Only Republicans Could Get Fewer Votes and Claim a 'Mandate' to Govern
On Monday, Wisconsin's Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel conceded defeat to his Democratic opponent, Josh Kaul. This now gives the state a Democratic governor and a Democratic AG, as well as driving another spike into the heart of Scott Walker's tenure in Madison. However, Wisconsin remains a political drop-case, as Isthmus explains here.
Despite Democrats winning every statewide office on the ballot and receiving 200,000 more total votes, Republicans lost just one seat in Wisconsin’s lower house this cycle. And that victory was by a razor-thin 153 votes. Democrats netted 1.3 million votes for Assembly, 54 percent statewide. Even so, Vos will return to the Capitol in 2019 with Republicans holding 63 of 99 seats in the Assembly, a nearly two-thirds majority.
Vos likes to frame it this way: If you discount uncontested races - a third of the entire Assembly - Republicans won 58 percent of the vote. “That seems like a mandate to me,” Vos told his caucus. “What do you think?”
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Democratic minority leader Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) doesn’t see it that way. He says his party is “competing on the most uneven playing field in the United States” because Republicans have “disenfranchised thousands of Democrats.”
This result, of course, is the product of a gerrymandered election map that was so egregiously crooked that it caught the attention of even this United States Supreme Court, which, in Gill v. Whitford, decided not to decide, sending the case back to the lower court for re-argument and leaving the door open just a crack to the possibility that it might one day rule on partisan gerrymandering.
“The biggest obstacle remains gerrymandering. There are only a handful of districts that are remotely competitive. That’s why a district court ruled the [legislative] maps unconstitutional and why we still have a case before that court,” says Hintz, referring to Gill v. Whitford which the U.S. Supreme Court sent back to the lower federal court for reargument. “Gerrymandering doesn’t just have an impact on the outcome. It has an impact on being able to recruit candidates. There aren’t a lot of people willing to run when they know they don’t have a shot.”
The first thing the Republican majority decided to do after Walker was defeated was to hobble the incoming Democratic governor because of what the Republican leader in the Assembly called his "mandate to govern." I guess in this case we really can't say that said mandate was "stolen." It was "appropriated," maybe. Or it could have been "pulled out of thin air." Experts are divided.
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