trump unprecedented and counter-constitutional immunity for crimes that are deemed “official acts.”
  
• Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin’s state director Megan Novak has claimed that progressives are trying to “institute their agenda through lawfare instead of the legislature because they just can’t win.” The reality is that, before Wisconsin’s new state legislative maps were approved in 2024, the state had the most rigged political maps in the country because of Republicans’ severe partisan gerrymandering efforts in 2011 and a GOP-aligned state supreme court that refused to overturn grossly the partisan and disproportionate maps.
  
  • According to a 2020 report by the Electoral Integrity Project, Wisconsin’s political maps scored 23 out of 100, the worst in the nation. For example, in 2018, Democrats won every statewide race and received 54 percent of the state legislative vote, but only won 36 of the state’s 99 Assembly seats—due to the Republican-rigged maps.
    
  • Republican state legislators threatened to impeach Janet Protasciewicz shortly after she was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023, a desperate effort to prevent the new court majority from ruling on the state’s severely gerrymandered electoral maps.
    
  • When he was state Attorney General, Schimel defended Wisconsin’s gerrymandered maps and Voter ID restrictions that make it harder for Americans in Wisconsin to vote.

AFP and the Koch Network Have a History of Backing Trump and the Wisconsin GOP

• Despite Charles Koch’s PR statements about disliking Trump personally, his political GOTV operation has buoyed Trump while also aiding the election of many of the officials in lockstep with the Trump administration’s agenda. It is also engaging in a lobbying and media blitz to make permanent Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts that Koch touted as a “once in a generation” opportunity for people like himself. Notably, in 2024, his affiliated super PAC, AFP Action, spent $157 million backing Republican candidates for the U.S. House and Senate. House speaker Mike Johnson joked at an AFP event in February that he has “AFP tattooed on [his] back.”
  
• AFP was implicated in the criminal investigation into election/anti-corruption violations in Wisconsin during the recall elections that was coordinated by RJ Johnson and Eric O’Keefe through Wisconsin Club for Growth, though none of them were ever charged and they denied wrong-doing. The then-right-wing packed Wisconsin Supreme Court issued an edict killing that bipartisan criminal investigation and the right-wing state legislature then changed Wisconsin election law to effectively legalize the conduct that was at issue.
  
  • In 2017, Schimel released a report on the “John Doe” probes, attacking the officials who investigated Scott Walker and who probed a number of other right-wing special interests groups over illegal coordination. Former RGA executive Phil Cox (who is now deeply involved with groups funded by Elon Musk that are also backing Schimel), told a gathering of right-wing donors that Americans for Prosperity was a “tremendous partner” and “heavily involved” in the recalls.
    
  • Schimel’s report contained major mistakes and errors. Leaders of the Wisconsin Ethics Commission called on Schimel to correct and clarify portions of the report.

Koch Has Invested Heavily in Leonard Leo’s Court Capture Operation

• Koch has invested in Leonard Leo’s court-packing operations for years, funding the Federalist Society, which Leo co-chairs and uses as a way to screen opportunists for his effort to put right-wing operatives who share his extreme agenda into key positions on federal and state courts, as well as in state attorneys general offices, and in other influential posts. Leo has been involved in Wisconsin Supreme Court races since at least 2010, when documents show that he was tapped to secretly raise a six-figure sum to help keep Prosser on the state’s highest court—and even before that financial support Leo was using the Federalist Society to influence the composition of the Wisconsin Supreme Court by deploying Kellyanne Conway to work in ways that helped put the deeply controversial right-wing operative Michael Gabelman on the state’s highest court.
  
  • Schimel has deep ties to the Federalist Society. He has spoken at a number of events hosted by the organization, including “How AGs Can Shake Up Government.” During his re-election bid in 2018 he delivered the keynote address at the organization’s Inaugural Wisconsin Chapters Conference.
    
• As Wisconsin Attorney General from 2014 to 2018, Schimel worked with the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), a pay-to-play group that allows corporations and wealthy individuals to have a deep impact on the regulatory landscape by buying access to state AGs by funding RAGA that them uses that money to fund elections. At a 2018 Federalist Society meeting, Schimel described his leading role in RAGA’s campaign to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
  

• RAGA’s top funder by far is Leonard Leo’s Concord Fund. As a 527, RAGA can accept unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations, and spends millions of dollars each cycle in an effort to elect state Republican attorneys general.
  
• RAGA also receives funding from special interests with a direct stake in the cases that Republican AG’s are involved with. In particular RAGA has been heavily funded by oil and gas interests while its affiliated AGs have attacked efforts to mitigate climate change and hold carbon corporations accountable.

AFP Has a History of Misleading Wisconsin Voters 

• In the summer of the 2011 state recall elections, AFP sent mailers to Democratic voters with information about absentee voting, but listed a deadline that was after the actual election and the return address was to Wisconsin Family Action, an anti-LGBTQ+ religious right group. 

TLDR: Charles Koch, an out-of-state billionaire with a long track record of trying to use his enormous wealth to influence elections to advance his agenda is backing Brad Schimel through a group called “Americans for Prosperity.” 

For additional information about this article, please contact Evan Vorpahl at evan@truenorthresearch.org.