Anti -Democratic Forces Are Winning The Post-Election

The bad news since the blue wave the more republicans lose, the harder they work to rig the game.

- Jonathan Chait

Even by the standards of a Republican-run state, Wisconsin’s legislature is gerrymandered so ruthlessly that the 2018 elections, in which voters supported Democrats by a 54-to-46-percent margin in the State Assembly, nonetheless delivered Republicans 64 percent of the seats. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, asked about the gerrymander, argued that it was perfectly fair. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” he told reporters after the election. In Vos’s mind, the fact that many Democratic voters resided in the state’s two largest cities rendered them undeserving of equal representation.

Indeed, as Vos saw it, if there was anything unfair about the system, it was the process for electing the governor. Democrat Tony Evers had defeated incumbent Republican Scott Walker by nearly 30,000 votes, and the fact that this result was arrived at by counting votes of city residents exactly the same as votes of people in small towns did not sit easily with Vos. “I do not like the fact that Madison and Milwaukee chose Governor Evers and they’re the reason that he won,” he said.