Images via State of Wisconsin Legislative Technology Services Bureau
2023 Wisconsin legislative maps
2023 Wisconsin legislative maps
With democracy on the ballot everywhere in the rematch between President Biden and former President Trump criminally indicted for his violent attempt to overthrow Biden’s election, Wisconsin’s restoration of democracy has become a model for the nation.
For the first time in 15 years, the votes cast by the majority of Wisconsin voters for state legislators in November will determine the state laws the legislature will pass affecting their lives.
That’s how democracy is supposed to work, of course, but it hasn’t happened in Wisconsin for a decade and a half. In 2011, a partisan state Supreme Court approved corruptly gerrymandered Republican voting maps that elect lopsided Republican majorities even when Democratic candidates win more votes than Republicans.
The entire nation is now facing the same challenge to democracy with the Trumped-up rightwing U.S. Supreme Court destroying a half-century of constitutional rights for women to make their own decisions about their lives while allowing states to create more voting restrictions for Black and Brown Americans.
Voter Turn Out
Wisconsin’s experience suggests that when politicians go too far in destroying fair elections and equal rights for all Americans, voters will turn out in large numbers in election after election to restore democracy.
That happened in 2018 two years after the state voted for Trump, in 2020 when it voted for Biden and in 2023 when it solidified a new pro-democracy majority on the state supreme court. Justices Rebecca Dallet, Jill Karofsky and Janet Protasiewicz won double-digit victories defeating rightwing opponents in what were previously low-turnout spring elections.
The pro-democracy election momentum bodes well for the reelection of Biden and Sen. Tammy Baldwin in November and for Democrats winning control of the Wisconsin Assembly for the first time since President Obama’s victory in 2008.
Despite Gov. Tony Evers’s election and reelection victories in 2018 and 2022, it will take longer for Democrats to win the state senate in a fair election. Only half of the 33 senate seats dominated by Republicans under the corrupt old maps are on the ballot this year. The other half will be running for reelection in 2026.
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New Maps
The new voter maps created by Evers were supported by Republican legislators because they feared election experts advising the new supreme court might treat them even worse. The new maps appear to produce closely divided elections in both the assembly and senate.
That seems about right in a politically divided state where most statewide elections are decided by a percentage point or two. It also perfectly illustrates the radical difference between the two parties in their support for democracy.
Democrats have never tried to prevent Republicans from voting. But Republicans had no qualms about using their control of redistricting after the 2010 and 2020 censuses to draw totally dishonest voting districts guaranteeing Republicans whopping two-thirds majorities in the Assembly and Senate leaving Democrats with little voice at all in the legislature.
A fair election to the legislature has finally become a reality in Wisconsin and Democratic party chair Ben Wikler’s tireless political activists who created those record turnouts in court elections are working flat out to do it again in November.
They should be joined by the majority of Wisconsin voters left unrepresented ever since 2020 by the Republican legislature wasting four years and millions of tax dollars trying to become the only state in the nation to throw out its electoral votes electing President Biden. That political embarrassment shattered the unified rightwing corruption on the Wisconsin Supreme Court even before Justice Protasiewicz’s election last year created a new majority.
Election Results
Justice Brian Hagedorn, Gov. Scott Walker’s legal counsel and a proud member of the Federalist Society providing Trump’s list of appointees to Supreme Court pledging to overturn Roe v. Wade, refused to vote with his other rightwing court colleagues to throw out more than 1.6 million votes for Biden in response to a lawsuit from Trump supporters. Instead, Hagedorn wrote the majority opinion supporting the election results that had been recounted and certified as accurate.
Because both Gov. Evers and the state legislature approved the new voting maps, it removes the possibility Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos was counting on Trump’s corrupt U.S. Supreme Court supermajority stepping in to prevent fair elections in Wisconsin.
What can Republicans depend on anymore to stop democracy from getting a foothold in America again? Vos might not even make it through the election if Democrats win the assembly.The next thing you know senate Republicans will find themselves negotiating with assembly Democrats to prevent the climate crisis from destroying human life on the planet and mass murderers from blowing away first graders.
Equal rights allowing women to make decisions about their own bodies, their own health care, their own families and their own lives will reach the state supreme court any day now. Life as Republicans have known it in Wisconsin is over.
