Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has submitted such transparently partisan maps to the liberal-controlled state Supreme Court that we can only dub them “Dr. Evil’s Maps” for their sheer political game playing. In each story of this multi-part series, we will zoom in on an egregiously partisan decision by Evers to better educate the public on what has happened here. This is part 1.
Gov. Tony Evers’ new maps pit powerful state Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August against a fellow Republican, Amanda Nedweski, in newly drawn maps that appear to miss placing August in Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s district by about SIX houses.
August thinks that was a (somewhat hysterical) mistake by Evers, whom he believes meant to put him in Vos’s district but used an old address since he’s moved three times in recent years, all within the Lake Geneva area. Evers submitted the maps to the liberal-controlled Supreme Court on Friday.
Because it’s so close, and because August’s past address IS in the newly drawn Vos district and because Democrats mistakenly used his same old address in maps before, August believes the Democratic governor thought he was pitting August with Vos but screwed up. Even so, he told Wisconsin Right Now that he thinks it’s raw partisan politics for the governor’s maps to pair him with another fellow Republican – Nedweski.
“It’s obvious what they’re doing,” he said of Evers and his map-drawing team. “We still have to look at the maps as a whole. I am sure there are a lot of pairings of Republicans. It’s clearly a political move even if they made a mistake and got it wrong, even if they were using the maps to try to get rid of me and Robin. I believe they were trying to put us together and made a mistake.”
However, “even if they had my address correct, by putting me in with another incumbent where I have a small percentage of the new district, it makes it clear they are making it as difficult on me as possible,” August said.
They’re also messing with August by putting him in a new district that contains very little of the area he’s represented for years, about 5-10%, although those specific numbers are still being vetted, he said. More of the district is Nedweski’s previous district. This gives August, a powerful Republican leader in the Assembly, a distinct disadvantage.
“It appears they draw me in with Nedweski,” August said. Amanda Nedweski, a Republican from Kenosha, was elected to the state Assembly in 2022. She has served on the Kenosha County Board.
In contrast, maps submitted by the Republican Legislature deal with only the issue of “contiguity” that the liberal Supreme Court outlined in its decision invalidating the GOP maps. They don’t meddle with much else. Pairing Republican incumbents against each other is a raw political power move in a process the governor has told the public is “fair.”
August believes there will be many other examples of such Republican incumbent pairings as Legislative experts analyze the maps. We intend to report on the pairings – and other issues in the maps – as they are unearthed to educate the public about the partisanship at play here.
We initially reported Friday night that Evers’ maps had pitted Vos against August. August said he and Vos “came to the same conclusion” Friday night because it’s so close even using his new address.
It turns out the address easily available online for August and in usually accurate datamining sites is an old one; he’s moved. That’s the address we had used and that he thinks Evers used too. That address is in Vos’s new district.
August said he was contacted by a Wisconsin State Journal reporter on Saturday morning who also had the wrong address for him, and he noted that Democrats have used an old address for him by mistake when drawing maps before. Told his new address, the State Journal reporter then recontacted August and sent him screenshots claiming he’s actually paired with Nedweski and is out of Vos’s district by about six houses.
August said this is all so complicated and fresh – seven sets of maps were filed at 5 p.m. Friday – that the Legislature’s mapping experts themselves thought initially last night that he was paired with Vos. He said they were on their way to Madison Saturday morning to pore through it all and confirm the State Journal’s screenshots showing him in Nedweski’s district and six houses away from Vos’s.
“He sent me a screenshot where my house is with the lines; it appears he’s correct,” August said of the reporter. “I called our guys right away; they were in the car on the way to the Capitol. On their cursory review last night, they were like, ‘Oh, they put Tyler and Robin together.’ We kind of expected they would do that. It looks like they (Evers) tried to do that and made a mistake.”
If that’s true, and Evers’ map drawers used the wrong address as August believes, it’s somewhat hysterical because he thinks – although they are still working to confirm – that Vos is then without a Republican challenger in his newly drawn Evers’ district. The court will choose which of the seven map sets to pick, if any, after they are reviewed by two out-of-state unelected consultants picked by the liberal majority. They can also draw their own maps or the court could.
According to August, he has moved three times in recent years within the Lake Geneva area. The State Journal initially had an even older address that he used two addresses ago, he said.
Part of the problem with all of this is the extremely rushed timeline that the court set, which has been a matter of appeal by the Republican Legislature. The court usurped the powers of the chief justice on scheduling and then put the maps case through at warp speed, leaving even those most directly affected completely unclear on which districts they will have to run in next August or November.
August said it would be hard for him to just move and avoid running against Nedweski. “If it’s the governor’s map, I could literally move six houses down, but I’d be with Robin again.” If he moves to the west, it “triggers a primary with Ellen Schutt,” another Republican. He doesn’t want to move somewhere else because, “the vast majority of my current district I’ve represented those folks for the entire time I’ve been in the Legislature. I feel more tied to them than anything. I ran to represent my community. I don’t want to represent someone else’s community. I want to represent mine.”
He said older Democratic maps previously missed another Republican’s driveway “by a half a mile” when they were clearly trying to draw him out of his district, so such a mistake “wouldn’t be unprecedented.”
“If I had to guess, it would be that they (Evers) just got my address wrong, and they were trying to put us together, but made a mistake, he said. “So I have to confirm that. Robin’s staff is in the Capitol working on it right now, but from the screenshots I’m getting, and I’m doing this on my phone, it does look like I would be with Nedweski.”
According to August, he’s represented his current district for about 14 years.
Here’s how the map looked using August’s past address, but he’s moved about 6 blocks outside Vos’s new green district below.
Pairing Republican incumbents against each other is pure game playing that does nothing to resolve the issue outlined by the court – contiguity. In fact, it’s an obvious attempt to destabilize the Republican leadership in the state Assembly and to get rid of one of Evers’ top two Republican foes.
And there is clearly no foe he would like to force out of politics more than Robin Vos. Tyler August would likely be a close second. They are the top two leaders in the Assembly.
Yet Evers lied, saying in a press release, “I’ve always promised I’d fight for fair maps – not maps that favor one political party or another – and that’s a promise I’m proud to keep with the maps I’m submitting today.” You be the judge.
August was “first elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly in 2010, and is currently serving his seventh term,” his bio says.
Vos’s bio says he “was first elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly in 2004 and is currently serving his ninth term as a state representative. Robin is the 75th Speaker of the Assembly and the longest-serving Speaker in Wisconsin history.” He lives in Burlington.
Here Vos and August are sitting behind the governor during one of Evers’ State of the State addresses.
Republican pairings is a raw power grab. And we’re not letting the governor get away with it – hence, we are exposing it here.
Evers’ maps are one of seven sets of maps submitted to the court on Friday. Some are drawn by Republicans. See them all here. The court will ultimately pick. However, as the Democratic governor, Evers is going to have a lot of sway with a liberal-controlled court.
The liberals on the court have already shown that they are willing to engage in raw power politics, which is not the role of the court. Even though the state Constitution gives the Legislature the power to redistrict, and the court already chose the Legislature’s maps after the US Supreme Court tossed a previous version of Evers’ for improperly using race, the liberals threw out the Legislature’s maps. They did so right after a new justice, Janet Protasiewicz, took office, propelled there by $10 million from the state Democratic Party and after prejudging the legislative maps as “rigged.”
The liberal majority argued that the legislature’s already-ruled-on maps were “unconstitutional” because the Constitution requires districts to be “contiguous” (all connected), and the Legislature included municipal islands in theirs (chunks of annexed land, often vacant or sparsely populated.” A previous federal court, the state Supreme Court, and Evers himself were fine with municipal islands before. The Legislature was just following municipal boundaries in including them, which is also required by the Constitution.
The new maps submitted Friday by the Republican Legislature argue that the court should simply dissolve the little islands into their surrounding districts, since the court has now suddenly deemed them such a problem, and make no further changes, to avoid exactly the type of game playing Evers is exhibiting in the newly proposed Vos/Nedweski istrict.
Two unelected out-of-state consultants, handpicked by the liberals, will have the first go at choosing a set of maps, but ultimately the liberal court is going to decide.
But the public should know exactly what Democrats are trying to do here.
This is only part 1.
We have updated this story with the new information about August’s pairing and address.
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