LoginFour things we learned from Tuesday’s Democratic tsunami in Wisconsin
Tuesday was a surprising, historic Election Day across the nation, though in Wisconsin it culminated a Democratic effort that progressed through fits and starts ever since Gov. Scott Walker smashed the power of public sector unions in 2011.
Here’s what we learned in Wisconsin:
The Walker Republican era of Wisconsin government is over.
As Brittany Carloni reports today, Democrats have waited 16 years for this moment.
A national Democratic tsunami helped Democrats flip eight Assembly seats and three Senate seats, giving them 53-46 Assembly and 18-15 Senate majorities.
A rising tide of opposition to President Donald Trump’s tumultuous second term clearly lifted all ships. Democrats flipped a legislative district between Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls that Trump won by 7 percentage points just two years ago. The Republican phalanx that retiring Assembly Speaker Robin Vos held together through the end of the Walker era and eight years of split government under Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has crumbled.
When the tea party movement swept Walker and Republicans into power in 2010, they controlled 60 Assembly seats and 19 Senate seats. They used that mandate to try to create a permanent Republican majority in the state, passing Act 10 to cripple public sector unions, enacting strict voter ID to make it harder for students and low-income people to vote and drawing some of the most gerrymandered legislative districts in the nation.
They passed conservative priorities, including a 20-week abortion ban, right-to-work, concealed carry of firearms, expansion of private school vouchers statewide, major tax cuts particularly for farmers and manufacturers and pro-business deregulatory measures. They even put the brakes on a Milwaukee-to-Madison rail line.
But Wisconsin is a purple state, and the great pendulum of purple state politics has now swung back to Democratic control. What Democrats do with that power will keep our reporters busy for years to come.
Voters want equality, but maybe not through shortcuts.
Voters more than doubled the number of elected Black governors in U.S. history, electing David Crowley in Wisconsin, Byron Donalds in Florida, Aaron Ford in Nevada and, in Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the first Black female governor in U.S. history.
Wisconsin now has elected its first Latino- and Hmong-American candidates statewide in Secretary of State-elect JoCasta Zamarripa and Treasurer-elect Yee Leng Xiong, who also becomes the first Hmong American elected to statewide office in U.S. history.
But voters also passed by a nearly 13-point margin a constitutional amendment that will prevent the state from giving scholarships to and designing government programs for specific minority groups and women, commonly referred to as diversity, equity and inclusion programs, or DEI. This was one of the few bright spots Tuesday for Republicans, who put three constitutional amendments on the ballot in the hopes of driving GOP turnout and circumventing Evers’ veto pen.
Opponents of the anti-DEI amendment, like the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, say the amendment was confusing. It asked voters to “prohibit governmental entities in the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration?”
Who would be against prohibiting discrimination?
But Democrats have long argued that minority groups have continued to disproportionately face barriers because of the country’s dark history of institutionalized racial discrimination. Wisconsin is home to some of the biggest racial disparities in the country in terms of health, wealth and incarceration.
Like in 2008 when they voted for Barack Obama for president by large margins, Wisconsin voters affirmed they want to turn the page on racism. But, assuming voters knew what they were voting on, they may not be willing to prioritize equity in order to achieve racial equality.
The Republican redistricting argument was proven (again) to be false.
Democrats in all likelihood should have taken control of the Legislature in 2018 — if the state’s political maps had been drawn fairly in 2011.
Instead Republicans used their majority to draw maps in secret and tweaked them so that they could withstand a Democratic wave election like the one in 2018 when Evers defeated Walker and Democrats won all statewide offices. But Republicans maintained near super majorities in the Legislature at the time. Republicans then argued that they retained the Legislature because Democrats packed themselves into cities while Republican voters were spread out in rural and suburban areas.
But Democrats rallied to elect a liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which tossed out the gerrymandered maps, leading to the current maps that aren’t so wave-proof. In 2024, as Trump won statewide, Democrats flipped 14 legislative seats, setting up this year’s fait accompli.
History could repeat itself. If Democrats win the presidency in 2028 and pass unpopular legislation or give Republicans enough firepower to forge a Tea Party Movement Part II, Republicans could sweep back into power in 2030 just in time for the next round of actual decennial redistricting.
Bonus note: The midterm Republican gerrymandering exercise in states like Texas, Florida and North Carolina proved to be a giant dummymander. Bipartisan redistricting reform’s day may have finally come — unless Democrats haven’t learned a thing.
Billionaires don’t control the government. The people do.
Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany’s entire gubernatorial campaign was almost entirely fueled by three billionaires — the same ones who engineered the conservative takeover of the Wisconsin Supreme Court 20 years ago and the Republican wave of 2010 (remember the video of Diane Hendricks and Walker discussing his plan to “divide and conquer” Wisconsin with right-to-work legislation and Act 10?).
Elon Musk spent roughly a half-billion-with-a-B dollars on these midterm elections nationwide. Although, for the world’s first trillionaire, that’s like a U.S. household with the median net worth of about $200,000 spending $100 on this election. (Do the math. It’s crazy.)
But as Wisconsin showed in 2025, when the state shattered the national record for spending on a state Supreme Court election, including Musk’s legally dubious voter giveaway, money can’t buy you happiness or a guaranteed win on Election Day.
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Four things we learned from Tuesday’s Democratic tsunami in Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
