Guaranteed to satisfy no one!
Wisconsin Democrats can pose for a PowerPoint’s worth of holy pictures all they want but Elbridge Gerry never mandered so voraciously.
The faceless bureaucrats at the Werkes put the seven proposed legislative district maps under its smudged microscope, focused on the State Senate maps.
Sure enough, a 22 to 11 Republican advantage flips to an 18 to 15 Democrat margin when Democrats draw the maps. To accomplish that, two of their districts are not contiguous as required by the liberal state supreme court majority in its December 22 decision.
A UW-Milwaukee professor who runs the redistricting consulting company FastMap, submitted his own map. Matthew Petering would put Democrats up 17 to 16 in the Senate.
Even that modest advantage appears engineered in Dr. Frankenstein’s lah-BOR-a-tory. Petering’s map “cracks” Madison into five senate districts — it is apportioned among only two now — to allocate enough Democrat(ic) votes to flip all the senate districts around it from Waukesha to Dubuque. So much for preserving communities of interest. Petering creates seven (7) Democrat(ic) senate districts in and surrounding Madison where today there are but three (3).
Most peculiar is his 16th district, which runs from the Willy Street Co-op on Madison’s wild and wooly east side, dips down to Fort Atkinson for dinner and a show, then s t r e t c h e s all the way to Delafield in ruby red Waukesha County, a distance of 50 miles into the heart of Republican darkness. Happens to also co-opt the state senator from the current 33rd district, now represented by Chris Kapenga. Happens to be the Republican president of the Senate.
Does it help to know that professor Petering contributed $2,800 to Bernie Sanders for President in 2019? Another $2,700 to ActBlue, the Democrats’ catch-all collection plate?
Is the current map (shown above) any less contiguous than the Petering map?
→ Download the proposed new district maps to see for your own self.
→ Analysis of a Marquette University law school researcher.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Republicans aren’t off the hook, either. Their map actually increases their state senate dominance by one seat, to 23-10! But even Law Forward, one of the original gerrymander case litigants, gives Republicans a 17 to 16 edge. So does Gov. Tony Evers’ map, as does a group of university law and mathematics professors known as the Wright petitioners.
7 responses to “Splitting Madison into atoms for Democrat(ic) control!”
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Your link to the proposed new district maps is not working properly.
Fixed but it downloads. Thanx.
In comparison to the current maps, doesn’t this map…
https://daveblaska.files.wordpress.com/2024/01/petering-map-1.png
…meet the very definition of political gerrymandering?
I’m sure that the gynecological junta that rules the Wisconsin Supreme Court would find no problems with the Democrat map.
Lefty CREATED GERRYMANDERING, They Must OWN IT!
The Gotch
Mark my words: There’s no way they’re going to pick the Senate Dems map (which as you note doesn’t even comply by the contiguity requirement) or the ridiculous map generated solely by computers submitted by Petering. This is all just more hot air and fear-mongering. All this could have been avoided if Vos just signed off on the “People’s Maps Commission” maps Evers nominated two years ago that would have solidified a GOP majority in both houses (a 56-43 advantage in the Assembly) but simply denied them super-majorities: https://law.marquette.edu/assets/community/lubar/posts/WI-Nov-2022-In-Selected-Assembly-Scenarios_3-27-2023.html