2020 Census and Redistricting Thread: Wisconsin

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I tried drawing a truly fair map without regards to current lines or partisanship awhile ago...and yep it ended up 6-2 anyway. Even the Evers/Walker numbers were still 6-2, although Evers came within a point of winning the purple district. So while it sucks facts are the current alignment of Wisconsin basically locks into a 6-2 map:



Letting the gerrymandered State Legislature maps remain is a lot worse though, although I do wonder how a fair map would differ much in partisan turnout, I'll probably draw one sometime soon, can't see one with a D majority in either chamber regardless. The current gerrymander is kind of weird, a lot of the weird splits are seemingly more just out of spite than partisan gains, for example the split in State Senate seats around Eau Claire is pretty weird but the net result is still just a single D seat in the region which is exactly what would happen on a pure community of interest drawn map. Some of the splits remind me of in my opinion the most perplexing State Senate seat in the country, that one in Upstate New York that links downtown Syracuse to a bunch of random rural areas while bypassing most of the suburbs for no real reason whatsoever: it's still a Safe D seat and the Republicans still hold the surrounding areas anyway. The way the urban areas in northeast Wisconsin are drawn in the State Senate is a shameless gerrymander and greatly assists them though.

EDIT: turns out I'm now wrong about Syracuse, Democrats did pick up the other main seat in the region in a special election last year. So they now have two seats from the region instead of just one...I highly doubt that was the intent though with how that map was initially drawn, making me still wonder what the purpose is. (Does mean Democrats will likely more or less keep the current boundaries in the new map though.)

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

BTW does anyone have a count of how many Biden/Trump and Evers/Walker districts there are in that map Evers tweeted earlier?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

So I drew a map ignoring partisanship and focusing only on CoI. (Senate map isn't complete yet but should be pretty easy since it's just combining three Assembly districts each into one Senate map.)

It's still pretty bad for the Democrats. PlanScore gives it a 9.7% R Efficiency Gap and predicts the Democrats would only win 37% of the seats with 49% of the vote.

There are 45 solid Trump districts, 37 solid Biden districts, and 22 "competitive" ones, DRA defines "competitive" as in the 45-55% range so a lot are still pretty solid. It also has 46 solid Walker districts, 32 solid Evers districts and 21 "competitive". I'm a bit shocked because I would've expected Evers' coalition to be better for Democrats.

There are three Evers/Trump districts (24, 27 and 58) and three Walker/Biden districts (47, 53 and 87.) So the three Evers/Trump are in the driftless and two mostly rural seats north of Madison, and the Walker/Biden ones are in a suburban area southeast of Appleton, Sheboygan and the surrounding areas and one right south of Milwaukee.

Here's the Trump/Biden map:

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

So I drew a map ignoring partisanship and focusing only on CoI. (Senate map isn't complete yet but should be pretty easy since it's just combining three Assembly districts each into one Senate map.)

It's still pretty bad for the Democrats. PlanScore gives it a 9.7% R Efficiency Gap and predicts the Democrats would only win 37% of the seats with 49% of the vote.

There are 45 solid Trump districts, 37 solid Biden districts, and 22 "competitive" ones, DRA defines "competitive" as in the 45-55% range so a lot are still pretty solid. It also has 46 solid Walker districts, 32 solid Evers districts and 21 "competitive". I'm a bit shocked because I would've expected Evers' coalition to be better for Democrats.

There are three Evers/Trump districts (24, 27 and 58) and three Walker/Biden districts (47, 53 and 87.) So the three Evers/Trump are in the driftless and two mostly rural seats north of Madison, and the Walker/Biden ones are in a suburban area southeast of Appleton, Sheboygan and the surrounding areas and one right south of Milwaukee.

Here's the Trump/Biden map:

Do you have a link to the map? How many seats did Biden win total?

https://davesredistricting.org/join/cd542c43-a23f-45d3-805d-36fb61bed0b6

I count 41 Biden seats.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

And here's the Senate of my above map. Unsurprisingly it's even worse because a few Democratic enclaves get drowned by the surrounding areas. Even Eau Claire is in a Trump district, although it's also the only Trump/Evers seat on this map (there's also a Biden/Walker seat, just south of Milwaukee, and voted for Walker by the tiniest of margins.) Biden and thus Evers only won 13 seats here.

Funnily enough the current gerrymander that puts Kenosha and Racine together might help Democrats, Racine is difficult to get in a D Senate seat because the surrounding areas are so super-Republican and the Kenosha seat voted for Biden by the slimmest of margins with 0.1%, it's the closest on the map. So the current vote sink at least guarantees a Democratic seat, while splitting them means there could be zero. Also noteworthy is that Kenosha was the only area in eastern Wisconsin where Evers outran Biden: he won that seat by 5 points while Biden did by a tenth of a point...probably settling the question to if the riots hurt Biden there.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I tried drawing a truly fair map without regards to current lines or partisanship awhile ago...and yep it ended up 6-2 anyway. Even the Evers/Walker numbers were still 6-2, although Evers came within a point of winning the purple district. So while it sucks facts are the current alignment of Wisconsin basically locks into a 6-2 map:



Letting the gerrymandered State Legislature maps remain is a lot worse though, although I do wonder how a fair map would differ much in partisan turnout, I'll probably draw one sometime soon, can't see one with a D majority in either chamber regardless. The current gerrymander is kind of weird, a lot of the weird splits are seemingly more just out of spite than partisan gains, for example the split in State Senate seats around Eau Claire is pretty weird but the net result is still just a single D seat in the region which is exactly what would happen on a pure community of interest drawn map. Some of the splits remind me of in my opinion the most perplexing State Senate seat in the country, that one in Upstate New York that links downtown Syracuse to a bunch of random rural areas while bypassing most of the suburbs for no real reason whatsoever: it's still a Safe D seat and the Republicans still hold the surrounding areas anyway. The way the urban areas in northeast Wisconsin are drawn in the State Senate is a shameless gerrymander and greatly assists them though.

EDIT: turns out I'm now wrong about Syracuse, Democrats did pick up the other main seat in the region in a special election last year. So they now have two seats from the region instead of just one...I highly doubt that was the intent though with how that map was initially drawn, making me still wonder what the purpose is. (Does mean Democrats will likely more or less keep the current boundaries in the new map though.)

If you are wrapping around the 2 NE seats like that just do it all the way. Have the red seat take in the entire coast while the blue seat takes in the entire Lake Winnebago area.

The red is really just a leftovers district but it's kind of moot, any district in that area would be heavily Republican.

This map kind of illustrates the Democrats' problem in Wisconsin, it's not just that Democrats are so concentrated in Madison and Milwaukee (especially as the Republicans have a vote sink too in WOW), it's that there's so many Democrats "trapped" in NE Wisconsin. The cities here have a ton of Democrats but they really can't elect someone to any office higher than State Assembly. Although there'd be a D-leaning State Senate seat based around Green Bay without the gerrymander.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I guess we are looking at sometime this month? Maybe today?

https://twitter.com/jrrosswrites/status/1498679934256140289?s=20&t=brWICBzSs...

Annoying acronym. It's WISC as the name is the Wisconsin Supreme Court. State Supreme Courts don't use the same naming convention as SCOTUS.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

How the hell is this a fair district?

Madison and Milwaukee are two separate cities and communities of interest. There's absolutely no reason to put them together besides a GOP gerrymander.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Technically the Congressional map wasn't drawn by the legislature though.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Technically the Congressional map wasn't drawn by the legislature though.

Hmmmm... good point.  Evers vetoed, and even a couple of the most originalist justices made clearly pro-veto comments in the NC case oral arguments, so this may be a different situation.  They would be asking for an even more aggressive form of ISLT than NC, and the NC case was looking like a close call anyway.

Yeah the best argument would be that the WISC only gets one shot a decade to draw the map and can't reverse itself, much like how some states like (like Minnesota as I noted) have language that explicitly only grants the legislature authority to draw the districts once per census. Honestly an argument like that could even get unanimous SCOTUS approval, or something like almost unanimous except Thomas writing some weird concur/dissent about some weird legal principles he wants to talk about as well.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Technically the Congressional map wasn't drawn by the legislature though.

Hmmmm... good point.  Evers vetoed, and even a couple of the most originalist justices made clearly pro-veto comments in the NC case oral arguments, so this may be a different situation.  They would be asking for an even more aggressive form of ISLT than NC, and the NC case was looking like a close call anyway.

Yeah the best argument would be that the WISC only gets one shot a decade to draw the map and can't reverse itself, much like how some states like (like Minnesota as I noted) have language that explicitly only grants the legislature authority to draw the districts once per census. Honestly an argument like that could even get unanimous SCOTUS approval, or something like almost unanimous except Thomas writing some weird concur/dissent about some weird legal principles he wants to talk about as well.

So Wisconsin can’t redraw but North Carolina can?

North Carolina technically wouldn't be a redraw, just reinstating the legislature-drawn map. In Wisconsin no legislature-drawn map passed due to Evers' veto. It'd be the same situation in NC except the governor doesn’t have veto power over redistricting.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I'm curious to see the route the court takes on a Congressional redraw. To be honest, I think a truly fair partisan-blind map would only yield slightly more equitable results on the Congressional level, with 2 safe D seats, 2 swing seats, and 4 relatively safe R seats. However, if the court aims for partisan fairness, we'll prolly end up with a map that's pretty bad when it comes to COIs.

It's more the legislature where a neutral map goes a long way. It's hard to draw an outright Biden majority, but you can get close in both chambers, and def keep Rs out of a supermajority.

IDK if they will actually redraw the congressional map?  It would send the ISLT thing right back to SCOTUS when it would be strongly in national Dem interests to push that off to at least 2031.

I don’t think I agree here? Right now ISLT that disqualifies court maps would give Democrats free rein in Maryland, Minnesota, and New York. In exchange, the GOP gets… nothing. Maybe insurance if the Florida Supreme Court ever grows a spine and decides to enforce the law?

The ISLT really isn't the issue here because the current Wisconsin map isn't court drawn. The argument would probably rather be that courts don't get to just redraw maps whenever they decide to based on a change in alignment and they only get one shot per cycle.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Vosem said that the Congressional maps is very unlikely to be overturned because the only argument the WISC could use to do so would actually undermine and diminish its own power, but he didn't elaborate on how. I'm interested in hearing that because that sounds rather strange.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Vosem said that the Congressional maps is very unlikely to be overturned because the only argument the WISC could use to do so would actually undermine and diminish its own power, but he didn't elaborate on how. I'm interested in hearing that because that sounds rather strange.

Vosem literally believes in the most optimistic(for gop) outcome in all the redraws

I'm more just intrigued in hearing the reasoning that by ordering a redraw the WISC would diminish its own power in future cases.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This is what it looks like when you see the sign showing that you're entering Dane County. The Madison area in terms of its urban cluster doesn't really leave Dane County, although obviously there are probably plenty of people who commute from places like Sauk City and even Janesville, as evidenced by voting patterns.

What's odd is that even the rural townships in Dane County are quite D.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This is another interesting example more remote and away from any major highways. This is in a township that voted for Biden by almost 13 points. That's quite weak for Dane County but in the rural Midwest places that look like that voting even the inverse of 55 Trump - 42 Biden would be way more Democratic than expected. The majority of people who frequent that bar and grill are Democrats....not what you'd expect.

That's a very standard look for those type of places in the rural Midwest, one thing I've always found odd is the signs out front with a soda and/or beer brand (this has both), obviously very old with how outdated the logos are but did places like that ever have to advertise that they carry 7-Up and Pabst Blue Ribbon? Like what bar/restaurant actually doesn't?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Is the Milwaukee District a VRA one by law or just merely by tradition?

There's no such thing as "VRA districts", at least the way the forum defines them. Those extreme racially gerrymandered districts didn't exist until the 90s thanks to Republicans helping pass them to create Safe R seats around them. The VRA only mandates them in cases of racial polarization like Alabama now (like what that broken record L-AL guy who does nothing but repeat the same drivel about the Democrats passing a similar map in 2000 over and over and over again doesn't get.)

WI-04 is a plurality white district now and drawing it to be more white wouldn't prevent the black and Hispanic population from electing their preferred candidate.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Incidentally people tend to forget there's a ton of white Democrats in metro Milwaukee. The area to the northeast of Milwaukee is heavily white and overwhelmingly D. Wauwatosa votes like 2:1 D now. Even West Allis is a fairly strong D city at this point. And of course Milwaukee proper whites vote like Dane County.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

From what I can tell putting the black and hispanic parts of Milwaukee together was an invention of the 2000s redistricting cycle; prior to that they were separated. There's no legal requirement to keep them together.

That wasn't due to any type of gerrymandering though, it's because historically north Milwaukee and south Milwaukee were always in separate districts. It was a relic of the time when Milwaukee had enough population for two districts on its own.

The north Milwaukee seat had most of the black population but was represented by Tom Barrett, who is now better known for his later stint as Milwaukee's mayor and failed gubernatorial bids. The south Milwaukee seat was represented by a faily moderate Democrat Jerry Kleczka, and it even voted for Bush in 2000 due to the strength in the suburbs despite Kleczka winning easily. But after 2000 they were double bunked due to Wisconsin losing a seat and all of Milwaukee in one district. Barrett bowed out despite most agreeing he was favored in the primary, probably because he had his sights set on the mayorship anyway and Kleczka won easily. He probably had the largest D swings in the district he represented without moving in decades. However he retired in 2004 and then Gwen Moore took the seat.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

If it's considered acceptable to split Detroit down the middle even though the entire city would fit into one district, I see no reason why the same shouldn't be true of Milwaukee.

The reason for the Detroit split is courts have also ruled that excessive packing of black voters is a VRA violation, and the split allowed in the past for two black plurality districts, this isn't really the case anymore (it's one black plurality district and one with a narrow white plurality, but in that one probably still a majority of black voters in the D primary so still a "black district"), that's irrelevant in Milwaukee where even a single district still has a white plurality.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

https://twitter.com/sbauerAP/status/1738300946839474433

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Rebecca Bradley really doesn't seem like an intelligent person.

The only reason she's even on the court is she's the daughter of a GOP megadonor, LOL.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Yay, *finally*.

While geography definitely favors Rs, I don't think the geography bias is as bad at the State Legislature level because smaller cities like Eau Claire, La Crosse, Appleton, and Green Bay can sustain D-leaning seats on their own. Dems will honestly probably gain most of their seats on the redrawn fair map out of these sorts of places.

The Congressional level, 8 seats is just an unfortunate number for Dems since both metro Madison and Milwaukee Dem sinks are sort of "natural" seats, and there aren't large enough D cities outside of those to sustain other D leaning CDs.

Just FYI for you and everyone else, maybe not needed in this response but important for the future, is this has 0 effect on the congressional plans at the moment. The case is solely the legislative maps. Maybe there will be a followup, but it could only happen for 2026 given the present timeframe.

Reminder to everybody that the legal argument used against the legislative maps does not apply to the Congressional map.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Here's a non-partisan map I threw together awhile ago. Obviously divide these into thirds for the Assembly:




It has 16 Biden seats and 17 Trump seats, which is actually better than I'd expect, that Kenosha-based 21st is the median seat. It also has the exact same alignment for Evers/Michels in 2022 even though Evers did a little over a point and half better than Biden AND manages to even be identical for 2022 Senate with a Republican victory and is notably almost identical in 2018, only the Appleton-based 18th flips to Walker. So...yeah pretty polarized.

Those Green Bay and Appleton seats voted a bit to the right of the national PV too, both are Biden 50.6-50.7 (as did the Eau Claire-based one in the west actually but Democrats seem to have some residual downballot strength there), the 7th is close to a complete match for the national PV, and that 29th voted like the Green Bay and Appleton-based seats but is probably a stronger for the GOP downballot district still. So 16 seats is possibly close to a ceiling for the Democrats. The Republicans meanwhile could probably win 22 in a true wave, which is exactly 2/3 and one could argue even the Janesville and La Crosse-based seats aren't truly out of reach there although they seem pretty inflexible giving Barnes about the same as Biden...actually he did slightly better in the Janesville seat. But in reality the Republicans are probably looking at something like 17-20 seats.