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Ending Reign of GOP Gerrymandering, Evers Approves Fair Maps in Wisconsin
"Wisconsin, for the first time in over a decade, we will not have some of the most gerrymandered maps in America," Evers said.
Feb 19, 2024
For the first time since 2011, Wisconsin has state Assembly and Senate maps that do not unconstitutionally favor Republican candidates.
Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed new legislative maps into law on Monday that were crafted by his office and approved by the state Supreme Court.
"I've promised from the beginning that I will always try to do the right thing. Today, I'm keeping that promise and I'm signing fair maps for Wisconsin," Evers said in a statement posted on social media. "Wisconsin, for the first time in over a decade, we will not have some of the most gerrymandered maps in America."
"This is a win for Wisconsinites, who for decades have suffered under maps that Republicans gerrymandered to protect their power and allow themselves to obstruct action on popular policies while avoiding accountability at the ballot box."
Evers said that Wisconsin was a "purple state," and that its maps "should reflect that basic fact."
"The people should get to choose their elected officials, not the other way around," Evers continued.
Wisconsin has been one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation since 2011, when Republican lawmakers redrew the state's maps under Gov. Scott Walker. In one recent example, the GOP made so many alterations to the 73rd Assembly District in 2022 that residents said it looked like a Tyrannosaurus rex, according to ProPublica.
Fair election groups saw a chance to challenge the maps in August 2023, when the state's Supreme Court flipped from a conservative to liberal majority with the swearing in of Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who had criticized the maps during her campaign. Advocacy groups and law firms filed a suit on behalf of 19 Democratic Wisconsin voters, and, in December, the court ruled that the maps were unconstitutional because the districts were not "composed of physically adjoining territory" as the state Constitution requires.
The court asked different groups to submit new maps and tasked University of California, Irvine political scientist Bernard Grofman and Carnegie Mellon University political scientist Jonathan Cervas with reviewing them, as Wisconsin Public Radio reported. The experts determined that maps submitted by Evers, the Wisconsin Democrats behind the lawsuit, Democratic state senators, and a group of independent mathematicians were competitive, while two by the state legislature and the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty amounted to gerrymandering. Though Evers' maps are slightly more favorable to Republican candidates, the court determined that, using his maps, "the party that wins the most votes will win the most seats."
"The governor's maps are pretty darn good," said Jay Heck, the executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin.
The resolution to the fight over Wisconsin's maps came as something of a surprise, as Republican lawmakers had initially opposed Evers' maps before introducing them last week and passing them through both the Assembly and Senate. GOP legislators said they decided that the governor's maps were their best option.
"This fall Republicans will prove that we can win on any maps because we have the better policy ideas for the State of Wisconsin," Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, (R-63) said, as Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
Most Democrats voted against the maps out of concern that the GOP was not acting in good faith and was in fact preparing a new legal challenge.
"I am voting no because I do not trust what you guys are up to," Sen. Chris Larson, a Milwaukee Democrat, said, as ProPublica reported.
Good governance groups, however, applauded the development.
"This is a win for Wisconsinites, who for decades have suffered under maps that Republicans gerrymandered to protect their power and allow themselves to obstruct action on popular policies while avoiding accountability at the ballot box," Chris Walloch, executive director of A Better Wisconsin Together, said in a statement.
Walloch added that Evers' maps were "a more fair and accurate representation of Wisconsin's diverse communities than other maps proposed by Republicans" and that they would give Wisconsin voters "a renewed chance for competitive elections and a truly representative government for all." He also expressed gratitude to the state Supreme Court and Evers for making the new maps possible.
Walloch concluded: "We deserve a legislature that represents us as constituents and prioritizes our best interests. MAGA faction politicians and their special interest allies have gone to great lengths, and great expense, to protect a rigged system that benefited them, and we will continue to hold accountable any politician who attempts to obstruct today's progress."
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) said they saw the new maps as an opportunity, especially since the entire Wisconsin Assembly and half of its Senate are up for re-election in November, when the new maps will be in use.
"While we still have more work to do to ensure fair representation in each and every Wisconsin community, with these new maps in place, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee reaffirms its commitment to reverse the Republican takeover of this state and shift the balance of power in both the Wisconsin Assembly and the Wisconsin Senate," committee president Heather Williams said in a statement.
"Wisconsin is a top priority for the DLCC in 2024, and we're already hard at work building the campaigns that will fuel our legislative gains this fall," Williams continued. "The time for fair representation in Wisconsin is long overdue, and we are building winning campaigns and sustainable infrastructure to build power this cycle and ultimately take back both majorities."
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Trump's Anti-Chinese Racist Campaign Strategy Mobilizes Right-Wing Extremists
The move is part of a broader Trump campaign strategy in the run-up to the November presidential elections.
Apr 19, 2020
In a direct attack on China and a clear indictment of international cooperation to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally ordered withholding funds from the World Health Organization. In a White House statement, Trump accused the international body of "preferential treatment" for China and "mismanaging" the pandemic.
Not only is this racist strategy a blow to democracy in the U.S., but it also puts many lives at risk, here and around the world.
Aside from the glaring hypocrisy and irony of Trump's projection of his mismanagement of the crisis onto international actors, the move is part of a broader Trump campaign strategy in the run-up to the November presidential elections. The strategy entails using anti-Chinese xenophobia and racism to mobilize white voters to support Trump and Republican candidates.
Not only is this racist strategy a blow to democracy in the U.S., but it also puts many lives at risk, here and around the world.
U.S. public opinion has turned sharply against the Trump administration because of its unsympathetic incompetence in handling the epidemic .
Trump ally and right-wing columnist Ben Shapiro, in social media and published columns, promoted this racist strategy. He senselessly defended the racist use of the phrase "Chinese virus." Shapiro and other Republican commentators and politicians have used the term to blame China for the pandemic openly. "The Chinese government is chiefly responsible," he wrote, and described it as having been deliberately "unleashed."
In a tweet in mid-March, Shapiro wrote, "If the media want Trump re-elected by massive numbers, they should keep asking him why he's mean to China after they unleashed coronavirus on an unsuspecting world." Shapiro claimed that the virus originated because of alleged Chinese unsanitary food culture, and implied that the Chinese government used it as an attack on the U.S.
Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott recklessly accused China of causing the pandemic with the WHO as an accomplice. "The bottom line is the WHO's actions and China's actions killed a lot of people," the Trump ally claimed. Scott, who went unpunished for his part in a massive medical fraud scandal as the CEO of Columbia/HCA, represents a state that is usually considered a toss-up in presidential elections.
Other Republican politicians attempted to promote conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus to fuel this campaign strategy. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas cruelly claimed that the virus originated in a military facility supposedly near Wuhan, China, and was deployed as a military operation.
These contradictory conspiracy theories were echoed by Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who added the demagogic and odd proposal that the U.S. should refuse to pay the public debt owed to China. Graham's demand seemed to indicate his low-level of knowledge of how the international bond market works.
Given the contradictions between Shapiro's and Cotton's theories about the origins of the virus, it is evident that Republican campaign strategists do not care about learning or sharing scientific truths about the disease. Instead, they want to promote fear and hostility to deflect from the incompetence of the Trump administration and his callous response to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.
A group of scientists prudently cautioned, "Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus."
In an open letter published in the British science journal The Lancet, a group of scientists prudently cautioned, "Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus."
False and racist rhetoric as a strategy in the presidential campaign has coincided with a surge of anti-Asian racism and hostility in the U.S. In late March, the New York Timesinterviewed dozens of Asian Americans, who reported being yelled at, spit on, and treated with hostility since Trump's decision to deflect his incompetence with anti-China rhetoric.
"The rhetoric from the nation's highest office is creating a climate of hate that is permeating the country and putting people at risk," warned Southern Poverty Law Center's interim CEO Karen Baynes Dunning. "There has been an increase in reports of bias-related attacks against Asians and Asian Americans in communities and online."
In the state of Michigan, also a hotly contested state in the presidential election, "multiple reports of discrimination and bias incidents targeting Asian Americans and individuals of Asian descent in Michigan" raised new alarms, according to the Michigan Civil Rights Commission.
Denise Yee Grim, who serves on the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, in a public message directly to President Trump, said, "You just put a target on the Asian community." She cited physical assaults on Asian people as well as boycotts of Asian-American owned businesses.
Militias, neo-Nazis, and neo-Confederates
Republican rhetoric about the virus and China fans the flames of racist hatred. The president and his allies crave racist violence, abuses, and hostility to flourish between now and the election, perhaps even permanently. These so-called leaders might as well be walking the streets themselves lashing out at Asian Americans. But they will leave that work up to their emboldened fans and followers.
In Michigan this week, the Republican Party mobilized a pro-Trump political rally that defied medical advice about social distancing and demanded an end to the statewide stay-at-home order.
In Michigan this week, the Republican Party mobilized a pro-Trump political rally that defied medical advice about social distancing and demanded an end to the statewide stay-at-home order. The Republican Party rally was fueled in part by a widespread fear of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's popularity for authoritatively taking on Trump's callous response to the pandemic and forcing him to use more federal resources to address it.
In part, the rally organizers were motivated by Trump's widespread lies and distortions of the "stay-at-home" policy spread, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and Republican media personality Meghan McCain. For her part, Whitmer ordered a moratorium on utility shut-offs and extensions for rent payments, won promises from health insurers to pay for COVID-19 testing and treatment, and accessed stockpiles of persona protective equipment for healthcare workers and a host of other worker protections during the pandemic.
The pro-Trump political rally prompted participation from large groups of heavily armed right-wing militias along with the white supremacist Proud Boys waving the Confederate flag. Dark money groups tied to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Trump campaign funded the event.
Public health experts warned that the gathering of so many people for the Republican Party rally could result in the further spread of the virus and necessitate an extension of the "stay-at-home" order.
Fox News, the right-wing, and COVID-19 capitalism
Right-wing media has taken up Trump's demand to force people to defy medical advice to stay at home during the pandemic and return to the workplace. Anti-worker ideologue Scott Walker told Fox News that workers should be forced to return to manufacturing first. Companies should close down break rooms, he said, and force workers to stay at their machines.
TV-Dr. Oz told Fox News that authorities should force children back to school. Describing that idea as "appetizing," Oz claimed that a 2-3% mortality would be likely but acceptable to him.
The energized campaign to force people back to work and back into the public puts the lives of workers and their families at risk of infection, illness, and death.
Adding to the push to force workers back into the economy and children back into schools was another celebrity "Dr." Phil McGraw. McGraw told his viewers that staying at home to stop the spread of COVID-19 would have economic effects that would be deadlier than the disease.
The energized campaign to force people back to work and back into the public puts the lives of workers and their families at risk of infection, illness, and death. It dovetails with right-wing callousness and resistance to public interventions during times of social crisis. It highlights the worst characteristics of neoliberal political strategies that aim to privatize public entities and energize the predatory nature of the corporate sector to profit from disaster.
More fundamentally, this move exposes how desperate capitalism is to access the labor-power of the 22 million workers who have been laid off and the millions more whose productivity has been drastically reduced due to the pandemic. Because capitalism cannot operate without the labor-power of workers, the profits of the capitalist class are in danger. Thus, they have mobilized right-wing callousness to shift the public discourse from solidarity against the disease and support for the working class in this crisis to the return to work.
The Trump campaign and the Republican Party have shown themselves willing to align with this capitalist urge. They have used campaign and public resources to mobilize their fringe allies in the militia movement, as well as neo-Nazi and neo-Confederate elements to threaten public officials who resist forcing workers into dangerous exposure for the sake of Wall Street profits.
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Dark Money Played a Pivotal Role in Trump's Wisconsin Win
A confidential report claims that secretive groups targeting independent voters helped tip the balance for Trump in 2016.
Mar 01, 2020
Two groups from outside of Wisconsin may have been responsible for President Donald Trump's narrow win in the state in 2016, according to a recently obtained "confidential" report.
The groups have used their "independent" brand name to appeal independents, an advantage Higgins touted to donors at an event in 2015: "Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you're actually conservative puts us in a unique position."
Between October 29 and November 7, 2016, sister groups Independent Women's Voice and Independent Women's Forum, two nonprofits based in Washington, D.C., launched a campaign to target registered independents and Republican-leaning women in Wisconsin. These efforts moved independent voters in the state by 16 percentage points toward Trump, says the report, which was prepared for both groups by Daron Shaw, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin.
The groups targeted approximately 1.54 million registered voters with multiple choice and 'true or false' quizzes, consisting of questions on the Affordable Care Act and the U.S. Supreme Court. The quizzes were delivered via digital outreach, postcards, and phone calls starting eleven days before the 2016 presidential election.
Heather Higgins, an heiress to the Vicks VapoRub fortune who has led the groups' boards for years, summed up Shaw's findings: Had the quiz messaging not occurred, "Trump would have received an estimated 215,840 fewer votes in Wisconsin, the state completely written off by all the political professionals."
Her website for the group added that without the groups' intervention, "both Trump and [Wisconsin Republican U.S. Senator Ron] Johnson would otherwise have lost Wisconsin by over 100,000 votes each."
Trump won the popular vote in Wisconsin by less than 23,000 votes.
True North Research, a research organization I founded and lead, has just issued a report about the groups, whose election-season activities flew below the radar of most national and state media outlets. It documents the groups' involvement in the 2016 election, as elucidated by Shaw's report, which was obtained by True North last year.
As Shaw's description of Higgins's strategy highlighted, most of the funding to influence women voters came from the Independent Women's Forum, the 501(c)(3) arm of the duo.
That's troubling, Marcus Owen, the former head of the agency's tax-exempt organizations division, told the Center for Media and Democracy. He noted that the IRS stipulates that 501(c)(3) charities "must avoid any issue advocacy that functions as political campaign intervention," whether they name a candidate or not.
Shaw suggested in his report that the potency of the messaging by the Independent Women's Forum and Independent Women's Voice was attributable in part to the power of repeated quizzes to reinforce the answers suggested. As he explained it:
"[E]ven relatively modest quiz messaging can have an impact on people, especially with respect to their knowledge of issue and policy arguments. However, to persuade people about the salience of the issue, or to move broader attitudes on the issue, it seems that multiple 'touches' and different modes of outreach are necessary, as we saw in the Wisconsin test."
The Independent Women's Voice used its outreach to tie those issues to the election.
Shaw found that the quizzes made Wisconsin independents 16 percent more likely to vote for Trump. He also found that the quizzes were more effective with Republican and independent women than with men in making women "more likely to support Trump over Clinton" (17 percent versus 11 percent).
Since 2010, Independent Women's Voices has been deploying women to tell other women to worry about government health insurance interfering with their access to doctors.
The groups have used their "independent" brand name to appeal independents, an advantage Higgins touted to donors at an event in 2015: "Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you're actually conservative puts us in a unique position."
Although the quizzes were not included in Shaw's report, the website for Independent Women's Voice has quizzes on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and on the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court (from when Senator Mitch McConnell was blocking President Barack Obama's ability to appoint Merrick Garland). Another quiz combines the two issues.
Since 2010, Independent Women's Voices has been deploying women to tell other women to worry about government health insurance interfering with their access to doctors. The group has also created numerous sites attacking the ACA, particularly around pivotal elections.
Higgins's groups poured millions into ads and other marketing efforts in 2016. Although the amount spent in Wisconsin alone was not reported, the two groups spent a combined total of more than $3.7 million that year. The Independent Women's Forum carried the bulk of that expense, spending more than $2.5 million on what they called "active engagement and market evaluation."
Independent Women's Voice also spent almost $700,000 on "active engagement" and communications, plus nearly $500,000 on polling in 2016.
In contrast, in 2015, the two groups spent only $12,000 on what they called active engagement.
Since 2016, my research found that the groups have raised nearly $20 million, not counting any funds raised in the past fourteen months. In the last presidential election year, donors gave them more than $8 million. That year, they targeted Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New York, but Shaw concluded their messaging was not as effective in the latter two states, where there was more "noise" from spending by others.
The Independent Women's Voice also issued individual press releases applauding sixty-eight members of Congress who were re-elected after signing a repeal "Obamacare" pledge, including one for Senator Johnson of Wisconsin.
How much the groups will raise and spend this year is not yet known.
Higgins has been focused on Wisconsin since at least 2011, when her groups worked to influence voters' views of unions as Republican Governor Scott Walker faced a potential recall from office. She later claimed the Independent Women's Voice played a decisive role in his success in remaining in office.
Here's how she described that race:
"IWV's research showed that the core belief among Independents who opposed Gov. Walker's reforms was that public employees are underpaid and are making a sacrifice to hold those jobs. Through our educational program, we changed this foundational belief into an understanding that unionized public employees are overcompensated relative to the private sector."
According to Higgins, "support for Scott Walker increased by 31 points among 10,000 likely voters who received our message . . . even though we made no reference to Walker, his reforms, or the recall."
The Independent Women's Voice and Independent Women's Forum grew out of a group of women who were friends of Clarence Thomas and defended him against allegations of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1991.
They argued, essentially, that because he had not sexually harassed them, he could not have harassed Anita Hill, despite her testimony under oath. Thomas, who angrily denied Hill's charges, was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since then, the Independent Women's Forum has countered the unequal pay claims of the U.S. women's soccer champions and opposed Title IX's guarantees for equal opportunity for athletics for women and girls, among other things.
More recently, the group has attacked a proposal to add a small payroll tax to fund paid leave to care for oneself or a loved one, and urged instead that parents borrow from future Social Security payments to cover time off for a newborn.
Independent Women's Voice has also repeatedly backed male candidates over women, as when it helped Scott Brown, a Republican U.S. Senate contender in Massachusetts, beat Martha Coakley in 2010. Three years later, Independent Women's Voice claimed to have played "a unique and critical role" in South Carolina Republican Mark Sanford's Congressional election win against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch. It even made $176,991 in independent expenditures on behalf of Richard Mourdock in 2012, after the Republican contender for U.S. Senate in Indiana said that, when a woman gets pregnant from being raped, "it's something God intended."
And both groups went to bat for Brett Kavanaugh, as he denied attempting to sexually assault Dr. Christine Blaisey Ford.
The Independent Women's Voice received $4 million from the Freedom and Opportunity Fund, one of conservative operative Leonard Leo's dark money groups, as they fought to keep President Obama's nominee from getting a hearing and while helping make sure President Trump's nominees were confirmed.
In the Trump Administration, the leaders of these two women's groups are gaining an even larger voice.
In 2018, Heather Higgins was appointed by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan to the U.S. Commission commemorating the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Last November, she was invited to the Oval Office as Trump signed a bill to honor this occasion with a commemorative $1 coin.
Kellyanne Conway, a White House counselor, is a former director on the Independent Women's Forum board and for years was one of the pollsters the Independent Women's Voice used in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Political observers have long debated how Trump was able to win Wisconsin in 2016. Pundits often cite Trump's digital campaign, the Republican's efforts at voter suppression, Hillary Clinton's failure to visit Wisconsin after Bernie Sanders won the primary, third party votes for Jill Stein, and even documented Russian interference. But the press in Wisconsin has largely failed to cover the role of these stealthy "independent" women's groups.
Whether the groups played as big a role as Higgins claims may never be known. The only question now is whether she will repeat the same game plan in Wisconsin and other swing states in 2020. If so, we need to make sure folks are paying attention this time.
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