Dems May Regret Not Taking Redistricting Deal

Wisconsin Democrats may be overplaying their hand on redistricting.

Twice in the last few months Republicans have handed them what they’ve wanted and they turned them down in both cases. Last fall Assembly Republicans passed the Iowa style nonpartisan redistricting commission Democrats have been campaigning for for a couple of decades. Democrats blasted it. The proposal languished in the Senate.

Then yesterday Assembly Republicans approved new maps that are almost exactly the same as those proposed by Gov. Tony Evers. The maps are projected to reduce Republican majorities to 53-46 in the Assembly and to 17-16 in the Senate. They currently hold a 63-36 majority in the Assembly and it’s 22-11 in the Senate. And those projections are based on 2022 election results. Things looks even better for the Democrats if you build projections off of 2020.

The redistricting maps, passed as an amendment to the nonpartisan commission bill, now go to Evers who promises to veto them. He promises essentially to veto his own maps.

What’s going on? Well, the fig leaf in the case of the maps is that Republicans tweaked them to save a handful of their own members from having to run against one another. The Republican passed maps would reduce the number of Assembly members who had to run against their colleagues from 15 districts to 11. Nothing would change in the Senate. But that’s just an excuse for the veto.

What’s the real reason? I honestly don’t know, but I suspect it’s just distrust of Speaker Robin Vos. Now, to be sure, that mistrust is well-earned. Vos rushed both the commission and the new maps to votes in the Assembly without public hearings or consultation with his Democratic colleagues. And he’s not known for his commitment to transparency or publicly spirited intent.

But I don’t think Democrats will get a better deal in the Supreme Court. Those projected partisan splits are as good as any of the seven maps that the Court has to choose from. An analysis of those from two court-appointed experts is due on February 1st, so we’ll know better then. If Evers were to sign the new maps he would short-circuit the Court as it has ruled that it would accept any maps passed by the Legislature and signed by the Governor. Evers wants this to play out in court.

So, it looks like the Democrats are counting on the Court to give them some kind of victory that is even better than the Evers maps and even better than the redistricting commission going forward. That’s hard to figure. What’s just as likely is that liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley loses her reelection in April, 2025, the Court regains a conservative majority, a case is quickly brought to overturn whatever maps the liberals adopt and we’re back in the soup. But if the Democrats took this deal that couldn’t happen because courts will defer to maps drawn by the Legislature and Governor, especially when they are of different parties.

The bottom line is that the Democrats may be passing on maps that are as good as anything the Court will give them and passing on the long-term redistricting reform they’ve said they’ve always wanted, and placing whatever victory they do get in peril in a couple years in the bargain.

I think it’s fair to say that nonpartisan Wisconsinites, which is to say most of us, want two things. We want maps that aren’t designed to give either party a built-in advantage, recognizing that Republicans will likely have some modest natural advantage as long as Democrats cluster in cities. And we want a process that assures that to be the case after each decennial redistricting.

The Democrats’ strategy will give us the first, but not the second.