In a 50/50 Wisconsin electorate, what does a 'neutral' election map look like?

When the Wisconsin Supreme Court last month ordered the creation of new legislative districts, it said those districts must not “advantage one political party over the other.”

We are about to find out what the justices meant by that.

Because in the 50/50 state of Wisconsin, there are deeply conflicting views over what a “politically neutral” map should look like.

Does it mean a map where the two parties have an equal chance of winning control of the Legislature?

Or does it mean a map that defers to the “political geography” of Wisconsin, which disadvantages Democrats in district-by-district elections because their voting power is more geographically concentrated?

Does that geography necessitate a map with a strong Republican tilt?

Or can you design a competitive map without a lot of creative, contorted and legally dubious line-drawing?

How the court answers these questions has huge political consequences. It will determine whether Republicans continue to enjoy a sizable edge for control of the state Assembly and state Senate, or whether the Legislature is basically up for grabs in 2024 and beyond.

The court plans to have new districts in place by mid-March for use in the November elections.

It has six plans to choose from. When you view them through a partisan lens, they fall into three categories:

• A plan drafted by the Republican Legislature that preserves the massive GOP advantage that characterized the map used in 2022 and the previous map in use from 2012 through 2020. These maps are widely regarded as gerrymanders and have locked in lopsided Republican majorities even in years when Democrats are winning at the top of the ticket.

• A plan drafted by a conservative legal group, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, that would reduce the current GOP advantage but still leave Republicans in a much better position than Democrats to control both legislative chambers.

• Four plans offered by Democrats, progressives and academics that would all but eliminate the Republicans’ current advantage, leaving both parties on a roughly equal footing in the fight for legislative control.

Choosing among these maps is a legal matter for the court but enmeshed with politics. The court’s ruling will shape the struggle for power between the two parties. It will determine how competitive legislative elections are going to be here. And it will dictate how responsive those elections will be to shifts in public opinion and in turnout from one year to another.  This column focuses on the political side of this issue, not the legal one.

There is virtually no chance the court’s 4-3 liberal majority will choose the first option listed above — the maps offered by GOP legislators. Those maps are very similar to the ones that a conservative court majority adopted in 2021 and that were used in the 2022 elections. But the court’s new, 4-3 liberal majority rejected those maps last month.And it’s hard to see how the new GOP plan conforms to the court’s insistence on a map that advantages neither side.  Under the map that the court overturned, Republicans won almost two-thirds of the Assembly’s 99 seats in 2022, despite losing the governor’s race that year by more than 3 points.  The Legislature’s new and old maps make it all but impossible for Democrats in Wisconsin to win control of either chamber of the Legislature, or even get very close.

It would also be a surprise to many political insiders if the court chose the second option. This is a map, proposed by the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, that meaningfully reduces the Republicans’ current advantage, but still leaves the GOP with a clear upper hand.

This plan, however, goes right to an issue at the heart of this dispute and redistricting fights in other competitive states, which is how a “fair” or “neutral” map should deal with the very different patterns in where Democratic and Republican voters live.

Democratic voters tend to cluster around large cities (Milwaukee, Madison), small cities (Eau Claire, La Crosse) and inner suburbs (Wauwatosa outside Milwaukee, Middleton outside Madison). Republicans are stronger in less densely populated exurbs and towns and across Wisconsin’s sprawling countryside.

This means Democratic voting power is more concentrated geographically. That pattern doesn’t really affect the competitiveness of statewide elections.  But it can hurt Democrats in district-by-district legislative elections because their voting power is typically confined to fewer seats. And those seats contain lots of “wasted” Democratic votes because the party is winning them by 60 or 70 points.

There is no disputing this feature of the state’s political landscape.

Does the GOP's 'natural advantage' lock in a Republican-friendly map?

But there are serious disputes over whether this “natural” advantage for Republicans necessitates a legislative map that is highly favorable to the GOP.

The Republican-friendly argument is that if you just draw maps based on non-political redistricting principles — districts should be compact, contiguous, and not split up too many counties and municipalities — you are overwhelmingly likely to end up with more “red” seats than “blue” seats. And to “correct” for that, to equalize the number of seats that lean red and blue, you have to put your thumb on the scale and engage in a kind of reverse gerrymandering to achieve a level playing field.

“A map that tracks Wisconsin’s natural political geography is far more ‘politically neutral’ than one that gerrymanders to overcome that natural disadvantage, as all of the (50/50) maps clearly do,” argues the WILL brief, which cites as an example how those maps seek to spread the very Democratic Dane County vote into districts that fan out into adjoining counties.  The broader Republican argument is that legislative control is not supposed to be strictly “majoritarian;” it’s not supposed to be a function of which party wins the most statewide votes but which wins the most districts.

The Democratic-friendly argument is that the GOP’s geographic advantage in Wisconsin (due to the concentration of Democratic voters) is not as large as Republicans claim and does not require the drawing of a heavily stacked map.  The parties who are seeking a 50/50 map all argue that you can get there in this state without going to outrageous lengths and without flouting non-political, constitutional redistricting standards like compactness.

“The Wright Map refutes the myth that Wisconsin’s political geography dictates the extreme partisan skew in the 2022 Map,” argues a group of mathematicians and social scientists in Wisconsin known as the Wright petitioners.

The broader argument on this side of the debate is that it’s in the public interest in a competitive state to have meaningful legislative elections (unlike now) that give both sides a chance and that are “responsive” to the electorate — that translate voting shifts into election outcomes.

How each map stacks up politically

So how do these maps actually differ politically?

There are lots of ways to measure this, many of them involving complicated metrics and formulas. But for the sake of simplicity, I am going to use a pretty basic set of measures.

To illustrate the partisan tilt in each map, I looked at how each district voted in the most recent races for president (2020), governor (2022) and U.S. Senate (2022), drawing on data provided by my colleague at the Marquette Law School, research fellow John Johnson.  Then I averaged the three results to get a partisan score for that district.

I used these statewide contests because they are recent elections, they are big elections, and they reflect the competitive character of Wisconsin. Democrats won the 2022 governor’s race by a little over 3 points and the 2020 presidential race by six-tenths of a point. Republicans won the 2022 Senate race by 1 point.  If a district voted Republican for president by 3 points in 2020, Republican for governor by 1 point in 2022 and Republican for U.S. Senate by 5 points in 2022, that district is treated as having an average 3-point Republican lean.

Based on this approach (or any other one you could possibly use), the Republican Legislature’s plan is extremely advantageous to the GOP. In the 99-seat Assembly, 62 seats would lean Republican and 37 would lean Democratic. In the state Senate, the GOP edge would be 22-11.   This plan goes well beyond the GOP’s “natural” geographic advantage to create an even more favorable playing field for Republicans.

The plan offered by the conservative legal foundation, WILL, has smaller but still sizable GOP margins: a 56-43 Republican edge in the Assembly and a 20-13 edge in the Senate.  This map, WILL argues, just reflects the GOP’s “natural” advantage.

Contrast that with the four remaining plans that all aim for rough parity between the parties.

Under the maps proposed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers plan, the breakdown would be 49 Republican and 50 Democratic seats in the Assembly and 16 Republican and 17 Democratic seats in the state Senate.

Under maps proposed by Democrats in the state Senate, the breakdown would be 51 Republican and 48 Democratic seats in the Assembly and 15 Republican and 18 Democratic seats in the Senate.

Under a plan offered by a liberal legal firm, Law Forward, the breakdown would be 49 Republican and 50 Democratic seats in the Assembly and 17 Republican and 16 Democratic seats in the Senate. The firm represents Wisconsinites who sued last summer to overturn the most recent maps.

Under the Wright petitioners, the breakdown would be 48 Republican and 51 Democratic seats in the Assembly and 16 Republican and 17 Democratic seats in the Senate.

As a caveat, you should treat these breakdowns as rough, not precise. That’s because you can generate slightly different breakdowns if you use a different set of elections as your barometer, turning a 50-49 Democratic edge into 50-49 or 51-48 Republican edge, or vice versa.

The basic takeaway is that these last four plans are all in the ballpark of partisan parity, measured by the number districts that advantage each party.  (My colleague John Johnson created a model that factors in the fact that GOP legislative candidates outperformed the party’s top statewide candidates in 2022; as a result, his model treats these proposed maps as a bit more favorable for Republicans than they are in the approach I am using here).    Of course, the breakdown of red and blue seats is not the only way to capture partisan advantage in a map.  It can even be a little misleading. A 52-47 GOP edge could be easily overcome by Democrats if the map included 3 or 4 seats that had only a 1-point Republican lean. And a 50-49 GOP edge could be very hard for Democrats to overcome if all 50 Republican seats had a GOP lean of at least 6 or 7 points.

An alternative way to measure partisan lean

So, another way to measure a party’s chances of winning a majority is to look at the makeup of the median seat, the one right in the middle of the partisan spectrum. In the Assembly, that’s the seat both parties need to win to get to a bare majority of 50.

In the map used in 2022 and in the new map offered by GOP legislators, the 50th or median Assembly seat has a GOP tilt of about 11 points (using my three statewide elections from 2020 and 2022)

That means that on paper, Democrats would need to win the statewide vote by roughly double digits to have a good shot at winning an Assembly majority. That’s a rarity, of course, in today’s polarized Wisconsin.By contrast, Republicans could keep control of the Assembly even while losing the statewide vote by 10 or 11 points.

Using the median seat as a guide, the Assembly map offered by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty is significantly less tilted toward Republicans than the map used in 2022 and the map proposed by GOP legislators, though it still leaves the GOP with much better odds of winning. The median Assembly seat has about a 6-point GOP lean in this plan.

In the four other plans that all aspire to level the partisan playing field, the median Assembly seat ranges from having a one-point GOP lean to having a 3-point Democratic lean, based on the three recent elections I’ve used in this analysis.

In short, under any of these four plans, it would be perfectly plausible for Democrats to win control of the Assembly next year for the first time since 2008. It would be very difficult but not entirely impossible under the WILL plan.  And it would take a political miracle under the map proposed by Republican state lawmakers.

One final and important way to look at these maps is how many competitive seats they feature, since that also helps determine how responsive legislative elections are to the voters. Many communities and regions in Wisconsin have grown more politically one-sided in recent decades, and fewer voters split their tickets today. These changes have helped reduce the number of truly competitive districts. But the maps that have been in place since 2011 have also reduced competition — by design.

Let’s somewhat arbitrarily call a district competitive if it has a partisan lean of 6 points or less (rounding off), based on the most recent races for president, governor and U.S. Senate.

Calculated this way, the maps with the highest number of competitive Assembly seats are the WILL map and the Wright map, both at 15. The other maps have between 8 and 10.

It’s not clear to what degree the court will consider this factor in the drawing of new districts.

But the biggest unknown is how it will evaluate the partisan bias or neutrality of the plans it is considering, and how it will weigh that against all the other criteria it is considering, from compactness to preserving communities of interest.

When the court overturned the current legislative maps, it did not do so on the grounds that they were politically biased and gerrymandered.  It didn’t take up that question, ruling instead on much narrower grounds.But the court said that it must be “politically neutral” in choosing new maps.

“We do not have free license to enact maps that privilege one political party over another,” the court’s liberal majority said.   The court set a Feb. 1 deadline (next Thursday) for two appointed experts to evaluate the map proposals before justices rule on new districts, a ruling that may well be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Barring an intervention by the nation’s highest court, it seems likely that the electoral struggle for control of the Wisconsin Legislature in this battleground state is going to be more competitive than it has been in more than a decade.

Craig Gilbert provides Wisconsin political analysis as a fellow with Marquette University Law School's Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Prior to the fellowship, Gilbert reported on politics for 35 years at the Journal Sentinel, the last 25 in its Washington Bureau. His column continues that independent reporting tradition and goes through the established Journal Sentinel editing process.

Follow him on Twitter: @Wisvoter.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: In 50/50 Wisconsin, what does a 'neutral' election map look like?