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When liberal Milwaukee judge Janet Protasiewicz was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April of last year, Democrats had zero chance of winning a majority in either the state senate or the assembly.
Protasiewicz’s investiture last August handed liberals a 4-3 majority on the court, a path to adopting fair legislative maps, and a decent chance for Democrats to take back the state legislature for the first time in thirteen years.
On December 22, the liberal majority on the court ruled that Wisconsin’s legislative maps were indeed unconstitutional. Interested parties, including the governor, legislative caucuses, and interest groups, submitted proposed maps to the high court at its request. When it became obvious that the court would choose a Democratic-leaning map, Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos decided to adopt Democratic Governor Tony Evers’s proposed maps as a legislative bill.
On February 19, Evers called Vos’s bluff and signed the legislation. At the signing, the governor declared, “Today is a victory, not for me or any political party, but for our state and for the people of Wisconsin, who’ve spent a decade demanding more and demanding better of us as elected officials . . . . The people should get to choose their elected officials, not the other way around.”
Wisconsin now has relatively fair electoral maps for the first time in more than a decade. But how did we get here?
In 2010, the Republican Party of Wisconsin was riding high. Its members had just won the governorship and flipped both houses of the state legislature. Combined with taking two Democratic seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and defeating U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, a liberal icon, the state’s Republican Party did better than any other state party in the red wave of 2010’s midterm elections.
But by the following summer, the political winds had shifted. The Democrats had prevailed in two state senate recall elections, leaving them one seat shy of a majority. A normal politician might have trimmed the sails a bit, but not the archconservative governor at the time, Scott Walker, or the party’s legislative leaders, two brothers named Scott and Jeff Fitzgerald, who held the top posts in the state senate and the assembly, respectively. To them, the setbacks in the recall elections were simply collateral damage.
Two weeks after the August 9, 2011, recall election, new legislative maps went into effect, resulting in some of the most gerrymandered districts in the country. (They were surpassed only by their successor, the maps redrawn by Republicans in 2020.) For the next thirteen years, Walker and Republican state lawmakers had secured their grip on the levers of power in Madison.
My introduction to Vos occurred at an ethics training session when he was a freshman state legislator. He sat in the front row and asked questions with two apparent goals: to show the rest of the room how smart he was and to see how far he could push the bounds of ethical conduct without breaking the law.
Evers, first elected in 2018, well understood Vos’s desire for external validation. He once said that Vos was one of the smartest people he’d ever met. That is a remarkable comment by itself, to say nothing of the fact that it came from a former teacher, who no doubt had called out a smart aleck or two in his time.
Evers was also well aware of Vos’s power-wielding prowess, which pushed the ethical envelope more often than not. Evers had borne the brunt of the speaker’s handiwork, most notably the lame-duck laws of 2018 that curbed long-established executive prerogatives or the COVID-19 public health rules in 2020 and 2021 that Vos and his state supreme court stymied in the face of widespread sickness and death.
Of all the goals of Vos’s wheeling and dealing, maintaining his majority in Wisconsin’s assembly has been the fundamental one, and the sure way to do so was by unprecedented gerrymandering.
Vos and other Republican leaders may wag their finger at Democrats for doing likewise when they were in power. But nothing measures up to what the current Republican Party inflicted on the body politic during the last two censuses.
Assembly Majority Leader and state Representative Tyler August recently told WisPolitics.com, “The geography of Wisconsin alone gives Republicans an electoral advantage in legislative districts.” He is not wrong; in fact, it is a well-documented argument. Craig Gilbert, a long-time political reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, attributed Republican strength in 2014—when they were crushing Democrats in legislative contests—in part to political geography; Wisconsin cities were becoming bluer, and rural areas redder.
That leads to the practical difficulty of writing maps that benefit Democrats in Wisconsin. Democratic votes are heavily concentrated in two cities: Madison and Milwaukee. The combined population is about 800,000, or approximately 15 percent of the state’s total population. But those two cities claim only 200 square miles, or less than three-tenths of 1 percent of the state’s total landmass.
Geography and demography certainly give Republicans an edge when drawing up maps, but they don’t come anywhere close to explaining the severity of the gerrymandering clearly favoring one party over the other.
It doesn’t take an assembly majority leader, and certainly not a rocket scientist, to understand that Republicans would have a far easier time writing Republican-leaning maps than Democrats would. A combination of the intoxicating power inherent in the assembly speakership and the senate majority leadership, with an assist from the state judiciary, also means Republicans would likely exploit this advantage to its fullest.
Neither the assembly nor the senate would disappoint.
Related to geography is the issue of demography. Highly educated voters have been congregating in larger cities and suburbs. At the same time, those same voters have been increasingly voting Democratic.
The proof is in the ale froth. Democrats have made gains in cities, and the hard-right edge associated with Milwaukee’s suburbs is not so sharp anymore. In 2012, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney won Waukesha County, the largest of the so-called WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) that encircle the city of Milwaukee, by thirty-five points. In 2016, Donald Trump carried it by twenty-seven points. In 2020, he won it by twenty-one points.
Geography and demography certainly give Republicans an edge when drawing up maps, but they don’t come anywhere close to explaining the severity of the gerrymandering clearly favoring one party over the other.
In the wake of 2011 gerrymandering, former state representative and Capital Times columnist Spencer Black, Democrat of Madison, pointed out that if one were to add up all the votes for assembly Democrats and Republicans, you would have rough parity. But instead, those votes are scrambled around the state in a game of ninety-nine-card monte. “Despite the fact that Republicans only received 47 percent of the statewide vote, they ended up with more than 60 percent of the seats in the state assembly,” Black wrote in 2015.
That is the basis of the argument of the petitioners in the landmark 2018 redistricting case, Gill v. Whitford. Sachin Chheda, who served as director of the Fair Elections Project and was a key organizer for the Whitford lawsuit, told The Progressive, “The case argued simply that the U.S. Constitution required legislative district maps that at least tried to reflect the will of the voting public.”
Chheda’s strategy was akin to what the organization Law Forward brought before the Wisconsin Supreme Court in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission. Their petition contends that the maps represent an “extreme partisan gerrymander” because they violate free speech. The districts violate the state’s “guarantee of equality” by treating voters differently. And the maps “violate the promise of a free government found in the Wisconsin constitution.” That’s quite the indictment.
For the first half of the twentieth century, members of the Wisconsin Assembly looked to the speaker as a statesman whose priority was maintaining the integrity of the body. He was speaker not just for Democrats, Republicans, or, in the early twentieth century, Progressives, but for all members.
Today, the integrity of the assembly is at stake, to say nothing of the state of democracy in Wisconsin. When Vos signaled a constitutional crisis by threatening to impeach Protasiewicz in the summer of 2023, thereby neutralizing the liberal majority, it brought official Madison to its knees. Thankfully, pleading by Republicans swayed Vos, and a well-organized Democratic Party brought the speaker to heel. For now.
Yet even the most Democratic-friendly map will not give Democrats a majority. Democrats still have some distance to go to grab the levers of power in the assembly and the senate. The recently adopted maps lean Republican. An analysis conducted by John Johnson of Marquette University Law School reveals a 53-46 GOP margin in the assembly and a 16-17 Democratic-Republican split in the state senate.
What made the state impervious to the ill effects of redistricting or any other partisan maneuvering in the early and mid-twentieth century were the durable political coalitions that the progressive movement and the early modern-day Democratic Party cobbled together.
The secret to their success was the ability of reform-minded legislators to bring together the socialists of the cities with the progressive farmers of the countryside. Such legislators embraced a pure ideology that ensured clean, participatory government and economic fairness. Indeed, it was the Wisconsin legislature that spawned a “little New Deal” in 1930.
Former director of the Legislative Reference Library and University of Wisconsin professor Edwin E. Witte was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to help draft the federal Social Security Act of 1935. The 1911 Wisconsin legislature passed a battery of progressive legislation that included factory safety measures, child labor laws, and a statewide parks system.
This is all to say that redistricting is not the ointment to salve the wounds that Democrats have endured for the last six election cycles. The majority is not just a court ruling away.
Democrats must look to history not for nostalgia but for a blueprint on how to campaign and govern. The Democratic Party has been first and foremost an economic coalition—papermakers and machinists in the cities, office clerks in the suburbs, and farm hands in the country. An economic agenda that truly speaks to the needs of working families is essential. Conservative and liberal voters alike need good schools for their kids, safe communities to live in, and quality, accessible health care to survive.
Even better, those votes are ripe for the picking because once, not too long ago, they were in the Democratic fold. According to the study “Factory Towns” by two left-of-center organizations, American Family Voices and 21st Century Democrats, Democrats bled votes predominately in small to medium-sized communities built around manufacturing economies. Between 2012 and 2020, the GOP flipped less than 200,000 votes in these communities. As neither party has won the state by more than 1 percent in the last two presidential elections, chipping away just a small percentage of these vote totals would secure a victory for Democrats in the Dairy State.
What made the state impervious to the ill effects of redistricting or any other partisan maneuvering in the early and mid-twentieth century were the durable political coalitions that the progressive movement and the early modern-day Democratic Party cobbled together.
With Democratic state party Chair Ben Wikler—dubbed “the most important Democrat in America” by The Atlantic—in the driver’s seat, Democrats are in the pole position to take advantage of newfound momentum from newly drawn districts. Candidate recruitment in the state legislature over the past decade and a half has been strong. Democrats are holding their own in fundraising, having raised $17 million for the 2022 election cycle. The potential for more fundraising success is there, too; Evers, along with Wikler, dominated the 2022 gubernatorial contest, outraising Republican and conservative-aligned groups by $12 million.
The halcyon days of “Fighting Bob” LaFollette’s Wisconsin—where candidates were spendthrifts and super PACs did not exist—are long gone. But that does not mean Wisconsin Democrats cannot look to their heritage for inspiration to help working families improve their lives, rebuild a progressive coalition, and win elections.