Gerrymandering works with two basic moves. They're called packing and cracking.

Packing means stuffing as many of your opponent's voters as possible into a single district. They win that one seat in a landslide — eighty, ninety percent — but all those extra votes are wasted. They could have helped win seats somewhere else.

Cracking is the opposite. You take a community that would have enough voters to win a district and split it across two or three, so they're outnumbered in every one.

That's what happened in Sheboygan. A city with fifty years of Democratic representation was cracked in half — split between two districts packed with enough rural voters to flip both. The people didn't move. The lines did.

In Wisconsin in 2018, thanks to gerrymandered maps, one party won sixty-three of ninety-nine Assembly seats with just forty-five percent of the vote. Nearly two-thirds of the seats, with less than half the votes. Perfectly legal. But it doesn't need to stay that way.

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What are packing and cracking? The two core techniques of partisan gerrymandering. Packing concentrates opposing voters into as few districts as possible so they win those seats by huge margins but "waste" votes that could have been competitive elsewhere. Cracking splits a community of opposing voters across multiple districts so they're outnumbered in each one. The two strategies work in tandem: you pack some voters so you can crack the rest. (Marquette Law Faculty Blog; UW Applied Population Lab)

The Sheboygan story: Democrats held Sheboygan's Assembly seat in all but four years from 1959 to 2011. During the 2011 redistricting, Republicans split the city between the 26th and 27th Assembly Districts, each drawn to include enough rural voters to ensure Republican wins. The city went from 50 years of Democratic representation to zero — without its voters moving. (Wisconsin Watch / WPR)

The 2018 election numbers: Republicans won 63 of 99 Assembly seats with just 44.75% of the statewide vote. Democrats won approximately 53% of votes but only 36 seats. That year Democrats won every statewide race (governor, attorney general, etc.) but couldn't come close to an Assembly majority. (Wikipedia; Wisconsin Watch)

The efficiency gap: Under the 2011 maps, the Wisconsin Assembly's efficiency gap — a measure of how many votes are "wasted" due to gerrymandering — averaged 11%. In 2018 it hit 15.4%, the fourth-highest Republican skew in nearly 1,000 statehouse elections between 1972 and 2020. (PlanScore via Wisconsin Watch)

The margins tell the story: In the 10 closest Assembly races Republicans won in 2022, the average margin was 7.5 points. In the 10 closest for Democrats, it was 15.2 points. This asymmetry is the signature of packing — Democratic wins are lopsided while Republican wins are efficient. (Wisconsin Watch / WPR)

New maps are now in place. Governor Evers signed new legislative maps into law in February 2024 after the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled the old maps unconstitutional. The 2024 elections were the first under the new maps, and Democrats flipped 10 Assembly seats.

"Perfectly legal" — and the Supreme Court says it's not their problem. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that partisan gerrymandering claims are political questions beyond the reach of federal courts. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Constitution does not provide federal courts with a standard for judging when partisan gerrymandering goes too far. This means reform must come from state courts, state legislatures, ballot initiatives, or Congress — not the federal judiciary. (Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684)

General resources on gerrymandering and redistricting:

• PlanScore — Nonprofit that scores redistricting plans for partisan fairness using the efficiency gap and other metrics.
• Princeton Gerrymandering Project — Grades every congressional and state legislative map in the country for partisan fairness, competitiveness, and geographic features.
• MIT Election Data + Science Lab (MEDSL) — Nonpartisan research lab producing election data, including redistricting analysis and election performance metrics.
• Brennan Center for Justice — Research and advocacy on redistricting reform, with detailed state-by-state analysis.
• Dave's Redistricting App — Free tool that lets anyone draw and analyze redistricting maps using real census and election data.

Related Civic Minute segments: The Sheboygan Story (CM-6), What Gerrymandering Is (CM-7), Competition (CM-8), How Safe Seats Make Politics Worse (CM-10)