In the war against gerrymandering, an army of voters meets a dug-in foe
MERRILL, Wis. — When the Supreme Court concluded this summer that it had no authority to strike down partisan political maps, no matter how outrageous, Chief Justice John Roberts offered solace to those who call the maps dangerous to democracy. Maybe federal judges cannot outlaw gerrymanders, he wrote in the court’s majority opinion. But voters surely could.
Here in Lincoln County, a fircarpeted swath of rural northern Wisconsin, that is starting to look like no simple task.
In March 2017, the county board of supervisors passed a resolution urging the state to create a nonpartisan panel to take over mapmaking from politicians in the state Legislature. That kick-started a movement that has now seen 47 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties — representing three-fourths of the population — issue similar resolutions. Atop that, voters in eight counties, including Lincoln, have overwhelmingly endorsed nonpartisan mapmaking in referendum votes.
That is striking, because many of those counties, including Lincoln, are Republican bastions in a state where Republicans have so deftly filleted the state legislative map that a Democratic landslide in November barely dinged their dominance.
“History tells us that our legislators are not going to have the courage to do the right thing unless they get nothing but pressure,” said Hans Breitenmoser, a dairy farmer and Lincoln County supervisor. “And the only way to do that is a grassroots movement.”
But 2½ years of grassroots appeals have hardly budged the Republican majority in the state Legislature that rigged the state’s political maps to begin with.
In a statement last month, State House Speaker Robin Vos, one of those maps’ chief architects, said that legislation to finally set up a nonpartisan redistricting panel of the kind Lincoln County and others were endorsing would hand over the Legislature’s lawful authority to “an unelected, unaccountable board of bureaucrats.”
A bill to create a nonpartisan panel, introduced in June, has drawn only four of the State Assembly’s 64 Republicans as cosponsors. An identical bill in the State Senate has no Republican backers at all.
The reason is obvious, said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin political scientist and an expert on gerrymandered maps: Nonbinding referendums and resolutions — even those with overwhelming public support — are the equivalent of Nerf guns in a political battle that demands heavy artillery.
“Is there any evidence that anyone has lost an election because they oppose a nonpartisan redistricting process?” he asked. “When people start losing their seats because of a policy position, that’s when they get religion. And I don’t think there’s much evidence that that has happened.”
Both parties do it
Some measure of gerrymandering has traditionally been practiced by both parties; in Maryland and Illinois, for example, Democratic majorities have ignored or rejected pleas to take politics out of map-drawing. But by far the greatest resistance to fair maps has come from Republicans, who mounted a wildly successful campaign in 2010 to control the statehouses across the country that draw political districts. Since then, the party has embraced gerrymanders, some of them so extreme that they effectively consign opponents to permanent minority status.
Wisconsin is but one indicator that a citizen-led crusade against gerrymandering, a movement that had begun to score major victories before the Supreme Court’s decision in June, may find the struggle harder now, and success more elusive. The easy battles have largely been won, experts say. And with the Supreme Court’s refusal to regulate partisan maps, they say, the politicians who benefit most from them are less subject to outside pressure than ever.
“The low-hanging fruit has been picked and eaten,” Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor and election analyst, said of the campaign against gerrymandering.
There has been some progress. Last year, voters in four Republican-controlled states approved ballot initiatives that diluted partisan control of mapmaking. The legislature in a fifth state, Colorado, handed map-drawing to a