Elections Do Matter

Elections Do Matter

Our recent state-wide elections brought interesting and hopeful results. Democrats swept the state-wide races and Republicans maintained comfortable, but not veto proof, majorities in both the Assembly and Senate. Hopefully, one of the results will be an end to, if not a tempering of, the one-party rule arrogance that has permeated Wisconsin government since the GOP ascendance in 2010.  

Clearly, Wisconsin voters just elected to move forward with divided government. When power is split between the two parties, no one agenda holds sway. There are only a couple of options. 

The preferable option is for the GOP leaders in the legislature to work with Democratic legislators and the Governor’s administration to find common ground. Polling makes clear that voters want our roads, bridges and other infrastructure items fixed, they want affordable healthcare that covers everybody and they want public education funded adequately. These are problems that transcend party lines and need bi-partisan fixes with which everyone can live. Governor-elect Evers reached out to GOP legislative leaders offering to work with them on these and other pressing agenda items. There has not been a favorable response.

A second, less favorable, option is for the two sides to continue the battle for power and control with the legislature passing bills that Governor-elect Evers cannot sign or fix with the line item veto. The goal here has less to do with actually trying to address real problems with real solutions than it is to make the other side look bad and rack up points to use in the next election cycle. Unfortunately, the GOP’s Assembly Majority Leader Robin Voss and Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald are toying with this option by publicly floating proposals for a lame duck legislative session to pass bills stripping the newly elected governor of certain powers they freely gave when a friendly Scott Walker occupied that office. They follow this path at their peril. Voters will see it as nothing more than a naked power grab and a slap in the face for the new administration. The ultimate outcome with this choice will be a do-nothing government until the next election and that will suit many in the GOP just fine. 

An equally intriguing issue is how the legislative races turned out. Even though Democrats scored a 10-point victory re-electing Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate, and took the rest of the state-wide races with relative ease, they lost legislative races to the GOP in staggering numbers. 

Michael Warren, a UW-Madison student journalist, looked at the numbers and came up with this analysis. 

If we look at the votes cast in all the Wisconsin Assembly Races, Democrats out polled Republicans by about 200,000 votes. 1.3 million Democrats voted in Assembly races but only 1.1 million Republicans did. These translate roughly to Democrats casting 54% of the votes to 46% for Republicans. When we look at the numbers of Assembly seats won, in a fair election, we would expect similar percentages to hold. Instead, Republicans won roughly 63% of the Assembly seats to 36% for Democrats. There is only one way to explain those numbers. Unfair partisan gerrymandering of the Assembly districts in favor of Republicans. 

Gerrymandering involves the drawing of state and federal legislative district lines to give an advantage to one party over the other. It is done in two ways, “packing” and “cracking.” The current legislative districts were drawn by the GOP when it controlled the legislature and governor’s office. They “packed” certain districts with Democrats, making sure they stayed blue, and “cracked” other democratic strongholds into several districts, giving Republicans majorities in multiple districts. 

In this past election, there were 35 democratic seats won. 80% of those races had no Republican candidate to challenge the Democrat. In the Republicans’ 64 seat victories, only 4% were uncontested. Republicans did not bother to run in districts “packed” with Democrats while Democrats ran in many more districts because they contained “cracked” Democratic voting blocs. Of the 68 contested races, 41% had a margin of victory of less than 5,000 votes. Thin victory margins rely upon where the district lines run in “cracked” districts. 

Let us add fairly redrawing the lines of Wisconsin’s state and federal legislative districts after the 2020 census to the list of issues the new Wisconsin split power government must consider. Leaving it to partisans leads to unfair gerrymandered districts that favor those in power. 

Six states, some red, some blue, have instituted independent commission systems to draw fair lines that make districts with roughly equal numbers of voters from each party much more competitive. It is part of the Wisconsin tradition to utilize panels of experts to look at and propose solutions to problems free from partisan political influence. We should consider returning to that approach when tackling redistricting while we have time to get it done fairly and correctly. This is another issue voters care about and demand a fair fix.