IT WAS SIX WEEKS before the November election, and in his snug campaign office in suburban Milwaukee, located in a shopping plaza between a dentist and an acupuncturist, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers scanned the brightly colored maps that hung on the walls. They depicted the tortuously shaped legislative districts drawn in a state regarded as one of the most gerrymandered in the nation. “Who in their right minds could’ve made them up?” Evers asked.
The answer: Republicans in the state legislature. Evers saw firsthand the impact of GOP control of the redistricting process when he ran for governor in 2018. That year, Democrats swept all four statewide races and won 53 percent of votes cast for the state Assembly, but the party retained just 36 percent of seats in the chamber. “There’s something wrong with that picture,” Evers said, after polishing off a Five Guys burger for lunch.
Evers, 71, is a mild-mannered, grandfatherly figure who could not be more old-school Wisconsin. He likes polka, the card game euchre, and Egg McMuffins—despite being “so irritated at McDonald’s” for no longer offering breakfast after 10:30 a.m. “He’s got more of a Clark Kent vibe than a Superman vibe,” Barack Obama joked when he campaigned for Evers in Milwaukee a week before the election.
After serving as the state’s school superintendent for nearly a decade, Evers ran against then-Gov. Scott Walker on meat-and-potato issues; his signature phrase on the campaign trail was “fix the damn roads.” But in his reelection campaign in 2022, he faced a more existential battle: to preserve what’s left of democracy in the state.
If the redistricting maps drawn in secret by Republican staffers and passed by the GOP-controlled legislature in 2011 were unfair, the maps adopted by Republicans in 2021, over Evers’ objections, were even more one-sided. As a result, the number of GOP-leaning seats increased to 63 out of 99 in the state Assembly and to 23 out of 33 in the state Senate. That meant that—according to calculations by Marquette University Law School research fellow John Johnson—Democrats would have to win the 2022 statewide vote by 12 points just to get to 50 seats in the Assembly, while Republicans could garner a majority with only 44 percent of the vote.
At the state GOP convention back in May, held at a Marriott in suburban Madison, GOP Assembly leader Robin Vos candidly laid out his plan for total domination of state politics. His top priority, he said, was defeating Evers. But short of that, if Republicans picked up one more seat in the Senate and five in the Assembly, Vos explained, that would give them a two-thirds supermajority that would “make Tony Evers irrelevant.”
That supermajority would have given legislative Republicans unfettered authority to override Evers’ vetoes and the power to implement an extreme and unpopular agenda on issues ranging from guns to education to abortion—including, potentially, the ability to overturn election results. “If Republicans get supermajorities in the state legislature,” Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler warned before the election, “it’s a threat to the foundations of American democracy.”
On November 8,
