Wisconsin is not that MAGA. That’s one top-line takeaway from the latest Marquette University Law School poll, released this week, which shows 56% of Wisconsin voters disapprove of the job President Donald Trump is doing — his worst approval rating so far during his two terms in office. Violent immigration raids, a dangerous and ill-conceived war in the Middle East, high gas prices, ruinous trade wars, devastating health care cuts and economic uncertainty are clearly eating away Wisconsin voters’ enthusiasm for Trump, whom they elected by a narrow margin in 2024. That’s not great news for fervent Trump ally U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who won Trump’s endorsement in his campaign for governor.

It might also have something to do with the exodus of Republican leaders from the Legislature, with both Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu announcing their retirements, along with a growing crowd of other departing Republicans, some of whom represent newly competitive districts. 

Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chair Devin Remiker has been gleefully proclaiming that all those Republican retirements foreshadow a Democratic sweep of state races in November.

But while Tiffany will almost certainly be the Republican candidate for governor, on the Democratic side, we don’t know who will emerge from a seven-way primary race.

Which Democrat has the best shot at beating Tiffany was the main question on the minds of a handful of Democrats who gathered at a coffee shop in downtown Madison Tuesday evening to listen to a pitch from Joel Brennan, Gov. Tony Evers’ affable former secretary of the Department of Administration. Brennan, the only white, male candidate in the Democratic field, seems like the safe bet to many of the people who came out to hear him — more “electable” than the rest of the field of progressive women and people of color, as several attendees sheepishly told me. That assessment is entirely subjective at this point. The leading Democrat in the last three Marquette polls is Madison-based state Rep. Francesca Hong, a socialist, who is the top choice of 14% of Democratic primary voters, followed by former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes at 11%. All the other candidates are in the single digits, including Brennan, who only pulls down 2%. A large majority of voters — 65% — say they have not yet decided on a candidate. 

There’s no simple formula for “electability” in Wisconsin, a state where a majority of voters helped elect former President Barack Obama twice, then twice chose Trump. Wisconsinites also enthusiastically embraced Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, when he won 69 of 72 counties. U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin has proven it’s possible for a progressive lesbian from Madison to win in conservative, rural areas of the state, by listening and working hard on the issues that matter to her constituents. A successful, independent populist campaign by a candidate who is not a centrist or an establishment type is definitely possible in Wisconsin.

But it’s easy to see Brennan appealing to a broad cross-section of voters in the state. He seems like a decent guy with a folksy, well-meaning aura not unlike two-term Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. Like Evers, he talks a lot about reaching across the aisle and getting things done for the people of Wisconsin, regardless of the national political circus. He also warns that Democrats in the Legislature have been out of power so long they haven’t used the “muscles” one needs to engage in the work of compromise and deal-making that will inevitably be necessary to govern a closely divided state.

Under Wisconsin’s new, fair voting maps, Republicans can no longer act like they are the undisputed rulers of a one-party state. But Democrats, even if they win majorities in both houses of the Legislature, are likely going to have to manage narrow margins and make some efforts at bipartisanship. It’s also possible that we will continue to have a divided government. 

Many Democrats have been disappointed in the compromises Evers made with legislative Republicans. Maybe he could have driven a harder bargain on budget deals that allowed the state surplus to balloon while schools were starved of resources and property taxpayers picked up more and more of the tab. Maybe we could have done more to expand health care than the belated, one-year postpartum Medicaid deal that allowed us to finally get in line with 48 other states. Maybe we could have adequately funded our state’s SNAP program and avoided ruinous federal penalties for high error rates without tying that money to a ban on candy and soda that stigmatizes poor people and micromanages small pleasures but doesn’t actually improve people’s health.

On the other hand, dealing with the obstructionist, power-grabbing Republican majority was a thorny problem Evers dealt with essentially by himself. His most significant contribution is probably the passage of new, fair maps, which are suddenly changing that dynamic. Republicans are showing signs of dropping their obstructionist habits as they face newly competitive elections even as their national leader’s popularity craters. But even on fair maps, legislative Democrats didn’t close ranks behind Evers. After the state Supreme Court forced Republicans to abandon their gerrymander, their willingness to vote for the maps Evers endorsed made many legislative Democrats suspicious. Most of them didn’t vote for the new un-gerrymandered reality.

If Democrats win, that new reality will involve a new kind of struggle for both parties — moving from fighting tooth and nail with the other side to trying to move the state forward.

Before Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) announced his retirement Thursday, it was obvious something had changed. The longest serving speaker in Wisconsin history, known for keeping Assembly Republicans on a tight leash, slipped out of a caucus meeting late Wednesday night. Capitol reporter Baylor Spears tracked him down at a fundraiser at the Madison Club, where, she reported, Vos told her his caucus was meeting without him. Later that evening, Assembly Republicans announced that Vos had suddenly dropped his yearslong opposition to letting Wisconsin expand postpartum Medicaid coverage for new mothers for one year. Vos’ last-minute change of heart allowed eight Republicans facing competitive reelection races to hold a late-night press conference proclaiming the news that they planned to pass postpartum coverage, along with another measure extending life-saving breast-cancer screenings that Vos was suddenly permitting to come up for a vote. Vos himself didn’t bother to attend. 

With both Vos and Gov. Tony Evers retiring, the two most powerful politicians in the state — and the often dysfunctional dynamic between them — are going away. It’s the end of an era characterized by toxic partisanship, although probably not the last we’ll see of divided government in our 50/50 state. 

Still, as Vos relaxes his grip, Wisconsin Republicans are starting to wrap their heads around the new reality that they no longer hold complete control over what was once, effectively, a one-party state. 

New, fairer voting maps have already eroded gerrymandered GOP supermajorities in the Legislature that previously endured even when Democrats won every statewide race. In the upcoming November elections, the new maps will, for the first time, take full effect.

The creation of more competitive districts has not immediately ushered in an atmosphere of productive bipartisanship in the Capitol. But it did cause enough of a thaw that Wisconsin could finally join the other 48 states that have already expanded postpartum Medicaid. Republicans running in newly competitive districts can campaign on this bit of belated progress. Two cheers for Wisconsin! We’re 49th!

At the Vos-less press conference Wednesday night, Republicans gave emotional testimony about “the women who need this protection.” They thanked the speaker for finally listening to their pleas. Then, instead of reaching across the aisle, they delivered a scorching rebuke to Democrats who had been pushing for months for a vote on both of the women’s health bills they were celebrating. When the bills were not scheduled, Democrats vowed to bring them up as amendments to other bills, holding up action on the floor and threatening to put their GOP colleagues in the embarrassing position of having to vote down their efforts.

“I’m very angry at what happened today — very angry,” Rep. Patrick Snyder (R-Weston) said. “I talked to my Democratic colleagues and told them that I was close, that it was going to get done, but then they throw this crap at us today. It almost blew it up.”

By speaking up, Democrats nearly ruined Republicans’ efforts to gain support within their own caucus, according to Snyder. That analysis caused Democratic Minority Leader Greta Neubauer to roll her eyes. “It seems that the bills are going to the floor after years of Rep. Pat Snyder telling us that these bills were going to be passed and them not being passed, so it does seem like our actions made a difference today,” Neubauer said. 

Partisan habits die hard. For much of the most recent legislative session, Republicans formed a Sorehead Caucus whose sole aims were rehashing grievances about their loss of power and trying in vain to recreate the dominance they enjoyed when they controlled every branch of government. 

Back in 2018, when Evers won the first time, breaking the GOP stranglehold by beating former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Republicans held a lame duck session to claw back the incoming governor’s powers. Eight years later, as Evers is about to leave office at the end of his second term, they’re still at it. Motivated by spite over Evers’ line-item veto extending their modest, two-year increase in school revenue limits for the next 400 years, they have insisted on starving school districts of state funds, punishing not only Wisconsin schoolchildren but also the property taxpayers who, in the absence of state funding, are forced to pick up the tab. 

In a similarly spiteful vein, Republicans just killed off the popular, bipartisan Knowles Nelson stewardship program, setting up the 36-year-old land conservation effort to die this summer. Over and over in hearings on whether to renew the program or drastically cut it back, Republicans cited a state Supreme Court decision that held they cannot anonymously veto individual conservation projects. GOP legislators said the decision — written by the most conservative justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court — left them no option but to gut the program just to show who’s boss. 

As Henry Redman reports, a handful of conservation-minded Republicans could have joined forces with Democrats to save the program, but Republican bill authors insisted on negotiating only within their own caucus, ignoring Democratic efforts to make a deal and instead trying to please the program’s far-right enemies by making deeper and deeper cuts before finally giving up and letting the program lapse.

This style of governing — a hangover from the Walker era — might satisfy certain politicians’ hunger for power, but it’s ill-suited to getting anything productive done for the people who live in the state.

Let’s hope Vos’ departure marks the end of the petty partisanship that has blocked progress in Wisconsin for far too long.