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Tony Evers narrowly defeated three-term incumbent Gov. Scott Walker by 30,500 votes on Nov. 6. In 2016, Wisconsin went for Donald Trump by a margin of 23,000 votes. The state has sent a progressive and a tea partier to the U.S. Senate — back-to-back, twice. Wisconsin is a purple state. Yet, the state Assembly is a sea of red. That’s what voters want, according to Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.
“There’s no doubt about it that the voters across Wisconsin affirmed our record, the record of our party, and the agenda that we have put forward over the past eight years,” Vos (R-Rochester) told the Assembly Republican Caucus on Nov. 12. “Some will say, the only reason that we are here is because of redistricting. That is a faulty premise.... We are the ones that were given a mandate to govern.”
Despite Democrats winning every statewide office on the ballot and receiving 200,000 more total votes, Republicans lost just one seat in Wisconsin’s lower house this cycle. And that victory was by a razor-thin 153 votes. Democrats netted 1.3 million votes for Assembly, 54 percent statewide. Even so, Vos will return to the Capitol in 2019 with Republicans holding 63 of 99 seats in the Assembly, a nearly two-thirds majority.
Vos likes to frame it this way: If you discount uncontested races — a third of the entire Assembly — Republicans won 58 percent of the vote.
“That seems like a mandate to me,” Vos told his caucus. “What do you think?”
Democratic minority leader Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) doesn’t see it that way. He says his party is “competing on the most uneven playing field in the United States” because Republicans have “disenfranchised thousands of Democrats.”
“The biggest obstacle remains gerrymandering. There are only a handful of districts that are remotely competitive. That’s why a district court ruled the [legislative] maps unconstitutional and why we still have a case before that court,” says Hintz, referring to Gill v. Whitford which the U.S. Supreme Court sent back to the lower federal court for reargument. “Gerrymandering doesn’t just have an impact on the outcome. It has an impact on being able to recruit candidates. There aren’t a lot of people willing to run when they know they don’t have a shot.”
Hintz says the current maps “crack” Milwaukee County in a way that dilutes true representation of the largest — and solidly liberal — county in Wisconsin.
“If you had districts drawn along community lines or contiguous with existing lines the way you’re supposed to, you’d have 16 representatives for Milwaukee County. The way it’s cracked, under redistricting, you have 21 people who have a piece of Milwaukee County,” says Hintz. “If it was drawn normally, we’d have 14 or 15 [Democrats] in Milwaukee County. The way it’s cracked, we had 10 and now we have 11.”
Hintz admits that even if district lines were drawn by a court or a bipartisan commission, Democrats probably wouldn’t have a majority in the Assembly.
“If we had fair maps — considering the current demographic distribution — I don’t know that we’d have a majority,” says Hintz. “I think we’d be somewhere in the mid-40s.”
If Democrats had 45 seats in the Assembly, the GOP would have a 55 percent majority.
That oddly jibes with how Republican Party of Wisconsin spokesperson Alec Zimmerman dissects the election. He attributes Evers’ success to huge turnouts in Dane and Milwaukee counties. In an email, Zimmerman writes that if you don’t count Dane or Milwaukee, Walker would have won with 55 percent of the vote.
“Democrats continue to gloss over their fundamental flaw in state Senate and Assembly races: candidates matter,” Zimmerman writes in an email. “Local candidates who have strong ties to their community that run on track records of success and a message of delivering results for hard working families will always have a leg up over candidates who are pandering to a far-left base in Madison.”
However you add it up, Republicans will have a 64 percent majority when Evers is sworn in as governor — not 55 or 58 percent.
UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner says if the GOP supermajority in the Assembly seems lopsided, “that’s probably why there is a lawsuit.”
“A court-drawn map or bipartisan commission map certainly wouldn’t promise a Democratic majority,” Wagner says. “But it would be far more likely to have a more representative result given the partisan makeup of the state. Wisconsin is very competitive. That we know.”
An Assembly that more accurately represents the electorate may be in the future — Democrats will just have to wait four years. With Evers as governor, Republicans won’t have complete control of the redistricting process when new lines are drawn in 2021. In past divided governments, the courts ultimately drew the district lines.
“The hard part for us is the maps probably don’t change for 2020. I’ve talked to a lot of our potential candidates who said they are interested in running. They just want to run when there are fair maps again,” Hintz says. “But with Tony Evers winning, we at least know there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
