Victory in Wisconsin
The most gerrymandered state in the nation gets fair state legislative maps, at last.
Wisconsin had the most unfair political maps in the country. Now they’re among the fairest.
Ever since 2010, when Republicans swept into power, they have used redistricting to draw highly favorable maps and squeeze out the Democrats. Even when Democrats won the most number of votes statewide, Republicans held a supermajority in the state legislature, and six out of eight House congressional seats.
This is the story of how Democrats, working tirelessly under the leadership of state party leader Ben Wikler, forced a change and restored fairness to the system. It’s not only an inspiring story of what is possible, but another blueprint for how other states that are currently unfairly gerrymandered and under the control of a GOP supermajority can still wrest away control and return it to the people where it belongs.
In today’s piece, I’ll briefly recount the history of gerrymandering in Wisconsin and how it got to be so bad. I’ll show you some of the appalling unfairness, even in the most recent election, that produced lopsided power for the party that received the fewer number of votes. Then I’ll walk through the steps that led to new, far fairer maps being drawn—somewhat surprisingly approved by the state GOP itself. Those are the maps Gov. Evers just signed into law.
Wisconsin: A case study in partisan gerrymandering
When the GOP won state legislative elections across the country in the midterms of 2010, it set about to cement its power through redistricting in 2011.
In Wisconsin that year, for the first time in over 40 years, voters had elected a Republican majority in the state assembly and the senate, as well as a Republican governor. The GOP developed a voting map that would allow Republicans to maintain a majority under any likely scenario. The plan was introduced, passed and signed into law in 2011.
The plan at first didn’t have the usual hallmarks of oddly shaped districts. In a state like Wisconsin, Democratic votes are highly concentrated in urban areas, so it’s hard to prove that voters are “packed” deliberately together to waste their votes. Perhaps that is just where they live, the argument goes.
But besides “packing” votes together, there is also the practice of “cracking” districts apart to lump Democratic voters in with greater numbers of Republican voters in order to dilute Democratic strength. This was far more evident in Wisconsin. You can view, for example, the suburbs around Milwaukee, which reach in with “fingers” to grab parts of Milwaukee.
The blue dots represent backers of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and red are backers of Donald Trump. As Malia Jones of the University of Wisconsin Applied Population Lab noted in 2018,
A close look at the suburbs shows a ring of districts which each ha[s] a little piece of the city of Milwaukee, rich in Democratic voters, and a large piece of the surrounding suburbs, which are strongly Republican-leaning. This ring includes districts 13, 14, 15, 20, 22, 23, 24, 82, 83 and 84—all but one of these 10 seats was held by a Republican in 2018.
The GOP-dominated legislature, comfortable in its supermajority, got to do it all again in 2021 with another round of redistricting. And they really went all out.
ProPublica offered the 73rd district as an example:
And in the northwest corner of the state, there’s the 73rd Assembly District, which resembles a Tyrannosaurus rex after a remap wiped out a reliable bloc of Democrats and added more rural conservative areas. The result: After 50 years of Democratic control, a Republican won in 2022.
Here’s what it looks like after being reconfigured:
The 2022 maps also had areas that many described as “swiss cheese” because of the way they isolated voters into pockets. According to ProPublica,
Fifty-five of the state’s 99 Assembly districts and 21 of 33 in the Senate contain “disconnected pieces of territory,” according to the most recent petition filed with the state Supreme Court by 19 Wisconsin voters.
Here are the 68th and 91st state assembly districts. You can see that there is a purple island that is literally cut off from the rest of the 68th district.
Lawsuits to force the state to use fairer maps were blocked by the courts, including the state Supreme Court under a 4-3 conservative-led ruling and the U.S. Supreme Court which held in Gill v. Whitford that partisan gerrymanders were a non-justiciable, political question.
The GOP lost in 2022 but still held a supermajority in the legislature
In the most recent election in 2022, Democrats won 53 percent of the statewide popular vote. But in the end, it didn’t matter: Republicans received nearly two-thirds of the state assembly seats—63 out of 99. That’s only one seat less than it held in the previous election. Notably, they received almost 8.25 fewer points of the popular vote than the Democrats had garnered.
It’s the very opposite of how democracy is supposed to work.
And as I discussed above, in 2022 among the eight Congressmembers sent by the state to D.C., six were Republican, even though Democrats won more votes statewide. Had Democrats won these proportionally, that would have natrower the House majority to one after the departure of George Santos and Kevin McCarthy.
Note that the congressional district maps, as opposed to the state legislative maps, have not been redrawn, at least not yet. They are the subject of a new lawsuit recently filed to challenge them.
The long road to new maps
The Wisconsin Democratic Party has been striving for years to rectify this systemic unfairness. To do so, they methodically plotted a course to restore democracy in the state.
Their first priority was to hang onto the governorship in 2022, held by Democrat Tony Evers, so that new maps, should they ever be generated, could get signed into law. Evers won by over three points that year.
The second priority was to flip the state Supreme Court, which was protecting the Republican gerrymanders. In 2023, Justice Janet Protasciewicz defeated her extremist opponent by a whopping 11 points. Republican threats to impeach her fizzled under public pressure.
In December of 2023, the new 4-3 liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down the state legislative maps as unconstitutional, ordering new maps for 2024. They concluded, as is rather obvious, that the maps violate the requirement that the districts consist of “contiguous territory.” Swiss cheese districts are not contiguous.
Importantly, the Court warned that if lawmakers did not produce new legislative maps, it was prepared to draw its own.
Now the 2024 cherry on top. Time was running out for the GOP following the ruling because Evers had vetoed the maps that Republicans had submitted, noting they were still gerrymandered and non-contiguous. Evers had his own maps at the ready, which he presented to the Republicans.
“The Legislature faces two choices,” said Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg), as the Legislature approved the new maps last week. “Either pass the governor’s maps as is or let the liberal majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court gerrymander the status quo.”
They chose option number 1. Evers signed the new maps into law, giving Democrats a real chance at taking back the state assembly in 2024 and the state senate in 2026.
But as the New York Times reported, Republicans intend to take the fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Robin Vos, the GOP speaker, said in a statement that the case “was pre-decided before it was even brought” and remarked, “Sad day for our state when the State Supreme Court just said last year that the existing lines are constitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court will have the last word.”
There may not be five justices, however, even on this Court, willing to rule that state supreme courts do not have the power to interpret the state district map requirements of their own state constitutions.
The new maps
Under Evers’s new maps, an analysis by redistricting experts retained by the court agreed that the party that wins the most statewide votes is likely to take control of the Legislature. And as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported,
The 99 Assembly districts proposed by Evers are about evenly split between Republican and Democratic-leaning districts. Forty-five districts are more Democratic than Republican, and 46 districts are more Republican than Democratic.
That leaves eight districts that are more likely to be a toss-up between Democrats and Republicans.
The state Senate maps tell a similar story.
The state Senate districts drawn by Evers are about evenly split between Republican and Democratic-leaning districts. Fourteen districts out of 33 are Democratic-leaning, while 15 districts are Republican-leaning.
The other four districts are competitive, where either party has a fair chance of winning them.
Note that only half of the Senate seats are up for reelection in the 2024 cycle, however, so Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Ben Wikler laid out that the party’s goal is to flip the GOP-controlled Assembly in 2024, then lay the groundwork to flip the Senate in 2026.
Ever’s decision was not without controversy. Nearly all Democrats opposed the new maps because they wanted the state Supreme Court to pick the maps—and likely create even more favorable ones for them. But Evers stuck to his guns and his principles, creating a truly “purple” set of maps that Republicans could live with, while giving an incentive for Democrats to work hard to win those swing districts. Those very much fairer maps for all might be less likely a target, too, for a skeptical U.S. Supreme Court.
Gov. Evers was effusive about the victory. “It is a new day in Wisconsin, and today is a beautiful day for democracy,” he said at a press conference held in the State Capitol. “Of the 1,869 days I’ve been proud to serve as your governor, few have been as consequential as this one.”
Wisconsin had represented one of the many notorious REDMAP project success stories that turned gerrymandering into an exquisite GOP vote theft...MI, PA, OH, NC, all fell under the REDMAP assault, and are only slowly returning - with the exceptions of OH and NC - into more fair representation on the state and federal level. Dems SORELY need an analogous operation to further right the political maps to avoid more acutely partisan Repub legislatures in states having Dem governors.
The people of Wisconsin deserve a big hug for working in the trenches to get out the vote, which is a big reason for this change. They never gave up. This is a master class in arguing against those who say their vote doesn't matter, especially in local elections.
Local elections are MORE important than national elections. You should vote for your local dog catcher if that comes up as an option. The Republicans will, and they'll vote in somebody who wants to mass euthanize the little fellas.