In 2011, as tens of thousands of left-leaning demonstrators occupied the Wisconsin state capitol to protest a new bill gutting public employee unions, a prank caller posing as the right-wing billionaire David Koch got the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, on the phone. Just two years after Barack Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points, Walker had been swept into office by the Tea Party wave. He saw the anti-union law, Act 10, as his chance to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Ronald Reagan, who’d fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981, a devastating blow to the labor movement. Republican governors nationwide, Walker boasted, would follow his lead. “This is our moment,” he told the man he thought was Koch.
In addition to eviscerating unions, Act 10 was designed to undermine the Democratic Party that depended on them. If similar bills were “enacted in a dozen more states,” wrote the right-wing activist Grover Norquist, “the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics.” Pro-union forces in Wisconsin tried hard to fight back. Democratic legislators fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum. Students walked out of schools and teachers held sickouts. People camped at the capitol for almost three weeks, with sympathizers around the world sending them pizzas. As demonstrations spread to other states, The New York Times drew comparisons to the Arab Spring, asking if Wisconsin was “the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights.” But Republicans jammed the law through, and Wisconsin’s hard right turn was underway.
Walker and his party would go on to lock in G.O.P. rule, enacting shockingly lopsided electoral maps and assuring continuing Republican control of the state legislature, as well as dominance of Wisconsin’s national congressional delegation. Nothing since, not even the election of a Democratic governor, has been able to loosen Republicans’ gerrymandered grip on the state. That grip has been used to restrict voting rights, pass an anti-union right-to-work law, cut funding to education, dismantle environmental protections and make Wisconsin one of the hardest states in the country in which to cast a ballot.
Democrats, on the other hand, are powerless to pass laws of their own. In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled, 4-3, that the state must adopt new, even more gerrymandered maps passed by the legislature. As Craig Gilbert wrote in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, under those maps, to win a bare majority in the Assembly, Democrats would have to win the statewide popular vote by double digits. The Wisconsin Democratic representative Mark Pocan put it this way: For Democrats to win a majority in the legislature, “The Republican Party would have to come out and say we’re now the party of the Chicago Bears and the Minnesota Vikings.”