The 2018 midterm election brought significant change to Wisconsin politics. Yet the results in legislative and congressional races prompted a separate debate: whether the composition of elected bodies reflected the statewide vote and whether district boundaries had limited meaningful competition.
Despite the fact that 54 percent of Wisconsin voters voted for Democratic candidates for the State Assembly, Democrats held only 36 of 99 seats.
Only one incumbent in the Wisconsin Legislature lost that November. In the 99-seat Assembly, every incumbent won and only one seat changed partisan hands. All incumbents in the state’s eight congressional districts were also reelected, and no challenger came within 10 percentage points of winning.
Two decades earlier, six of nine Wisconsin congressional districts had been regarded as competitive. By the time of the election discussed here, the commentary argued that none of the state’s congressional districts offered comparable competition.
Taxpayers foot the bill for the legal defense
The central question was how Wisconsin could produce such a wide gap between statewide votes and legislative seats. The commentary attributed the result to the Republican-led redistricting process undertaken in 2011 and described those maps as an extreme partisan gerrymander.
Wisconsin taxpayers were also paying for outside legal representation to defend the maps in court. The article objected to the use of public money for that purpose and argued that voters had not meaningfully consented to the expense.
At the time, a contract had been disclosed to pay a Chicago law firm $850,000 to defend the 2011 maps in a planned federal trial. According to the commentary, that brought the total taxpayer burden associated with the maps’ legal defense close to $4 million.
A call for nonpartisan redistricting
Reform advocates supported transferring the map-drawing responsibility to a nonpartisan body. The proposal discussed here would have assigned a major role to Wisconsin’s nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau and was modeled in part on the process used in Iowa.
The article cited a Marquette University Law School poll that found broad support for a nonpartisan approach across party affiliations.
“Seventy-two percent of voters say they prefer redistricting of legislative and congressional districts to be done by a nonpartisan commission, while 18 percent prefer redistricting be done by the legislature and governor.”
The poll summary cited in the original commentary reported support among 63 percent of Republicans including leaners, 83 percent of Democrats including leaners and 76 percent of independents. Those historical poll findings describe opinions measured at that time and should not be read as current polling.
What the commentary asked citizens to do
The piece encouraged readers to contact state legislators, ask them to support nonpartisan redistricting legislation and scrutinize additional public spending on the defense of the 2011 maps. It also urged state officials to ensure that the Legislative Reference Bureau had the resources needed to prepare for the next redistricting cycle.
Its broader argument was that sustained public attention could turn wide support for fair maps into a durable change in the redistricting process. The article closed by asking voters not to abandon that effort and to keep pressing elected representatives for a system in which district boundaries do not predetermine political outcomes.
