Stacking The Deck

It's redistricting time ahead of the 2022 elections, and no state is more obscenly broken in this respect than Wisconsin, where Democrats actually won 200,000 more state legislature votes last year, and Republicans run the state assembly with a 60-38 margin anyway. The 2022 GOP redistricting plan will actually make that even worse.

Republicans who control the Legislature would maintain a large advantage in Assembly races under a redistricting plan they made public late Wednesday.

The release of their proposed congressional and legislative maps propelled the state's redistricting fight into the next stage.

States must draw new maps every 10 years using census data to ensure districts have equal populations. Where the lines go can give one political party a big advantage over the other for a decade.

Republican lawmakers plan to approve their plans as soon as next month, but Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is likely to veto them. That would leave it to the courts to decide how to draw the districts.

Under the plans Republicans released Wednesday, 61 of the Assembly's 99 districts would lean Republican, according to recent voting patterns analyzed by Dave's Redistricting, an online platform that allows the public to review maps.

A small number would have only a slight GOP lean, meaning Democrats would have a shot at winning a few of those 61. But the vast majority of GOP seats would be quite safe for their party. (Republicans would also have a shot at winning a handful of the 38 Democratic-leaning seats.)

Because of the number of GOP-advantaged seats, Republicans would likely continue to hold sizable majorities in the Assembly for years.

 

That 61-38 margin would be the new baseline in a 50-50 election year, and fewer than ten state House districts would be competitive at all, meaning that Democrats would have no chance of regaining control for another decade, and then Republicans would just redraw another 55+ safe districts again in 2031.

It gets even worse when it comes to the state's eight Congressional delegation seats in the US House.

Six of the state's eight congressional districts would have a Republican advantage — four by double digits and two by single digits, according to Dave's Redistricting. The state's remaining two districts — one centered around Milwaukee, the other around Madison — would be overwhelmingly Democratic.

 

Republicans would actually gain a US House seat. In fact, redistricting in the nation as a whole would give Republicans about 15-20 more US House seats across the country, net. 

Which is the point. After this year, with this GOP, state control of most of the country's state legislatures will be impossible to flip for Democrats.

 

Permanent one-party state control.

 

Coming to a state near you...