The Assembly maps - any of these are better, but some are better than others

Wanted to follow up from my breakdown of the maps submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court for the Wisconsin State Senate, and apply the same work to the Assembly maps.

First, I want to bring back Marquette Professor John Johnson's breakdown of these maps, which uses district-level results from 2012-2022 to project outcomes for 2022. That baseline is somewhere around 50-50 to a 1-2 point GOP lean.

I am going to throw out the Legislative Republicans' map, because they really didn't try to change their current gerrymander. With the rest, you can see that all maps make it at least somewhat more competitive than anything WisGOP has drawn up, and should make Robbin' Vos at least a little more nervous about losing his only reason to exist.

With this in mind, let's look at the six legitimate maps, as well as one I've drawn up to try to increase both competitiveness and compactness. Because of the smaller size of Assembly districts, I'm going to show both the statewide and Milwaukee-area maps so you can better see the differences.

We'll start with the maps Governor Evers submitted to the State Supreme Court.

Next we go onto the maps from the Law Forward litigants who got the current gerrymander struck down.

Now let's look at Professor Petering from UW-Milwaukee, who worked on having the best scores for compactness, and in matching the statewide votes.

Here are the maps the State Senate Democrats sent in for the other chamber.

Here are the only legitimate GOP maps, from the Bradley Boys at WILL.

The last maps submitted to SCOWIS came from a group of mathematicians that used computers to draw maps to match several criteria.

And here's what I got.

I'm going to use a slightly different baseline from Johnson's, where I think Democratic Governor Evers' 3.5% win in November 2022 should be about where we assume the state is falling these days. Just like we did with the Senate, let's see what we get using that outcome and Johnson's "tipping point" metric.

WIS ASSEMBLY MAPS
Evers map 50-49 Dem, Tipping point GOP +3.3%
Law Forward 50-49 Dem, Tipping point GOP +2.8%
Petering 53-46 Dem, Tipping point GOP +0.1%
Senate Dems 50-49 GOP, Tipping point GOP +3.6%
WILL map 53-46 GOP, Tipping point GOP +8.8%
Mathematicians 51-48 Dem, Tipping point, GOP +1.4%
My 50-50 map 54-45 GOP, Tipping point GOP +6.5%

Mostly a toss-up for control, outside of Petering's Dem-leaning results and the GOP lean for myself and WILL. Yes, I'm surprised that my map has more GOP seats in this situation than WILL's, but notice that WILL requires Dems to win by an extra 2.3% to take control, because I have many more close, competitive districts. That's another way to gerrymander, by giving up the size of the majority, but making it more durable , and able to withstand the will (pun intended) of the voters. Tricky stuff, Bradley Boys!

The last stat I want to give regards minority representation, because that is where the US Supreme Court jumped in last time, on the claim that the maps that originally passed the Wisconsin Supreme Court's muster gave too many seats to Black people in Milwaukee (I wish I was kidding). The SCOTUS majority claimed 7 majority-Black districts in Milwaukee were too many, so let's see what we have for majority-minority representation.

WIS ASSEMBLY MAPS
Evers map 5 majority Black districts (1 other has Black plurality of 47%), 2 Hispanic majority, 8 minority-majority
Law Forward same as Evers in all 3 categories.
Petering same as Evers and Law Forward in all 3 categories.
Senate Dems 6 majority Black districts, 2 Hispanic majority, 8 minority-majority (all 60%+)
WILL map 5 majority Black districts (1 other Black plurality of 47%), 2 Hispanic majority, 9 minority-majority (1 in Racine)
Mathematicians same as Evers, Law Forward, and Petering in all 3 categories.
My 50-50 map 6 majority Black districts, 2 Hispanic majority, 9 minority-majority

I would hope any of these maps are OK, given those minority representation numbers.

So, take a look and have at it.