The country’s purplest state can now do its purple thing. The newly liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court tossed the state’s very Republican-friendly legislative maps in December 2023. In their place, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and GOP lawmakers approved new districts that aren’t much of a slobbery love note to either party. Instead of what had been a sizable baked-in advantage for the GOP, the new maps give each party roughly an equal shot at controlling the state Assembly and state Senate, according to projections from John D. Johnson, a Marquette University political data guru. The obit has been written for Mander, Gerry.
This new age comes after a decade-plus of GOP dominance of both houses thanks to maps passed by Gov. Scott Walker and his GOP legislative allies in 2011.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
Whether the new maps fundamentally transform either party’s chances in the November races for president and U.S. Senate is anyone’s guess. The new maps apply to state-level races, which appear lower on the ballot than the marquee federal matchups. “The normal situation is that coattails flow down,” says Kenneth Mayer, a UW-Madison political science professor and academic expert on redistricting. “You have a popular top-of-the-ticket candidate, and the lower level races will track that. I haven’t seen evidence that the coattails will flow up.”
But could they?
The new maps present Democrats with what would seem to be a tantalizing possibility: more contested state-level races give Democratic voters more reason to come out. Those voters – some of whom may have sat out previous elections due to the unlikelihood of their local candidates winning – more than likely would punch the ticket for Democrats up and down the ballot. Any new voters matter to an outsized degree in such a tightly contested state, where the last two presidential races were decided by about 20,000 votes, a minuscule fraction of the state’s roughly 3.3 million voters.
Democrats will run a candidate in all 16 state Senate races this year. In previous cycles, they regularly ceded a handful of Senate seats, with no Democrat even bothering to run. The new maps mean it’s very likely Democrats will significantly cut into – but not completely erase – Republicans’ current 22-11 advantage, Mayer says.
In the Assembly, where Republicans have a 64-35 advantage, all 99 seats are up for election. Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has consistently said it’s candidate quality, not the Republican-made maps, that explain the lopsided GOP edge.
But under the new maps, Democrats have a legitimate chance of control of the chamber, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis that lists 45 seats as Democratic-leaning and 46 as Republican-leaning. Eight are too close to call. Toss-ups. Jump balls.
“My back-of-the-envelope calculation is that Democrats should increase the number of seats they have in the Assembly from the mid 30s to the high 40s,” says Mayer, who’s done consulting work for Democratic-aligned groups in redistricting court cases. “But it won’t remotely surprise me if they wind up with 45 to 48 seats, and that would be a major change. ”
One thing is for sure: the new maps will bring floods of new money to state races. The national Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee has given $24,000 last year and this year toward Wisconsin legislative races, the max allowed under campaign finance laws. The state Democratic Party will spend at least $7 million advertising in five key State Senate races. On the other side, the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national group that funnels money to state races, has Wisconsin among its top eight states for funding in 2024. The group reported a record $47 million total national haul in the first quarter of the year but hasn’t yet specified how much it will flow here.
“It would not surprise me that state Republicans, recognizing that they now are more likely to have a fight on their hands, will see their campaign finance activity also go up,” Mayer says. “I think we’re going to see a really significant jump on both sides.”
