1LABORATORY FOR OLIGARCHY
In the late spring and early summer of 2011, soon after tens of thousands of progressive activists had demonstrated at the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison to protest Governor Scott Walker’s bill stripping public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights, Republican members of the legislature walked across the street to the shiny glass office of Michael Best and Friedrich, the party’s go-to law firm. The GOP was in control of the state’s redistricting process for the first time since the 1950s, and Republicans were shown to the “map room,” where their aides were drawing new political districts in secret following the 2010 census.
The legislators signed confidentiality agreements, pledging not to discuss the work with anyone, even though the redistricting process was financed with taxpayer funds and maps had traditionally been drawn at the capitol, not at a private law firm. “Public comments on this map may be different than what you hear in this room,” read the talking points distributed to GOP legislators. “Ignore the public comments.”
The new maps had titles like “Aggressive” to describe how they favored Republicans. “The maps we pass will determine who’s here 10 years from now,” a legislative aide told the Republican caucus. “We have an opportunity … to draw these maps that Republicans haven’t had in decades.”
On July 11, 2011, the maps were introduced in the legislature; no Democrat had seen them before they were released. There was one public hearing, two days later, and the reshaped districts were approved the next week on a party-line vote.
Publicly, Republicans downplayed the significance of the maps. “This looks fair to me,” said the GOP state senator Van Wanggaard. “I don’t have anything jumping out at me.”
But state politics had been transformed virtually overnight. Nowhere was this more evident than in Wanggaard’s hometown of Racine, one hundred miles east of Madison.
Wanggaard, a former cop with blond hair resembling Dennis the Menace, lived on a quiet, tree-lined street in a neighborhood known as the Danish Village for its Scandinavian ancestry and numerous bakeries. His two-story white house had a large American flag hanging from the porch and a pro-police “We Back the Badge” sign in the yard. Two houses to the south, his state senate district—the 21st—abruptly cut off to exclude the rest of the largely Democratic neighborhood near Lake Michigan.
It used to be one of the state’s most competitive senate districts, encompassing all of rectangular-shaped Racine County, a fifty-fifty mix of urban and rural communities in southeast Wisconsin. But the new redistricting maps converted the swing district into one that favored a Republican by sixteen points.
It was now shaped like a horseshoe, pulling in the Republican countryside of Racine and Kenosha counties while excluding heavily Democratic urban areas, except for the block where Wanggaard lived. “It’s a prime example of how a party in power chose a district for their guy,” said John Lehman, a Democrat who represented the 21st before Wanggaard.
Lehman, a longtime public school teacher whose grandfather came to Racine in 1929 to work in a foundry, represented the district from 1996 to 2010. He lived five blocks from Wanggaard and used to teach at the same high school where Wanggaard was sometimes stationed as an off-duty cop. Wanggaard defeated him in 2010 by three thousand votes, but Lehman beat Wanggaard in a recall election in 2012 after Wanggaard voted for Walker’s highly contentious antiunion legislation. “I voted for every conservative item that the governor brought forward,” Wanggaard told Wisconsin Public Radio. Wanggaard had once been the rep for his police union and his vote to strip public-sector unions of collective bargaining rights infuriated his constituents. Racine’s police union endorsed Lehman, who won by 819 votes.
By then the new district lines had been drawn by Republicans, but they didn’t take effect until after the recall, which put Lehman in the awkward position of winning an election in his competitive old district but serving in the new, deeply Republican one. He used to represent all of Racine, a city of seventy-five thousand with a large Black population, but his district now stretched to the resort town of Twin Lakes on the Illinois border. In between were old farms, new McMansions, and small towns with yard signs that said “Keeping Christ in Christmas.”
Lehman was six feet five with a bushy gray mustache. Everyone knew him in Racine. But when he spoke at a Memorial Day parade in Twin Lakes, throwing candy to kids, “nobody knew who I was,” he said. When he scheduled listening sessions in the district’s rural areas, nobody showed up. “I tried to serve the district, but it was like a foreign land,” he said.
The new boundaries effectively nullified the recall election Wanggaard had lost and all the unpopular votes he’d cast in favor of Walker’s arch-conservative agenda. “It was unwinnable for a Democrat,” Lehman said. Wanggaard ran again in 2014 and won by twenty-three points.
Most of the state legislature’s Republican majority was just as secure. In 2012, Obama carried Wisconsin by seven points and Democratic legislative candidates received 51.4 percent of the statewide vote, but Republicans retained 60 percent of seats in the assembly. Under the Republican map, the number of safe GOP seats in the 132-member legislature had increased from 55 to 69 while the number of swing districts decreased from 24 to 13. It was a practically foolproof system: no matter the public mood or how extreme their agenda was, Republicans would maintain control of state politics. “Even when Republicans are an electoral minority, their legislative power remains secure,” one federal court noted.
Entrenching GOP dominance by manipulating core democratic institutions represented a huge shift not just in Wisconsin’s politics, but in its culture as well.
The state had often swung between red and blue but had long been known for the idea that government should represent the common good regardless of who was elected. “The basic principle of this government is the will of the people,” said Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, the state’s influential governor and US senator from 1901 to 1925. La Follette pushed for progressive reforms such as women’s suffrage, the direct election of presidential nominees and US senators, and a ban on corporate donations to political candidates to expand democratic participation and counter the influence of the robber barons.
Teddy Roosevelt called Wisconsin “a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.” The state paved the way for landmark policies like Social Security, unemployment insurance, and collective bargaining rights for unions.
But Walker and the Republicans elected in 2010 launched a counterrevolution against what had come to be known as the Wisconsin Idea. The gerrymandering in Wisconsin, which was replicated by Republicans across the country in 2011, was just one part of a larger strategy to systematically tilt the state’s democratic institutions in the GOP’s favor. Rather than government working for the many, Walker wanted to concentrate power in the hands of an elite and wealthy conservative white minority. If he succeeded, he wrote, Republicans could “do it anywhere in the country.”
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Todd Allbaugh became a Republican in 1980, when he was in the fifth grade, after meeting his local GOP chairman and putting a Reagan poster in his bedroom. Allbaugh worked for Wisconsin Representative Steve Gunderson, the first openly gay Republican in Congress, and then became chief of staff for the state senator Dale Schultz, whom the Madison Capital Times called “the last remaining moderate Republican in the state legislature.”
“In the 1980s and ’90s, when I went to Republican conventions, I heard about the need to create a bigger tent, to bring new people into the party,” Allbaugh said. Republicans controlled the state government during much of that time but never passed laws limiting the ability to vote. Indeed, Wisconsin was one of the first states to adopt Election Day registration in the 1970s, which significantly boosted voter turnout, and trailed only Minnesota in voter participation in 2008.
Allbaugh received a rude awakening when he attended a closed-door meeting of the State Senate’s Republican caucus in the late spring of 2011. They were considering a new bill requiring government-issued photo ID to vote, a top priority for Wisconsin Republicans since the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, when George W. Bush lost the state by less than one point. The party blamed the losses on voter fraud by Democrats in Milwaukee, a majority-minority city long scapegoated by white conservatives, along with high turnout among Black and young voters.
These complaints resurfaced after Wanggaard lost his recall election by eight hundred votes in 2012. His lawyer said that election officials in Racine had “used procedures that would make Fidel Castro blush.” Republicans claimed that voter registration forms were found in a dumpster, poll books were unsigned, and union members were bused in from Michigan to vote illegally. “Anyone who argues … that we do not need voter ID either wants to conceal these potential fraudulent activities or hasn’t been paying attention,” Wanggaard said.
Yet no evidence of fraud turned up when the county sheriff and district attorney, both Republicans, launched a month-long investigation. Behind closed doors, Republicans offered a different rationale for the law. Since gerrymandering only applied to US House and state legislative races, GOP senators argued the voter ID law would boost the party’s prospects in all races by depressing the votes of core Democratic constituencies.
“We’ve got to think about what this could mean for the neighborhoods around Milwaukee and the college campuses around the state,” the state senator Mary Lazich reportedly said, rising from her chair and smacking the table for emphasis.
Schultz asked his colleagues to consider not whether the bill would help the GOP, but how it would impact the voting rights of Wisconsinites. According to Allbaugh, the state senator Glenn Grothman cut him off. “What I’m concerned about is winning,” he said. “We better get this done while we have the opportunity.” Two other GOP senators were “giddy” and “politically frothing at the mouth” over the bill, Allbaugh recalled, while three others sat “ashen-faced” during the debate.
“It made me physically ill,” Allbaugh said. “It was like a gut punch. I never thought, after all the years of dedicating my life to helping advance the Republican Party, that I would sit in a meeting of Republican officials and hear them openly plotting to impede another citizen’s voting rights.”
Copyright © 2024 by Ari Berman
