The Guardian: How gerrymandering allows a purple state to promote Trump’s big lie

Over the last few months, an attack on democracy has slowly escalated in Wisconsin.

A group of Republicans in the state legislature, encouraged by Donald Trump, is pushing an illegal effort to undo the 2020 election. They want to rescind Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes for Joe Biden – something that is not legally possible. The GOP-controlled state assembly appointed a special counsel to review the 2020 election, who has encouraged the decertification effort, embraced conspiracy theories, and produced a 136-page report filled with misleading information. He has also suggested jailing mayors of some of the largest cities and employees of the state elections commission for opposing his investigation. And like their counterparts in many other states, Wisconsin lawmakers have advanced a series of measures that would make it harder to vote.

But this fall, those promoting these anti-democratic measures are likely to face few, if any, consequences at the polls. Republicans will probably easily hold control of the Wisconsin legislature. It’s a result made possible by extreme partisan gerrymandering.

A decade ago, Republicans won control of the state legislature as part of a state-by-state national effort to win control of legislative bodies that control the redistricting process. They subsequently drew district lines that gave them a severe advantage for the next decade. The districts are so distorted that Republicans can hold a majority in the state assembly, the lower legislative chamber, even if they don’t win a majority of the statewide vote. For the past decade, Republicans have held nearly two-thirds of the seats in the assembly, including in 2018 when Democrats won the governor’s race and every other statewide office. …

In the decade since the successful GOP effort to take control of state legislatures, voting rights groups and other reformers say there is now greater awareness than ever of gerrymandering – an issue that long went overlooked. Even so, getting people to look beyond congressional gerrymandering and at distortions for state legislative districts can be a challenge, said Suzanne Almeida, redistricting and representation counsel at Common Cause, a government watchdog group.

“Particularly, given the polarized nature of the US Congress, it’s a lot more straightforward to tell a story of Democrats versus Republicans on the national level than it is to think through the nuances of what happens on the state level,” she said. The policies that most directly affect people’s lives, she added – school funding, public health policy and voting rights among them – are all decided by state legislatures. One recent survey found that Republicans are more likely to identify state legislatures as an important forum for driving policy decisions.