'No plan is the clear winner': Redistricting expert breaks down proposed voting maps

 

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- The Wisconsin Supreme Court is weighing seven different proposals for how to redraw the state's legislative districts.

The submissions had to be in by Friday night, and the court will pick one of the maps this spring after reviewing the analysis of two out-of-state professors it appointed after striking down Wisconsin's current maps. 

The court's ruling could dramatically alter the state Legislature, where Republicans currently have a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate with 22 of the 33 seats, and a near-supermajority in the Assembly, with 64 of the 99 seats.

Liberals and nonpartisan analysts have branded the current maps as an extreme gerrymander for Republicans in a state where four of the last six presidential elections were decided by less than one percentage point.

Republicans counter the legislative results will be in their favor because liberal voters are largely clustered in urban areas, such as Milwaukee and Madison.

John Johnson, a research fellow at the Marquette Law School, compiled all seven maps in a single downloadable database. Beyond that, Johnson analyzed the maps fared on different guidelines established by the court.

Johnson's analysis, which compares the proposed maps against the outcomes of statewide elections in 2022, concludes five of the maps would see Democrats gain seats in the Legislature. Those maps include the submissions from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, Senate Democrats and the liberal legal firm, Law Forward.

In the maps submitted by Senate Democrats and UW-Milwaukee professor Matthew Petering, Democrats would gain a majority in the Senate based on the 2022 results. 

John Johnson's analysis used 2022 election results to project how the Legislature would look under the seven proposed maps before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Two of the maps maintain a significant Republican majority. Those proposals came from GOP lawmakers and the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL).

While partisan fairness is not a constitutional requirement for redistricting, the court, which swung to a liberal majority last spring, determined it would not sign off on maps that gave one party an unfair advantage.

Some of the key guidelines moving forward will be compactness -- whether maps avoid zigging and zagging into bizarre shapes -- and limiting how much cities and villages are split up. 

Johnson noted those criteria can be contradictory.

"One idea is districts should be as compact as possible. But you also need to keep municipalities together," Johnson said. "And some municipalities have strange, not very compact shapes."

Johnson highlighted how, in some cases, maps that fared on the same criteria could still have drastically different outcomes. The Law Forward and WILL maps did the best job of putting entire cities and villages in the same district. Yet, the WILL maps left Republicans with a 60-39 advantage in the Senate while the Law Forward maps narrowed the GOP majority to a razor-thin 50-49 margin.

"Even though they put forward these criteria and we can measure them, no plan is the clear winner across all of them," Johnson said.

Johnson said some key areas to watch on the map will be the suburbs around Milwaukee and Madison. He demonstrated how on a liberal-friendly map, there could be 15 Democratic-leaning districts if slices of Madison's inner suburbs were connected to more conservative rural areas. 

Republican-friendly maps limited South Central Wisconsin to 10 Democratic-leaning districts by containing Madison and its neighboring suburbs as much as possible. 

In the Milwaukee metro, the bluer Senate maps connected Wauwatosa and West Allis, which are trending Democratic, with parts of Waukesha, which has long been a Republican bulwark. The GOP-leaning maps kept Waukesha apart from the inner-ring suburbs. 

WILL President Rick Esenberg said the projected outcome of his firm's maps differed from Johnson's calculations.

"We think that the projected outcome in the Assembly [with WILL's maps] is more like 56-43, not 60 to 39," he said.

Esenberg said he believed the discrepancy in map models demonstrated why considering partisan fairness is a slippery slope.

"The fact that these questions are complex, I think, highlights some very serious problems with the process that we have underway here," Esenberg said.

CBS 58 also reached out to Law Forward and Senate Minority Leader Dianne Hesselbein (D-Middleton), but neither responded to messages Monday afternoon.

Last month, Evers' office issued a statement supporting the court's decision to strike down the current maps.

"I remain as optimistic as ever that, at long last, the gerrymandered maps Wisconsinites have endured for years might soon be history,” Evers' statement read.

The court has appointed Bernard Grofman, a professor at the University of California-Irvine, and Carnegie Mellon University fellow Jonathan Cervas as consultants who will review the seven submissions.

Both Grofman and Cervas have until Feb. 1 to give the court their analysis of the map proposals.