By Evan Vorpahl

GOP mega donor Dick Uihlein, a billionaire who lives in Illinois, is spending millions to aid Brad Schimel in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election on April 1, 2025. Uihlein, an heir to the Schlitz beer fortune and CEO of the box and office supply company Uline, has a net worth of $5.6 billion. Over the years, he has used that fortune to back fringe Republicans, including in state court races, as well as other nonprofit and media groups that push extreme policies. Dick and his wife Liz Uihlein were the second largest disclosed funders of federal outside spending groups during the 2024 election cycle according to OpenSecrets. 

Uihlein has also been behind efforts to oppose state ballot initiatives that would protect abortion access. Schimel, who is backed by anti-abortion groups, has indicated he would reinstate Wisconsin’s archaic 1849 abortion ban, and he recently accused the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s liberal-aligned justices, all women, of being “driven by their emotions” during oral arguments. 

Uihlein contributes to a network of nonprofits and super PACs backing Schimel’s campaign, including at least three groups running ads. On February 17, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Schimel was banking on special interests groups to buoy his campaign, “I’m hoping that very soon we’re going to start seeing friends like Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Fair Courts America, other groups like that — that very soon they’re going to get on the airwaves and help take some pressure off.”

That same day the right-group that goes by the name Fair Courts America, which is Uihlein’s state court focused super PAC, filed its first independent expenditure in the race. It has now spent $2.5 million in TV and digital ads attacking Schimel’s opponent, Susan Crawford. In 2023, Fair Courts America spent nearly $5.5 million backing Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Dan Kelly, who lost. 

Schimel also directed his donors to “max out, then go to the party, they’ll send me the check.” Before this comment, Dick and Liz Uihlein had already contributed $1.3 million to the Wisconsin Republican Party this year, which has provided Schimel’s campaign with $1.67 million so far this cycle.  

What You Should Know About Fair Courts America

FCA Has Ties to Leonard Leo’s Court Capture Network

• Fair Courts America was launched in 2022 as a super PAC project of Dick Uihlein’s Restoration of America/Restoration PAC. During the 2024 campaign cycle, FCA received over $9 million from Uihlein and Restoration PAC. The Leonard Leo-tied Concord Fund also provided $2.5 million to a related entity, “Foundation for Fair Courts,” between 2022 and 2023, and an RSLC-tied entity that calls itself the “Good Government Coalition,” which has funded groups spending to pack the North Carolina Supreme Court, gave FCA $250,000 in 2022.
  
  • FCA has also received large sums from anti-abortion poultry billionaire Ron Cameron, and and from Trump mega donor Tim Mellon, who contributed nearly $200 million to federal outside spending groups during the 2024 election, making him the top disclosed funder in the entire cycle.
    
• FCA is led by Andrew Wynne, a former leader of the Leonard Leo-network funded Republican State Leadership Committee’s “Judicial Fairness Initiative” (RSLC-JFI), which has also launched a $2 million ad campaign in Wisconsin. In 2022, after the Leo-linked faction of the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe, Wynne crowed that he “was so excited about the Supreme Court’s reversal of that decision.” 

Fair Courts America Works to Install Partisan Right-Wing Judges on State Courts

• FCA’s 2022 initial “battle plan” proposal in its first year sought $22 million to elect right-wing judges and prosecutors. It spent on judicial races in Illinois, Kentucky, and Texas that year.
  
• In 2023, FCA spent $5.5 million backing anti-choice extremist Dan Kelly in Wisconsin’s 2023 supreme court race, the most expensive supreme court race in history, and nearly $1 million during the 2023 Pennsylvania supreme court race.
  
• Last year Fair Courts America-funded groups supported right-wing candidates in Montana and Ohio, and spent $500,000 to help retain Clink Bolick and Kathryn King in Arizona, after both justices ruled in favor of reinstating Arizona’s 1864 total abortion ban. Last February, after the Alabama Supreme Court decreed that embryos created during in vitro fertilization (IVF) were “minor children,” leading to the closure of multiple IVF clinics in the state, FCA spent more than $600,000 on ads backing state supreme court candidate Bryan Taylor, who has sought to ban abortion access due to his personal belief that “embryos [are] human beings whose lives begin at fertilization,” according to The Guardian.

Uihlein Promotes Regressive Positions on Abortion, Labor, and Elections

• Uihlein has used his fortune to attack reproductive rights across the country. In 2023, he bankrolled a group in Ohio that sought to make it harder for citizens to amend the state constitution just as a ballot initiative protecting abortion rights was set to go before state voters. He is also a major funder of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America’s super PAC called “Women Speak Out.” Women Speak Out spent over $2 million trying to get Dan Kelly onto the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023.
  
  • Other anti-abortion groups, like Pro-Life Wisconsin and Wisconsin Family Action, are backing Schimel..

• Uihlein has also been a key financial backer of Donald Trump and far-right election deniers and has funded efforts to drive unfounded conspiracies about the integrity of our elections, including through the “Voter Reference Foundation” and the “Liberty Initiative Fund.”
  
  • Schimel previously told TPUSA canvassers that Trump needs a “support network” and seemingly endorsed Trump’s claims around the 2020 election. Schimel recently told supporters that “the Wisconsin Supreme Court screwed [Trump] over” in 2020, although he admitted he “didn’t spend any time reviewing” the Court’s rejection of Trump’s 2020 election challenge. Similarly, in January, Schimel expressed sympathy for convicted January 6th insurrectionists whom Trump pardoned, claiming they didn’t get a “fair shot” in their cases, despite the fair trials they received or the court-sanctioned plea bargains they voluntarily made. 

• Uihlein has also deployed his fortune to limit the rights of workers and union power. His Ed Uihlein Family Foundation has funded numerous groups that have litigated in cases attacking labor unions and it is a major funder of the two anti-union groups, Illinois Policy Institute and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund (NRTWLD). NRTWLD represented Mark Janus in the landmark Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court case, which overturned decades of legal precedent permitting labor unions to collect dues from workers benefitting from union negotiations for pay and benefits. After the case, IPI hired Janus as a “senior fellow.”

• A case to rule on the legality of Act 10, Governor Scott Walker’s 2011 bill that effectively stripped public sector workers of their collective bargaining rights in the state, is likely to land before the state supreme court imminently. In 2011, Leonard Leo was coordinating with Wisconsin Club for Growth and other right-wing groups to create a “coalition to maintain the Court,” backing state supreme court candidate David Prosser. As a GOP operative wrote in an email at the time, without Prosser “The Walker agenda is toast.” Prosser was part of the Republican majority that later quashed the John Doe II investigation into Walker’s illegal coordination with outside special interests groups, groups which ran millions in ads in Wisconsin’s supreme court races, though Walker and his cohorts denied the wrongdoing that a bipartisan group of county prosecutors were investigating.
  
• 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, Schimel’s report contained major mistakes and errors, leading a bipartisan group of leaders of the Wisconsin Ethics Commission to call on Schimel to correct and clarify portions of his report.

• Restoration of America’s blog has also been championing the anti-worker legislation and attacking Crawford, who represented groups that sought to overturn Act 10. Last year a federal judge overturned Act 10 as unconstitutional and determined it was “irrational and violates the right to equal protection of the laws.”

TLDR: Controversial and regressive billionaire Dick Uihlein has spent millions of dollars to influence state court elections in Wisconsin, including in backing Brad Schimel in the April 1, 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race. 

For additional information about this article, please contact Evan Vorpahl at evan@truenorthresearch.org. True North’s Lisa Graves and Alyssa Bowen contributed to this article.