The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board’s Nov. 29 certification of the official results of the Nov. 6 election made it, well, official: Democratic candidates got more votes than Republicans in state races for president, U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, state Senate and state Assembly.
But the Republicans were able to keep a 5-3 lead in the U.S. House of Representatives, reclaim control of the state Senate by a margin of 18 to 15 seats, and secure a commanding 60-39 advantage in the state Assembly, despite getting fewer votes overall.
How can that be? Mike McCabe, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan elections watchdog, has a theory:
“The outcome of this year’s U.S. House as well as state Senate and state Assembly elections testify to the power of redistricting,” McCabe told the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.
The Center, using the newly released official results, has produced maps showing the Nov. 6 vote counts for each congressional and state legislative district. These are posted with this column at WisconsinWatch.org. They depict a mostly red (Republican) state, even though Democrats got the most overall votes in every category.
In the races for Congress, Democrats snared 50.4 percent of the nearly 2.9 million votes cast. In the 16 races for state Senate, Democrats came away with 53 percent of the vote but lost two key seats. In the state’s 99 Assembly districts, Democrats got more than 52 percent of the vote, but won just 39 percent of the seats.
Wisconsin’s congressional and legislative voting districts were redrawn in secret by Republican lawmakers last year, based on the 2010 Census. This wasn’t the first time politics has intruded into the redistricting process, and any drawing of voter boundaries along geographically sensible lines will likely result in some inequities.
But what allegedly happened in Wisconsin is that Democratic voters were packed into a few districts and other districts were carved up in a way to give Republicans a large enough edge to win as many seats as possible.
Consider this: In the Nov. 6 election, there were 23 Assembly seats considered so safely Democratic that no Republican was on the ballot, compared to just four seats that went to Republicans without a Democrat being in the race.
The nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Wisconsin has been pushing both parties to reform the redistricting process for decades, says executive director Andrea Kaminski. The these efforts haven’t gotten much traction because “the party in power wants to stay in power.” State lawmakers “are choosing their voters rather than the voters choosing them.”
Now the League is looking to partner with the Democracy Campaign, Common Cause in Wisconsin and other groups to take a fresh run at redistricting reform. It seeks an independent nonpartisan body to redraw voter boundaries to maximize the number of competitive seats, as is done in Iowa. Kaminski says her group favors doing this via state constitutional amendment, to protect against “the political winds of the day.”
Amending the state constitution is a multi-year process, which is why the League wants to begin now, starting with a public education campaign. Kaminski notes optimistically that lawmakers in power early in a given decade don’t have as great a stake as those later on, “when redistricting is about to take place.”
State Sen. Tim Cullen, D-Janesville, recently seconded this reasoning in remarks to Common Cause in Wisconsin, saying “this is the time to do the right thing. We don't know who's giving up the power that they're going to have in 2021.”
Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, has agreed to work with Cullen on this issue, as he has before. A resolution introduced by the pair and others in the 2011-12 Legislative session to accomplish this change with a state constitutional amendment died in committee. It wasn’t even given a hearing.
Bill Lueders is the Money and Politics Project director at the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (www.WisconsinWatch.org). The project, a partnership of the Center and MapLight, is supported by the Open Society Institute.
The Center collaborates with Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Television, other news media and the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication. All works created, published, posted or disseminated by the Center do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of UW-Madison or any of its affiliates.
The reason so many of the the Democratic votes is that their base is very densely packed in Milwaukee, Madison, Eau Claire and LaCrosse. Those area's are not just blue, they are bright blue. Take a look at the government accountability data. In most of the state, the individual wards have about a 55% to 45% split, one way or the other. When you get to the large cities, you can see several wards with a 10 to 1 swing for Democrats. The only way to change that would be to truly gerrymander the district. I will upload Illinois District 4. that is not the way I would like to see my congressional district appear.
Nothing at all. It speaks of who controls counting the votes, the Democrat's practice of registering and voting the dead, illegals, and voting more than once.
There is just NO good argument for maintaining a partisan system for redistricting. I challenge any one of you above to give me a PRO for making it a partisan issue.
2) making it stronger by adding portions of another "toss-up" district, thus losing one seat, but gaining two. The fact is, the total congressional vote was almost a 50-50 split, as was the assembly vote. The simple fact is, the blue vote is concentrated in Milwaukee, and Madison, with some in La Crosse and Eau Claire. The only way to fix this would be to gerrymander those area to the point of ridiculousness.
The people who tend to cry that things are too political are the ones who didn't win. State Dems have a golden opportunity to capture nominally GOP seats, of which there are many. They need to find the right candidate and message and the incumbant GOP seatholder needs to be viewed poorly by the district. However, this can only happen if the Dems who set the party's message moderate their tone to one that is much more inclusive of people who do not live in Madison or Milwaukee.
Obama care/Universal Healthcare is socialism and the worst thing to happen to our democracy. Voter supression and stilted voting districts to take away fair elections? That's fine. Huh?
Judging by the rest of your comment, you have no clue about apportionment. Under the US Constitution a census needs to be taken EVERY ten years so the number of Representatives, and electoral college electors, can be distributed appropriately. Therefore, the census is used for much more important things than just "long range planning for state expenditures". Koven also wrote: "...Wisconsin has the amount of electoral votes it has, and it doesn't matter where the voters live..." Yes Dave, it does matter where the voters live. Representatives must be divided up among the population as evenly as possible. Judging by your comment, you would be fine with having 6 of our House Representatives come from the city of Milwaukee, and the other two from out state. Wisconsin has 1 representative for every 713,000 people. Since Milwaukee has a population of a little under 600,000 it seems to be over represented with Gwen Moore. Koven finished off with: "... Now it is manipulation of the electoral process that takes center stage instead of a particular candidate's qualifications for a job." One of the basic rules for redistricting is to try and combine socioeconomically similiar people together. Would you gerrymander Milwaukee in such a way that it gets more "balanced" than it does now? THAT would be "manipulating the electoral process".
To date, no-one has come up with the perfect solution for drawing district boundaries. I look forward to the day when we don't have to worry about how many Hispanic or how many African-American or how many white representatives we have. It will be a great thing when we can just worry about voting for the best candidate!