You
Next week Zach continues his interviews with candidates running for governor.
Look for more of his reporting on air and online in coming weeks.
The battle lines are drawn once again over voting district lines.
This time Wisconsin congressional districts.
Republicans have blasted the order but the Wisconsin Supreme Court
assigned a pair of three judge panels to hear two lawsuits
that argued that the state's congressional maps must be redrawn
because they are unconstitutionally favoring of Republicans.
Six of the state's eight districts are currently held by Republicans.
The court battle in Wisconsin is playing out in the midst of a national redistricting battle
as President Donald Trump is trying to preserve a slim Republican majority
in the House in the 2026 elections.
Director of the Elections Research Center and Professor of Political Science
at UW-Madison Barry Burden is here with more and thanks very much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
So in your expert view do Wisconsin congressional maps
unconstitutionally favor Republicans?
Well they certainly favor Republicans whether this constitutional or not
will be an issue for the courts.
You know there are eight districts in the state.
Six of them are held by Republicans.
Two of the seats held by Democrats.
It's been that way for a while.
That's one of the contentions.
At least in one of the cases is that it's been a durable and predictable outcome.
The drawing of those maps which really began in 2011 under Scott Walker
and Republicans continued essentially with a least change version of that
after the 2020 census that it has locked in a 6-2 majority.
So in that sense it's certainly tilted towards Republicans.
So other than the 6-2 district margins what stands out about these maps?
They're not competitive.
At least four or six of those seats are unlikely to be held by anything
but a Republican or Democrat sort of regardless of who those people are
and what the campaigns are like and what the issues are like.
We know well in advance the second district, the eighth district.
What kind of party is going to represent those seats?
Only two of the seats.
The first and the third are anywhere near competitive.
We have Republican incumbents in both of those districts.
They lean Republicans.
There's always a possibility of an upset there but even those have been reliable
for Republican victories.
Why was congressional redistricting kind of left off the table when Wisconsin redrew
and then passed into law new legislative maps?
We don't know exactly because the Supreme Court wasn't transparent about that.
There were lawsuits brought to the Supreme Court focusing on the state legislative districts
and the congressional.
They took up the state legislative districts and that eventually resulted
in new lines being drawn for the assembly and state senate.
The congressional maps they decided not to touch and sent them back really without any
message as to why they were not taking them up.
It now in retrospect seems to be something about the process because those same groups
came forward essentially with similar lawsuits but now filed in Dane County court.
That's following an old process from 2011.
We might talk about that maybe is where the court was telling those litigants to go.
Because what kind of a precedent is there for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to order circuit
judge panels to hear the cases challenging these maps?
Well it hasn't been done before and that's because the law that enabled it was perhaps
in 2011.
Ironically by Scott Walker and Republicans when they were unhappy that Democrats
seemed to be filing suit in Dane County repeatedly where they thought they would get
a favorable hearing from a judge there.
This requires that any case that has to do with the apportionment or districting
at the congressional level or the state level has to result in three judge panels
being appointed by the Supreme Court and those judges can't all come from Dane County.
They've got to be scattered across circuits around the state.
So that's what the court did last week in creating two of these panels to deal with
the two cases before them.
So in the national redistricting battle are those efforts about the actual fairness of
maps or directed toward partisan advantage?
It's all partisanship I would say at this point.
That comes also from the Supreme Court which before this latest round of districting
back in 2018-2019 dealt with a case that ended up with the court saying any level of
partisan shenanigans in drawing districts at least for Congress under federal law is
completely fine.
That's not a matter of law.
It's not a matter of constitution.
So it's noteworthy that these two cases in Wisconsin are under state law and state
constitutions going to the state Supreme Court.
So the litigants have decided to steer clear the federal courts because there's no
longer a remedy there at least when it's about partisanship.
Because how does the decision just released by the U.S. Supreme Court on Texas maps inform
what happens with redistricting going forward?
So Texas is where this all began.
This is a really strange era wherein that many states are redrawing maps in the
middle of the decade.
We're sort of halfway between the last census and the next census.
Texas began with maps that were drawn to favor Republicans by adding about five
seats there that would also take away about five seats from Democrats so a 10-point
swing.
Those maps were declared illegal a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday decided to allow those maps to go forward partly because
they thought the federal court intervened too close to the primary in Texas which
comes up very quickly.
Candidates are beginning to file already just next week to get in.
And they weren't convinced that it was going to be a violation of the Voting Rights Act
anyway.
So it looks like the new map in Texas is back on and all of the activity in the other
states is also happening.
So does that kind of create an arms race of changing maps across the country?
It does.
So Texas was first.
The main response to that was in California where Democrats decided to override their
commission that draws districts by having a ballot proposition.
They've now created new districts that add about five Democratic seats.
So essentially canceling out what Republicans did in Texas.
Now we've got Missouri, Florida, Virginia, maybe Maryland, maybe Illinois,
Indiana, some other states, Utah because of a court ruling there.
There's a lot of redrawing and it's not clear in the end which party is going to be
advantaged but it's the most partisan manipulation of this process we have ever
seen.
In Wisconsin, is there any chance in your mind that new congressional maps could be
drawn before the midterms?
It's hard to see how that timeline gets met.
We're just now beginning to have hearings and some motions and filings for those three
judge panels that were appointed.
There's going to have to be evidence brought.
The judges are going to have to rule over those cases.
If they decide the congressional maps need to be struck down, then new districts need
to be created by some process, either the state legislature or the governor or the
courts appoint someone to do that process.
It all needs to be in place probably by the end of March so that candidates know
where to file.
The filing deadline is in June for a primary in August.
This was a crunch when the state legislative districts were redrawn two years ago but the
final maps were adopted around this time.
The rulings were just around Christmas time and the maps came shortly thereafter.
We're behind that schedule.
It seems very difficult to get that done in time.
All right.
Well, Barry Burton, thanks so much.
Thanks for having me.
Question in which I had and I tossed.
In terms of this kind of mid-cycle or mid-ten-year census, how rare is that?
Very rare.
So in the 1960s, there were the Supreme Court decisions that were the one person, one vote
decisions that equalized the populations of districts.
Since that era, this doesn't happen.
It happened once in Texas.
If you remember under Tom DeLay, there was a sort of scandal there and they tried to
redraw them and Democrats left the state.
Other than that, it doesn't happen.
Unless a court intervenes and there's a ruling that the districts are violation of law, in
the 1800s, it happened a lot.
It was a sort of the Wild West and states where some of them were redrawing the districts
every year.
But we're in an era where that should not happen.
So what do people like you, experts in this realm, think about what you're seeing now?
Well, I think it's harmful.
It has a few negative effects.
So one is it's going to turn California and Texas and Indiana and Maryland into one-party
states.
There are going to be very few Republicans from California, maybe no Democrats in Indiana,
maybe no Republicans in Virginia.
So in the aggregate, maybe the Congress will look like the country, but state to state,
it's going to be very imbalanced.
There are going to be a lot of people who are not represented adequately.
Another harm is, I think, what it does, the public opinion that everyone is watching,
both sides doing this.
So there's a both sidesism in this.
Everybody does it.
Everything is fair game.
What's next?
So it's today's drawing districts.
In the House, there have been a couple special elections this year.
The new member who was elected in Tennessee on Tuesday was seated within a couple of days.
Even those elections have not even been certified yet.
So that was a Republican.
So Speaker Johnson is very eager to get that person in.
The Democrat who was elected in a special in Arizona wasn't seated for about 50 days.
So those are just hard bar politics that now seem totally okay because it's part of the
partisan gamesmanship that's in the districts and everywhere else.
Interesting.
Well, even if you were a good government type, right, and thought that this is not how this
process should go, once somebody does it, like California.
California.
And Democrats feel more tension in this.
They want to do the right thing by good government, but they also don't want to get beat.
So Republicans don't feel any tension.
They feel like this is the right and proper thing to do.
And Trump is asking for it.
Well, thank you.
Thank you so much.
Oh.
Marissa just said that they were still recording when we talked about after I said thank you.
And they want, she wanted to know if we could use a chunk of that online.
Yeah.
Yeah, if it seems okay to you, it's fine with me.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right.
Sure.
Watch your step on our diet.