Luther has an excellent piece on the homepage about Democrats’ selective outrage over gerrymandering. One of the examples they are most outraged about is Wisconsin. The state is regularly a toss-up in statewide elections for president, U.S. Senate, or governor, yet it has a large Republican majority in the state assembly (currently, 64–35). They take that as prima facie evidence of gerrymandering and decry it as an unfair attack on democracy.

It’s tiring for Democrats to say democracy is under attack every time things don’t go their way electorally, and Republicans have in many respects simply outcompeted Democrats in redistricting, as Luther writes. But the disparity is nonetheless worth explanation. The best one I’ve seen was written by John Johnson of Marquette University Law School in 2021.

He wrote that it is true that Republicans gerrymandered the map (as legislatures of both parties do when given the chance). “However, that fact does not establish how much better Democrats could have done under a fairer map,” Johnson wrote.

Republicans redrew the map in 2011. The map that was in use before 2011 was drawn by a federal court in 2002, so it’s a tough sell to say that was gerrymandered. Johnson broke down the results of every presidential and gubernatorial election from 2002 to 2020 on the 2011 map, the 2002 map, and a hypothetical map drawn by a computer for maximum compactness (i.e., with no political bias). “Out of all 10 of these elections, the 2012 presidential contest is the only time that majority control of the Assembly varied between the schemes,” Johnson found.

That means the pre-gerrymander map, the gerrymander map, and the hypothetical nonpartisan map all generate the same outcome nearly all the time: a GOP majority in the state assembly.

How can this be? Johnson explained that the gerrymander doesn’t do much to help Republicans when they are doing well statewide, only giving them a boost when statewide candidates do poorly:

When Tony Evers won the statewide vote in 2018, he still lost to Scott Walker in 63 Assembly districts. Under the previous decade’s map, Walker would have only “won” 53 seats. This statistic is telling for two reasons.

First, it shows the strength of the 2011 gerrymander. Walker’s strong 2014 performance carried 65 districts — about the same as would’ve occurred under the old, court-drawn map. A six-point victory or a 1-point loss statewide (as in 2014 and 2018, respectively) made practically no difference at all in the Republican Assembly majority.

Second, it shows the extent to which Wisconsin’s political geography stacks the deck against Democrats, even in the absence of deliberate gerrymandering. Under the old district map, Tony Evers’ 1-point victory still only carried 46 seats. Republicans would have still held a 7-seat majority.

There are 99 seats in the assembly, so even though the ten-seat difference between maps in the 2018 election might seem like a lot, Republicans would have still had a comfortable 53–46 majority under the old map.

The political geography point is the most important. Drawing a toss-up assembly map would require some rather absurd gerrymandering, given where Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin live. Johnson wrote:

The number of voters living in a closely divided neighborhood shrank. In 2000, a third of voters lived in a place decided by single digits. That fell to 23% in 2020.

A greater share of Democrats now come from extremely blue neighborhoods. In 2020, 21% of Joe Biden’s voters came from places where he received at least a 50-point margin of victory. Only 9% of Al Gore’s voters came from such partisan places. The share of Republican voters living in similarly red places only increased by 3% over this period.

Still, Republicans also contributed to the rise in asymmetrical polarization. The partisan lean of the median Democratic voter’s neighborhood barely budged from 2000 to 2020. The median Gore voter lived in a place where Gore won the vote by 4 points, while the median Biden voter’s community gave Biden a 6-point victory. Compare that to the change in the average Republican’s neighborhood. The median Bush voter in 2000 lived in a neighborhood which Bush won by 8 points. The median 2020 Trump voter’s neighborhood gave him a 15-point victory.

Here’s another way of looking at it. In 2000, 42% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans lived in a neighborhood that the other party won. Twenty years later, 43% of Democrats lived in a place Trump won, but just 28% of Republicans lived in a Biden-voting neighborhood. Today, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to live in both places where they are the overwhelming majority and places where they form a noncompetitive minority.

It’s basically impossible to draw a toss-up assembly map in Wisconsin, even though it’s a toss-up in statewide races. Though Republicans have drawn the map to insulate their advantage when statewide candidates do poorly, a “fairer” map would almost always give them a comfortable assembly majority anyway.

Read Johnson’s full piece (with helpful visualizations of the data) here.