Why were state legislative districts redrawn for 2024, but congressional districts remain unchanged?

Wisconsin politics were shaken up this year with the signing of new legislative maps that ended over a decade of extreme and effective Republican gerrymandering.

It was the first time in Wisconsin history a Legislature and a governor of different parties agreed on legislative redistricting, the Legislative Reference Bureau told Wisconsin Watch.

In a good Republican year across the country, Wisconsin Democrats flipped 14 seats in the Legislature — largely because of those new maps. It wasn’t enough to win a majority in the Assembly or the Senate, but the resulting 54-45 and 18-15 splits better reflect Wisconsin’s swing-state status.

Wisconsin’s congressional maps were not redrawn. Republicans kept six of the state’s eight congressional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The state’s current congressional maps were drawn by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and approved by the then-conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2022. The last time a governor of one party and a Legislature of another agreed on congressional maps was in 1991.

Evers’ maps were slightly more favorable to Democrats than the previous decade’s maps, but they didn’t change that much because the court established a “least change” rule when deciding which maps it would approve. That meant they would largely conform to the Republican maps that had been in place since 2011.

In March, the now-liberal high court denied a request to reconsider the state’s congressional maps before this year’s elections without stating a reason. Evers had asked for changes to the congressional maps soon after he signed the new legislative maps into law in February. Those maps were approved by the GOP-controlled Legislature.

Elias Law Group filed a motion in January asking the court to revise the congressional boundaries ahead of the 2024 election. The Democratic law firm argued that new maps were justified after the court abandoned the “least change” approach when deciding on the legislative map challenge last year. In that case, the state Supreme Court said it would no longer favor maps that present minimal changes to existing boundaries.

Democrats argued that Evers’ congressional boundaries drawn in 2022 were decided under the “least change” restrictions later thrown out by the court in the legislative redistricting case.

Republicans pushed back, arguing that newly elected liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz prejudged the case during her 2023 campaign. They requested she recuse herself from the case. But Protasiewicz said she decided not to vote on the motion to reconsider the congressional maps because she wasn’t on the court when the underlying case was decided.

Republican Party of Wisconsin chair Brian Schimming in a statement called the court’s decision “the demise of Governor Evers’ latest attempt to throw out his own hand-drawn congressional maps.”

Republicans have retained control of six of Wisconsin’s eight House seats, with Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Gwen Moore safely controlling the two districts that cover Madison and Milwaukee. In comparison, Democrats held five of the eight seats in 2010 — the year before Republicans redrew the maps.

The 1st and 3rd districts are currently the only competitive congressional districts in Wisconsin, represented by Republican Reps. Bryan Steil and Derrick Van Orden respectively. Steil won his race this month with 54% of the vote, and Van Orden won with 51.4% of the vote.

Conservative Chief Justice Annette Ziegler and Justice Rebecca Bradley in their concurrence wrote the new majority’s “reckless abandonment of settled legal precedent” in the legislative redistricting case “incentivizes litigants to bring politically divisive cases to this court regardless of their legal merit.”

Representatives of Elias Law Group did not respond to Wisconsin Watch when asked if they anticipate another legal challenge to the congressional maps ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“I remain very interested between now and 2030 in trying to find a way to get the court to … tell us whether partisan gerrymandering violates the Wisconsin Constitution. I believe it does,” Jeff Mandell, founder of the liberal legal group Law Forward, told Wisconsin Watch. “I believe the court will say it does when we present the right case.”

But Mandell said nothing has been drafted, and his group won’t bring a case to the Supreme Court unless it has “got the goods.”

This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.