Now that the midterm election dust is settling, allow me to kick up a fuss just one more time.
Here in Wisconsin, good things happened for Democrats. Every statewide constitutional office (governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and treasurer) will now be occupied by Democrats who won Tuesday. And U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin easily won another term in D.C. Voters ousted GOP two-term Gov. Scott Walker and his chief legal henchman, Atty. Gen. Brad Schimel.
Those blue wins should bring relief from state GOP rules and laws that ripped apart the Wisconsin's traditional and proudly progressive environmental protection laws, cut taxes for the rich and corporations (in some cases zeroing them out), greatly weakened public and private employee unions and devastated public education, secondary and college.
Wisconsin news media made clear the above wins, but reporters too often doted on the fact that Republicans hung on to their congressional delegation and both houses of the state legislature, even padding their latter ranks by a couple of seats. So, went the journalistic ruminating, Wisconsin Democrats really didn't have a blue wave election.
Well, there's a huge but underplayed reason for that, and understanding the reason will show any fair-minded person that Wisconsin Democrats did indeed sweep the table -- but only that part of the table the state Republicans didn't first block with rhetorical barbed wire and political land mines.
You see, in Wisconsin as in some other states, a gigantic tsunami of statehouse Democratic victories was impossible in advance, thanks to the state GOP's secret move after they won power in 2010 to lock in the most heavily gerrymandered redistricting plan in the union. Every Wisconsin legislative district and congressional district was heavily skewed, with crazy borders designed to pack Democratic voters into as few districts as possible.
Result: Despite racking up tens of thousands more votes statewide in legislative races again and again, state Democrats over and over would up with only around 40 percent of the legislative seats. Republicans, to borrow a line, didn't let voters pick their representatives. Republicans instead picked their voters. And they magnified gerrymandering's impact by pulling their increasingly stark vote-suppression schemes, including tossing hundreds of thousands of registered voters off the election rolls for in many cases dubious reasons.
To sum up: Politically purplish Wisconsin, after one GOP wave election turned it heavily red, would as in the old Soviet bloc stay that way "forever," since the GOP would control all future levers of power. Or so the Republican reasoning has gone.
So it wasn't some lack of will by the Wisconsin Democratic Party or voters that produced Tuesday's outcome. The legislative results already were baked into the terrain, with a giant Republican sea wall in place to wash many blue votes aside. But the Democrats grabbed every seat of government that wasn't nailed down, including the few dozen legislative districts made far more blueish by the GOP to marginalize and contain that opposition.
This situation is not in fact permanent, but it will pertain at least until the next U.S. Census data triggers mandatory 10-year redistricting in 2020. Every state has its own redistricting methodology. Wisconsin relies on one of the worst: partisan legislators redraw the maps, and the majority GOP has arranged things so that its lawmakers again will be able to game the system by configuring those maps to its own benefit.
Ah, but this time, Democratic governor -- Tony Evers and not the GOP's Scott Walker --- will sit in the state Capitol. He will have and very well may use veto power over any GOP gerrymandering scheme. Moreover, Republicans don't have the supermajorities required to overturn his vetoes.
But unless a compromise can be reached (and state Republicans simply have refused to compromise with or be inclusive of Democrats whatsoever since the tea-party era began) gerrymandering again may become a matter for the similarly Republican-skewed state courts. It's possible the federal courts again can be brought to bear, although any GOP-unfavorable rulings there may end up in the right-wing majority U.S. Supreme Court.
Opponents of Wisconsin’s gerrymander came very close to seeing it overturned in the U.S. Supreme Court but last June the court declined to overturn the GOP scheme. The court said it wasn’t sufficient to claim that Wisconsin’s districts were drawn to favor one party or another. Plaintiffs who were voters needed to prove that gerrymandering made them individually unable to vote for a candidate of their political preference.
Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested that if the opponents returned with a mathematical proof of the latter claim, the court might consider after all. Plaintiffs developed what they considered a strong such proof, but Kennedy has left the court and it is more rigidly conservative now.
Even so, the situation simply is not permanent. If state Democrats are PR savvy, they will hang this issue around the necks of Republicans like a burning rubber tire. Those Republicans after all are acting unfairly; they cheat and deny hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin residents and voters of due process and the one-person, one-vote principle, and selfishly control more government than they deserve.
These Republicans are like the rude guests at a dinner who not only have huge second helpings but also third helpings, wiping out the dessert tray before everyone else finishes their first plate. Uncouth and gluttonous, in other words. But ordinary Tums won't help them avoid their own political indigestion. Nope. It will take sparkling, effervescent, progressive grass-roots action will ease their gut hurt and return them to pasture.