Wisconsin gerrymandering 2.0 - how WisGOPs want to rig it even more

This week, the Wisconsin GOP Legislature released their preliminary maps for the 2020s. Given that the WisGOPs have already passed a resolution that the gerrymandered maps of 2010s would be the basis for these new maps, it is no surprise that these new maps are gerrymandering 2.0.

Under the plans Republicans released Wednesday, 61 of the Assembly's 99 districts would lean Republican, according to recent voting patterns analyzed by Dave's Redistricting, an online platform that allows the public to review maps.

A small number would have only a slight GOP lean, meaning Democrats would have a shot at winning a few of those 61. But the vast majority of GOP seats would be quite safe for their party. (Republicans would also have a shot at winning a handful of the 38 Democratic-leaning seats.)

The new maps would include 62 Assembly districts that are more Republican than the state as a whole. That would keep in place the same dynamic that was created when Republicans drew the current maps a decade ago.

Few Assembly districts would be highly competitive. Eighty-one of them would have double-digit leans for one party over the other. The remaining 18 would have single-digit leans.

Here's what the WisGOP Legislative maps looks like. The black lines are Senate districts and the purple lines show the 3 Assembly districts within those Senate districts

But just because the WisGOPs used the 2010s maps as a basis, it doesn’t mean they didn’t use 2020s Census count to mess with the maps to help their chances even more. Wispolitics goes over some of these key changes.

Under the current maps, Biden won 37 Assembly districts as he took the statewide contest by more than 20,000 votes. Under the proposed lines, he would’ve won 35, according to a review of data posted by the Campaign Legal Center. The group describes itself as a nonpartisan organization that “advances democracy through law at the federal, state and local levels.”

Both the existing Senate map and the one proposed yesterday have 11 Biden districts.

Still, the GOP proposal would make two suburban Milwaukee seats significantly better for Republicans.

Biden won the 5th SD by 9,455 votes under the current lines, according to a WisPolitics.com analysis of presidential vote by district. Under the proposed map, he would’ve won the seat represented by Sen. Dale Kooyenga, R-Brookfield, by about 570 votes.

Biden lost the suburban Milwaukee 8th SD by 167 votes. He would’ve lost the proposed 8th by about 5,900 votes. The seat is now represented by Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills.

This is due to the population losses in the City of Milwaukee, which required the MKE-based 3rd, 4th, and 6th districts to take up more land. On a related note, Gerrymander 2.0 does maintain 2 majority-Black Senate districts, adds 1 new Hispanic-majority district (due to Hispanics becoming more of the population of the near South Side of Milwaukee), and has 9 majority-minority Assembly districts (8 in Milwaukee and 1 in Racine).

While that allows for sufficient majority-minority districts to comply with what remains of the Voting Rights Act, it also means that more of these Dem-leaning voters are packed together into the same districts. And that seems to be a trend throughout this new gerrymander – GOPs are trying to protect what they have and make now-competitive districts safer for Republicans.

To give you a visual, here's the current Milwaukee-area Senate map.

And here's Gerrymander 2.0 for the 2020s.

The way the eastern half of Tosa is cut out of Senate District 5 and moved to Senate district 6/Assembly district 18 is a good example of this creative map-making (although it's a nice admission that the city I graduated HS from is now a blue place that GOPs can't win in). Conversely, the WisGOPs moved two entire Assembly districts in SD-5 into Wauesha County vs splitting them like they did in the 2010s (because they ended up losing 2 of those Assembly districts in 2020). They also merged the blue-voting Milwaukee suburbs of Whitefish Bay and Brown Deer into 1 district, instead of having them in separate districts like they are now, while pushing all of Glendale into a district with Shorewood and majority-Black areas of Milwaukee near I-43.

There are some other eye-rolling aspects of these GOP maps, mostly in that they divide up smaller cities when there is no legitimate need to do so. Sheboygan is still split between two Assembly districts, and so are the college towns of Whitewater and River Falls. Not surprisingly, combining all residents into one district in all of these cities would mean that one of those districts either becomes Dem-leaning, or at least much more competitive.

The WisGOPs' Congressional map looks benign when you first see it.

But that also has city-splitting that is both lame and gerrymandered. In the 3rd district (an open seat that will be pivotal for control of the House), the City of Baraboo (population 12,000) is cut right down the middle. And while the 3rd loses the “pitchfork” where Stevens Point was shoved into it in the 2010s, Point is now pitchforked into the 7th district up North. WI-7 is also split off from Plover, which would now in the Green Bay-based 8th district, while District 8 loses part of the Appleton area because of…reasons.

None of that had to be done. When I drew up the Wisconsin Congressional map, I didn't have WI-3 be part of the Minneapolis media market, didn't go as far into Central Wisconsin put all of Sauk County and the two counties south of it into WI-3. Then I moved Mark Pocan's WI-2 district to the east, which allowed for WI-5 to be almost entirely a WOW-County district. I also put Stevens Point in Glenn Grothman's WI-6, which made WI-8 have less land area and more of the Fox Cities region included (Neenah-Menasha in particular).

But if the WisGOPs used my map vs the Gerrymandering 2.0, the GOP advantage in WI-3 (using the 2020 presidential election as a basis) shrinks from GOP +5 to GOP +7, and the race would likely get more attention from the Madison media market. So there you go.

Back to the State Legislature, I note that the WisGOPs pulled a nice little trick to try to shore up the Green Bay area. They stretched the 89th Assembly district from Marinette to the GB suburb of Howard and western edge of Green Bay itself. This lets them move the (safe Dem) 90th district in Titletown further east, and allow the increasingly competitive 88th district to go further into the country and become more red.

Wonder if that was a deal to encourage current 88th Rep John (Wacko) Macco to drop his campaign for Governor?

I also note that the Senate districts are drawn in such a way that the 1st has that odd hook that stretches into De Pere while going up to Door County and over into the Appleton suburbs, but the 30th is basically split 50-50 between the GB metro and the countryside.

In addition, a couple districts in the Northwest corner of the state represented by Democrats got their boundaries moved around, despite seeing little change in population. Here are the 73rd and 74th Districts as they stand today.

And here it is under Gerrymander 2.0.

Note how the 74th cuts further west into territory that was previously the 73rd? And how the WiGOPs make up for this by having the 73rd hug the St. Croix River in (GOP-voting) Burnett County? Doing this also takes the Town of Lac du Flambeau in Vilas County (and the associated Indian Reservation) out of the 74th Assembly/25th Senate district, and puts it into the strongly red 34th Assembly/12th Senate district. Which makes a difference when you realize that Joe Biden got more than 60% of the vote in the Town of Lac du Flambeau

The result? Those 2 Assembly districts and the 25th Senate district held by Janet Bewley are now GOP-leaning as well.

Look, rigging the game is who the WisGOPs are, and will always be. We just need to be able to point out the arbitrary choices being made on top of the already-egregious gerrymander that we’ve been living under since 2011, and hope we can get the courts to at least make these districts reasonable enough so that if the voters want Republicans out of power (like they did in 2018), it will actually happen in this decade.