Wisconsin Shows the Way

Yesterday’s primary election in the Badger State was a defeat for extremism

I’m adjusting to the West Coast time zone and have a busy couple of days in surrogacy land today and tomorrow, but I wanted to drop a quick note about what we saw in Wisconsin on Tuesday, where the state held its primary and democracy had a bit of a triumph.

First, a reminder of how we got here. As I’ve written about before, Wisconsin was the most heavily gerrymandered state in the Union following the 2010 census. The district lines that the GOP legislature drew were so egregious that, despite losing statewide votes to the Democrats in both 2012 and 2018, Republicans held huge majorities in the state legislature. In 2020 and 2022, Democrats won major statewide victories, but the Republicans still won near-supermajorities in the legislature.

It’s the clearest recent example we’ve seen of how democracy can be twisted and the will of the people thwarted through gerrymandering.

Republicans used their power to suppress votes by restricting ballot access and removing election oversight authority from the governor and the attorney general. Meanwhile, a narrowly-controlled Republican state Supreme Court prevented any real political reform from happening.

Local Democrats, led by party chair and hero of democracy Ben Wikler, organized and laid out a plan to take back their state and hold fair elections once again.

First, voters replaced the Republican governor Scott Walker with a Democratic one, Tony Evers, in 2018 and stopped supermajorities from forming by a hair. Republicans in the state legislature responded by promptly moving to strip Gov. Evers of as much power as they could.

Then a previously held conservative seat came open on the state Supreme Court, which had been narrowly split 4-3 against the liberals. Democrats rallied around a progressive replacement, Justice Janet Protasciewicz, who won her election against her extremist opponent by a whopping 11 points in 2023, marking the end of 15 years of Republican control of the state’s highest court.

That allowed a legal challenge to the state’s heavily gerrymandered state districts to proceed, with the result that far fairer maps, drawn up by Governor Evers, went into place in February of this year and were used for the first time in Tuesday’s primary. The maps were graded “A” for fairness by the head of the nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project.

The result? A high turn out primary with extremist GOP incumbents and election deniers losing their seats.

State Reps. Janel Brandtjen and Tim Ramthun, for example, had both pushed to decertify President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. That’s right: Well after the election was over, they had sought to see it completely undone. Brandtjen’s efforts had even earned her an endorsement from Donald Trump. But both Brandtjen and Ramthun lost their primaries on Tuesday. In Brandtjen’s case, she was losing by 24 points with 86 percent of the votes counts.

Turns out, voters don’t much like weird extremists.

All 99 seats of the Wisconsin Assembly and half of the Senate seats are up in November. Wisconsin voters will have a chance to have their ballots count fairly for the first time in a general election in over 12 years. And as neighboring Michigan showed, when you fix the maps, you can fix democracy.

Have a great day!

Jay