John --

We wanted to share this must-read op-ed with you on Tony Evers’ abysmal failure with his proposed maps last week.

While Tony Evers has been promoting his “People’s (AKA Liberal) Maps Commission” for months, he didn’t get the response he hoped for on the final product.

In fact, before 17 Democrats including Assembly Minority Leader Gordon Hintz voted against the maps — which Senate Republicans were forced to introduce because no Democrats were interested — Democrats blasted the maps as “a perversion of justice,” a “con,” and “stealing minority representation rights.”

According to former State Representative and redistricting expert Joe Handrick:

The Evers maps are a disaster in nearly every way and by nearly every measure. Fittingly, they were soundly rejected recently by a bipartisan super-majority in the state Assembly. Democrats in the Senate would not even take it up, opting to propose their own plan.

Wisconsin has made great gains in minority representation in the Legislature since the 1980s. In 1992 the federal court selected a map for Milwaukee County legislative seats I drew on behalf of legislative Republicans.

That map increased the number of predominantly Black Assembly districts in Milwaukee from four to five and, for the first time in history, created a second Black Senate district. This implementation of the Voting Rights Act continued in both 2002 and 2012. Today Wisconsin has six Black Assembly districts, two Black Senate districts, and two Latino districts.

Along came Gov. Evers and his commission. They picked up the ball and ran the wrong way.

His commission presented a map that, by my calculations, would reduce the number of Black Assembly districts from six to two and eliminate one of the two Black Senate districts. Furthermore, the commissioners drew the Latino district that was the center of the 2012 trial at a lower Latino level than the judges rejected at that trial.

[...]

Finally, the governor’s commission went the wrong direction on disenfranchisement. Due to population shifts, some Wisconsin residents are always temporarily disenfranchised in state Senate elections because they don’t get to vote for a state senator for six years. The commission decided to set a record on disenfranchisement.

In one of the most embarrassing and resounding defeats for Tony Evers in his nearly three years as governor, Evers’ maps were so bad that he couldn’t even get Democrats to support them. If Tony Evers can’t even unite Democrats, how can he claim to be able to unite Wisconsin?

You can read more about Evers’ maps disaster from Handrick’s op-ed here, or read our press release about the issue here.

Thanks,

Team WisGOP