Make Wisconsin a Democracy Again
Many Republican legislators lost their job in the 2018 blue-wave midterm that swept Democrats into the majority in the U.S. House.
But not in Wisconsin. There, Republicans celebrated the fourth straight election in which they maintained close to a two-thirds majority in the state assembly, despite winning about 200,000 fewer votes and losing every statewide race. Those extra 200,000 votes won precisely one additional assembly seat for the Democrats. Since then, their control of the state legislature has remained unthreatened.
How is that possible? After Democrats got wiped out in the 2010 midterms, Republicans —ensuring that in a state more or less evenly divided politically, the GOP would maintain its grip on power regardless of how the, according to one expert—just to get a bare majority of 50 seats in the assembly, whereas Republicans could do so by winning only 44 percent of the vote. The U.S. Supreme Court has fueled a on gerrymandering by invalidating every voter protection that comes before it, but even in today’s grim landscape, the Badger State is one of the standouts.
