Dear fellow Wisconsin Democrats,

The long, dark night of ultra-partisan gerrymandering is over, and a new day for democracy now dawns in the Badger State.

A few minutes ago, Governor Evers signed a new set of state legislative maps into law for Wisconsin. These maps are graded “A” for fairness by the head of the nonpartisan Princeton Gerrymandering Project. The current maps scored an F.

With the stroke of a pen, Wisconsin went from a “democracy desert” to, well, a democracy.

This was all possible because of you.

Wisconsin’s gerrymandering crisis begin in 2011, when Republican lawmakers—bound in secrecy by nondisclosure agreements as they worked with operatives at a lobbying firm—drew legislative lines that guaranteed that even landslide election losses wouldn’t cost them their majorities. The result was one of the most egregious, extreme partisan gerrymanders in American political history.

In 2012, and again in 2018, Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly voted for Democratic majorities in the state legislature—but Republicans won huge majorities of the seats. In 2020 and 2022, Democrats won major statewide victories, but Republicans won near-supermajorities.

All the while, Republican politicians in Wisconsin have used their power to take more power away from the people of our state—restricting access to the ballot, removing authorities that voters had entrusted to statewide elected officials like the Governor and Attorney General, and smashing the freedoms of workers to organize and advocate for themselves. For thirteen years, the democracy-proof legislature has been laying siege to democracy itself.

But those statewide victories added up. In 2018, 2020, and 2023, voters built a new progressive majority on the State Supreme Court. By electing Governor Evers and preventing GOP supermajorities, they stopped hard-right maps from being signed into law. And last year, a civic uprising prevented Republicans from impeaching Janet Protasiewicz. In December, the Supreme Court ruled that Wisconsin’s legislative maps were unconstitutional. Every one of those fights was a necessary step towards this moment. And now, a fair set of maps is the law of the land.

This wasn’t easy. You had to keep the faith. You had to knock on doors, call phones, chip in, share your views with friends and online—year after year, in election after election, never giving up, even when it felt like all was lost.

But you did it.

Today, the work doesn’t end. Far from it. The candidate recruitment process now goes into overdrive. And at the same time, we remain vigilant in case Republican politicians in Madison and their allies once again, through the courts or any other strategy, attempt to thwart majority rule.

Today, we commit. To doing the work. To ending the malign speakership of Robin Vos. To breaking the GOP supermajority in the State Senate — and paving the way towards a Democratic state Senate majority in 2026. To doing everything in our power to, at long last, translate the will of the people of Wisconsin into the law of the land.

This is a story with millions of heroes. You’re one of them. From all of us at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, please know you have our boundless gratitude.

In solidarity,

Ben

PS: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask. Flipping dozens of state legislative seats is going to take resources. Can you chip in to help us organize voters in districts in every corner of the state where, at long last, Democrats have the chance to win?