Searching for a ray of hope? Look at Wisconsin.
Stringing together small wins can lead to big progress.
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A lot of the post-mortems of the 2024 election have felt impossibly grim, with Democrats grappling with the fact that most of the country lurched right to elect a felon who led an insurrection.
It’s tempting to paint that shift with a broad brush and to succumb to a profound doomerism about the future. There’s no doubt that crawling out of this hole will be difficult and will require fighting the GOP tooth and nail on all fronts. But it can be done. Just look at Wisconsin.
Wisconsin may initially seem like an odd choice to focus on as a beacon of hope. After all, though President Biden carried the state in 2020, Trump flipped it back in 2024. But that isn’t the whole story. Democrats in Wisconsin have displayed a remarkable amount of grit and tenacity in their work to shore up the fragile tools of democracy and to undo the very worst of the Scott Walker era.
There’s no One Weird Trick to quickly recapture democracy from a minoritarian party bent on keeping power at all costs. Instead, it’s a long road that proceeds in fits and starts and has setbacks, but Democrats in the Badger State have kept moving forward.
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First, about that 2024 Trump victory. Yes, Wisconsin went for Trump, as did the other six swing states. However, Kamala Harris lost the state by under 30,000 votes. She got more votes than President Biden did when he carried the state in 2020. And where the national median vote margin shifted 3.2 percent to Trump from 2020 to 2024, his margin of victory in Wisconsin was only 0.86 percent. The state’s voters also reelected Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin. So, while the rightward shift was certainly present in Wisconsin, it was minuscule compared to elsewhere.
Democrats also made gains in both the state assembly and senate. They didn’t flip either chamber, but they broke a Republican supermajority in the state senate and picked up 10 seats in the assembly. Those gains were the product of a long-range, multifaceted strategy by Democrats and nonpartisan voting groups to undo one of the worst gerrymanders in the country.
How Wisconsin Democrats got back on their feet
In 2011, Wisconsin Republicans met in secret to draw state legislative districts that would ensure they retained control. Even though Democrats kept winning statewide races, Republicans kept huge majorities in the state legislature. The 2021 maps were even worse, favoring the GOP so heavily that Democrats would have needed to carry the statewide vote by 12 percentage points to get to a majority in the state assembly. The GOP, on the other hand, could get a majority of the assembly seats with only 44 percent of the vote.
The only real recourse to these maps was to sue — and here’s where you can start to see how much work had to happen, how many things had to come together, for Democrats to start making gains.
When the GOP passed the 2021 maps, the Wisconsin Supreme Court was controlled by conservatives. The conservative majority on the court did their Republican colleagues in the legislature a solid by inventing an entirely new test for redistricting — the “least change” principle. It required the 2021 maps to be as similar as possible to the already highly gerrymandered 2011 districts.
Suing over that would likely have been futile, as the conservatives had already tipped their hands that they weren’t interested in drawing fair legislative maps. The solution, then, was to flip the state supreme court. So that’s what Democrats did.
In April 2023, Janet Protasiewicz’s election gave liberals a 4-3 majority on the court. Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, who just announced he’s vying for the top DNC job, oversaw a full-court press for Protasiewicz, giving her a huge fundraising edge and an 11-point victory over conservative Dan Kelly.
Only after Protasiewicz was seated, then, did the Campaign Legal Center file a lawsuit to block the use of the gerrymandered maps. When that reached the state supreme court, the now 4-3 liberal majority found the GOP maps unconstitutional because they were not contiguous. Unlike the imaginary “least change” principle, the Wisconsin Constitution actually does require that legislative districts be contiguous. But under the maps drawn by the Republican legislature, more than two-thirds of the state’s voters were in Swiss cheese, disconnected districts.
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That court victory led to the state getting a nonpartisan, neutral legislative map for the 2024 elections. That’s why the state Democrats could pick up seats this year, even as the country shaded red. For the first time in 13 years, Democrats were on a level playing field. But getting there involved a ton of work in litigating, fundraising, and organizing — all the things Democrats will need to be doing over the next several years to try to reverse last month’s losses.
It isn’t just the gerrymander that has fallen. Key parts of Act 10, which stripped most public sector workers of their rights to collectively bargain, were recently struck down. Act 10 was Scott Walker’s first step in turning Wisconsin — once a strong union state — into a right-to-work state with far fewer protections for workers. It was also comically biased against traditional Democratic groups, and it was that overreach that proved its downfall.
Act 10 gutted most public sector unions, restricting what they could bargain for, limiting contracts to one year, and banning deductions of union dues from paychecks. However, it divided public sector employees into general and public safety — and then exempted the latter group from much of the law. So, cops and firefighters — groups that just happen to vote Republican — were spared.
In striking down parts of the law, the judge found there was no legal basis to split public employees into those categories, and it was therefore unconstitutional for, say, teachers’ unions to be treated less favorably than one for firefighters. The decision restored collective bargaining rights to all public workers in the state.
Of course the GOP-controlled legislature has already announced it will appeal. Indeed, they’re complaining mightily, saying that the Wisconsin Supreme Court already rejected similar arguments in 2014 and that the only thing that has changed since then is the composition of the court.
They’re absolutely correct, but it’s a hilarious complaint coming from Republicans, the party that spent decades working to shift the composition of the US Supreme Court so it could go on a reversal spree, throwing out abortion rights and gutting the regulatory state. Republicans love destroying norms when it benefits them, yet find it somehow fundamentally unfair if Democrats do the same.
Holding the state supreme court is critical. Justice Ann Bradley, one of the court’s liberals, is retiring, teeing up another election contest in April 2025. Stakes for that election were already high, and they got higher with the Act 10 ruling. The future of collective bargaining in the state now depends on the future of the state supreme court, just as unwinding the gerrymander did. That’s precisely why the multipronged, incremental approach that Wikler and other Democrats have undertaken is so important and so effective.
Laboratories of democracy
Focusing on state court elections is key because litigating in state courts gets around the problem of the federal courts being utterly broken by Trump and his Federalist Society appointees. Pushing litigation forward carefully is key to making change at the state level. And fighting tooth and nail for state seats is key to stopping GOP legislatures from amassing enough votes to strip statewide elected Democrats of power.
None of these things, taken alone, feel like huge victories. Taken together, though, across the last decade in Wisconsin politics, you can see what it looks like when Democrats string together smaller wins that can lead to massive progress.
Wisconsin’s western neighbor of Minnesota provides another example of a state where the Democratic brand is strong. As Kamala Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz was a national evangelist for the array of progressive policy wins Minnesota Democrats scored after securing a trifecta in 2022, including protecting abortion rights, paid family and medical leave, common sense gun control, free school meals, and much more.
Minnesota Democrats had another strong cycle this year, preventing Republicans from taking control of either chamber of the legislature (it looks like the Minnesota House will be evenly split, pending the result of a recount for one seat). As of next year, it will have been 20 years since a Minnesota Republican won a statewide race, and the state Democratic party chair, Ken Martin, is a rising star who’s running for DNC chair against the aforementioned Wikler.
As Trump descends on the White House once again, bringing the absolute worst people with him, Democrats will need all the state-level wins they can get. Wisconsin serves as an example of how Democrats can battle back to power, while Minnesota shows how passing progressive legislation can help them keep it.
That’s it for this week
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Thank you for the Wisconsin ray of hope; it is an encouraging story. But please don't say "most of the country lurched right." It simply isn't true. Trump didn't get 50% of the popular vote. That fact gives me hope as well.
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/03/nx-s1-5213810/2024-presidential-election-popular-vote-trump-kamala-harris
We absolutely need to concentrate our efforts at the local, city and state levels and build up from there. I live in MO (sigh) but I love what Jess Piper is doing in the state. She started Dirt Road Democrats and advocates for the rural areas of the state, including getting Democrats to run for office in these areas since Republican candidates are often unopposed. We need a lot more of these types of efforts if we're going to turn the tide.