Activists Want to Gerrymander Wisconsin’s Maps. Will Janet Protasiewicz Let Them?

The Left’s recent takeover of the Wisconsin Supreme Court gives “progressives” a new opportunity to overturn the legislature’s U.S. Supreme Court-backed maps. The best course for justice is clear: Janet Protasiewicz is too biased to rule fairly and must recuse herself from the case.

Leftists won’t be satisfied until they’ve gerrymandered Wisconsin’s legislative maps to unfairly favor Democrats—thanks to out-of-state “dark money” and Janet Protasiewicz.

Precisely one day after “progressives” secured a new majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this year, the leftist group Law Forward filed a new lawsuit attempting to throw out the state’s legislative maps and replace them with a set that favors Democrats. Far from seeking “justice,” this is lawfare at its worst—and for conservatives, ugly proof that elections have consequences.

Some background: Once per decade, the Constitution requires states redraw their congressional and legislative maps to reflect population changes identified by the U.S. Census, a process called redistricting. There’s no getting around the fact that this is an inherently political process, just like electing politicians or making policy, and is largely controlled by the party that controls the legislature and, in most states, the governor’s veto.

In purple Wisconsin, that resulted in a years-long showdown between Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled legislature. In October 2021, legislative Republicans proposed new maps that largely conformed to the state’s existing district boundaries. Evers vetoed it in November and countered with his own maps, which gave Democrats an advantage in a key congressional district. The state supreme court ruled 4–3 in Evers’ favor in March 2022 after conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn sided with the court’s three liberals—until the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Republican legislature later that month, reversing the state court’s ruling and adopting the legislature’s new maps.

And that was that—until Janet Protasiewicz was elected in April 2023, handing the Left a new supreme court majority for the first time in 15 years. Suddenly “progressive” litigation groups had a new opportunity to expand Democrat power in Wisconsin for years to come, and they took it.

“Extreme Partisan Gerrymandering”

Left-wing groups started scheming to roll back the maps the day afterProtasiewicz’s victory in April, with the far-left Brennan Center crowing that “gerrymandering los[t] big.” Fast forward to August 2nd, the day after Protasiewicz was sworn in, when a new lawsuit appeared from two groups: Law Forward and its close ally in the lawsuit, Campaign Legal Center. Both are staffed by professional political activists and funded by a constellation of left-wing foundations to push their agenda in Wisconsin and help elect Democrats.

Republicans are (correctly) demanding Protasiewicz recuse herself from the case, pointing out that she called the current maps “rigged” and “unfair” on the campaign trail. If successful, the lawsuit would trigger new elections for the 17 state senators who were elected in 2022—12 of whom are Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu.

Is overturning the vote of the 868,110 Wisconsiners who voted in these races good for democracy? 14 of these candidates won election to a four-year term with at least 55 percent of the vote. Many Democrats complain about money-in-politics; we’ve traced nearly $8 million spent across all 17 elections by both conservative and “progressive” groups, funds which will be wasted if the lawsuit succeeds, leading to more campaign spending.

Yet the hypocritical Left would force a do-over in 2024 in the hopes it’ll give Democrats an edge.

Carefully Conceived

For activists, this has been a long time coming. We’ve traced 5- and 6-figure grants to Law Forward from the Hopewell Fund and New Venture Fund, part of Arabella Advisors’ $1.6 billion “dark money” network; the Joyce Foundation, whose board once included Barack Obama; the Threshold Foundation, a New York global warming funder; and the carpenters union. In 2021, Law Forward received another $250,000 from America Votes, one of the Left’s top get-out-the-vote groups for juicing Democratic turnout.

Law Forward was launched in October 2020 to boost Democrats “on redistricting and election litigation” by a pair of Democratic lawyers, Doug Poland and Jeff Mandell, with legal advice from former Sen. Russ Feingold (D), ex-Lt. Gov. Barbara Lawton (D), and Ian Bassin, who heads the anti-Trump litigation group Protect Democracy.

The group’s director, Nicole Safar, previously ran advocacy for Planned Parenthood Wisconsin and headed the leftist group ProgressNow (via its front, A Better Wisconsin Together), which advised operatives on getting out the Democratic vote ahead of Protasiewicz’s election. ProgressNow is one of the “recommended” funding targets of the Democracy Alliance, which gathers top Democratic mega-donors like George Soros to coordinate their political spending.

Source: A Better Wisconsin 2023 messaging strategy.

Poland and Mandell are themselves well-known political operatives who’ve contributed to Democratic campaigns. Mandell has advanced the Left’s ridiculous 2020 “fraudulent electors” smear, pretending that it’s against the law for parties to have contingent electors in contested elections (as happened in 1960).

Shortly before founding Law Forward, Poland and Mandell were engaged in a failed U.S. Supreme Court lawsuit to allow Wisconsin officials to count absentee ballots that arrived after Election Day 2020.

Not surprisingly, Law Forward is a close ally of Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight Action and Protect Democracy, which accuse conservatives of “voter suppression” and “seiz[ing] . . . control over election results.” The group was involved in a successful suit to reinstate tens of thousands of inactive voters who were removed in an effort to clean up the state’s voter rolls (what the Left labels “voter purges”). And in January 2022, it filed an appeal to keep drop boxes for mass mail-in balloting, something the state supreme court ruled was unconstitutional in July 2022.

All of these measures were designed to boost Democrat voter turnout under the guise of helping Americans vote. In truth, the Left only cares about helping its preferred voters cast a ballot.

What’s obvious is that this is a well-crafted campaign to help Democrats, who blame their failure to secure majorities in the state legislature on Republican gerrymandering instead of the truth: Their far-left policies are unappealing to most Wisconsin voters.

Janet Protasiewicz must recuse herself from any redistricting case and conservatives must defend the current maps—democracy itself is on the line.