In Wisconsin, Democrats Hope Competing Down Ballot Helps Harris, Too

In a state that President Biden won in 2020 by 20,682 votes, and former President Donald J. Trump won in 2016 by 22,748, even a few thousand voters energized by the candidates at their doorstep could make a difference. Ben Wikler, the chairman of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, said issues like abortion, school funding and Medicaid expansion — all decided by the State Legislature — would drive “a small but incredibly consequential group of voters to the polls.”

Despite Wisconsin’s status as a national battleground, Republicans have controlled both of the state’s legislative chambers since 2011, aided by the voting maps that their party drew heavily in its favor. Just south of Green Bay, for example, three State Senate districts converged in a jigsaw puzzle configuration, allowing three Republican state senators to live within a half-dozen miles of one another.

Then last year, voters handily elected a liberal justice to the State Supreme Court, handing the left a majority. The campaign that elected the justice, Janet Protasiewicz, was driven in large part by a push to prevent a 19th-century abortion ban from snapping back into place with the repeal of Roe v. Wade. But voters also chafed at the draconian gerrymander that ensured that an almost evenly divided state had a Legislature with an overwhelming Republican majority.

Just after Justice Protasiewicz was sworn in, a coalition of voting-rights groups and left-leaning law firms filed a legal challenge to the districts, arguing that new maps should be drawn before the 2024 election. The new liberal majority agreed, and now those maps are in place, though the high court has yet to address similarly gerrymandered U.S. House districts.



https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/11/us/politics/wisconsin-election.html