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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we head toward the 2024 election year, it might not be too much of a stretch to say, "As goes Wisconsin, so goes the nation." The battle for this Midwest swing state is already going on. In April, Wisconsin voters elected Judge Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat to the State Supreme Court, and defenders of democracy breathed a sigh of relief. Protasiewicz's Republican opponent in that race, Daniel Kelly, was reported to have advised the state GOP on the fake elector scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Voters chose Judge Protasiewicz, and she won in a landslide that tipped the ideological balance of the court and signaled a possible and to the extreme gerrymandering that has given Republicans near complete control of the State House. Justice Protasiewicz's term began August 1st, but barely six weeks in before she's even heard a case, Republicans in the state have threatened to impeach her.

This has local but also national implications. We will zoom into Wisconsin now with Dan Kaufman, journalist and author of the book, The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics that was published in 2018. His recent story in The New Yorker is headlined, The Wisconsin G.O.P.'s Looming Judicial Attack. Dan, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

Dan Kaufman: Thanks for having me, Brian. It's always a pleasure. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Let me invite some listeners in right away. Is there anybody tuning in now in Wisconsin or originally from Wisconsin? How do you see all this playing out in your backyard? Help us report this story and why should the rest of the country be paying attention or any questions for Dan Kaufman? 212-433-WNYC. Maybe you saw his New Yorker article. 212-433-9692, or text to that number, or tweet @BrianLehrer. By way of background, tell us a little bit more about Justice Protasiewicz and how she became a member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and why that matters.

Dan Kaufman: Sure, Brian. Just one slight clarification too on your intro.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Dan Kaufman: It's a nonpartisan race for the Supreme Court. While she's widely perceived as a liberal and Kelly a conservative, and they have ties, her campaign was supported by the Democratic Party and his in various ways by the Republican Party, it's a nonpartisan race, but she ran-- The court has really cemented a lot of anti-democratic interventions by Republicans and conservatives in Wisconsin's kind of civic infrastructure over the past 12 years since Scott Walker won the governorship and the Republicans took control of the legislature.

This was a rare opportunity for liberals and progressives to reclaim a majority on the court, and it was the most expensive judicial race in American history. It costs more than $50 million. I think there's a lot of reasons for that. Wisconsin both has, as you mentioned, an outsized role in presidential politics. It's the swingiest of swing states. It went for Trump very narrowly in 2016 and then went for Biden by almost the same margin in 2020.

There were basically three states in the Electoral College that were tipping-point states, and Wisconsin was the only state that was on that list of three in both 2016 and 2020. Its importance really can't be overemphasized. I think there were two issues that Justice Protasiewicz ran on. One was gerrymandering and the other was abortion. She expressed her pro-choice values in various debates.

Wisconsin was operating under after Dobbs, and operating under a very draconian 1849 law that basically prohibited all abortions except to save the life of a mother. Going back to the gerrymandering question, which has defined Wisconsin politics since 2011, the Republicans established a secret gerrymandering in a law office across the street from the state capitol. There was no input from the public or any Democratic person.

There was a federal case brought about by this gerrymandering, and it was actually the first ruling against partisan gerrymandering in three decades. During that process, a lot of documents were discovered to just how extreme this gerrymandering was, and Republicans have never lost more than-- have never had fewer than 60 out of 99 assembly seats since then despite Democrats winning a majority of the aggregate vote statewide.

It's cemented their control of the legislature. In fact, they now have a supermajority in the state Senate, which Princeton Gerrymandering Project has said is the most heavily gerrymandered legislative body in the United States with a partisan bias of about 20%. This was a huge issue for people that were frustrated, not just Democrats. There were many Republicans that supported fair maps and so on, and Janet Protasiewicz had an event at a forum and said that the maps were rigged.

Republicans after the election got really apoplectic about these comments because they saw their two lawsuits being brought before the court or will be soon. These are challenging the gerrymandering, and now it seems clear that there are sufficient votes to overturn. It is the most extreme partisan gerrymandering in the United States, and it's cemented this control. Out of that talk of impeachment, suddenly it was a desperate attempt to hold onto power even though she had just won an election.

As you say, she hadn't even heard a case, and there's basically no precedent for something like this based on comments that she had said on the campaign trail. In fact, it's pretty much an empirical fact that the maps were rigged. There's documents in these court cases that show, emails and so on that show Republican aids discussing just how far to go in certain districts. It's clear that they were rigged, but that has caused a lot of consternation. Anyway, that's a little bit of the background.

Brian Lehrer: Right. When you talk about that 2011 context and the gerrymandering, listeners may remember the name Governor Scott Walker, who made a lot of national news for the way he was trying to weaken the public sector employees' unions but was also involved in this, so Scott Walker, right among other Republicans at that time. Republicans in Wisconsin are already trying to impeach this new justice on what grounds?

Dan Kaufman: Well, they say that because she received money from the Democratic Party, although the Democratic party is not a litigant in either of these cases, that she has a stake in the outcome. They pulled back a little bit from impeachment. I'll just catch you up, since my story was published, there's a lot of developments-

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Dan Kaufman: -and they've hold back a little on the surface. However, Robin Vos, the Speaker of the Assembly has said he's going to appoint a panel of former Supreme Court justices to advise him on impeachment. This is also unprecedented, and there's no public input in any of this. At the same time, they did a radical about-face and said that they would support on Tuesday, in Iowa style, nonpartisan fair maps with the legislative bureau drawing the maps as a nonpartisan agency.

However, there's a couple of very important key distinctions in their plan. In fact, a lot of people view it as simply a guise to continue their gerrymandering in other ways. For example, they can simply reject the maps that are drawn by this legislative bureau twice, and then the third time, they need just a majority vote to pass them. It's a lot, and this bill was drawn up within 24 hours. There was no public hearing. I think that's an important part that's missing from this story is how the public has been shut out of this process.

Wisconsin, as some of your listeners know, has a storied progressive history that goes back a century. One of the tenets of that was open government and transparency and involving the citizenry in their government. That has been totally corrupted over the past 12 years, and there was no public hearing on this new bill. It was just around through her vote last night, and the governor has promised to veto it because it doesn't safeguard--

In fact, it would just probably continue this gerrymandering but with a sunnier face by not being so aggressive. At the same time, they're still threatening impeachment by appointing this secret panel of justices who haven't even been named. One of them is a man named David Prosser, who was accused of choking his liberal colleague during deliberations over the Act 10, the law that you mentioned that gutted collective bargaining rights for public employees.

It's a very tense moment and it has wide implications for the rest of the country, both Wisconsin's role as a swing state, but also if they succeeded impeaching a justice who was just elected by Wisconsin standards, a landslide, they would create a new mechanism for sidelining a judge over a decision that they didn't want he or she to make. I think it has huge, huge implications for the rest of the country.

Brian Lehrer: I do notice that we're not getting any phone calls. Where are you cheeseheads? I imagine somebody out there with connections to Wisconsin, who originally comes from Wisconsin, even though this isn't a Wisconsin radio station broadcasting in Wisconsin primarily, might have something to say here. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Dan Kaufman. Before we get into presidential politics, when you talk about the extreme gerrymandering in Wisconsin, does it apply, not only to the state legislative districts, which is what you were talking about, but also to the congressional districts?

Because New York is going through this with a redistricting process that's been thrown out by the courts. Other states that are bluer may not have redistricted their congressional districts with as aggressive a partisan gerrymander as some of the red states. Does this also affect who has control of Congress?

Dan Kaufman: It does. It's a different process. What's been most legally contested has been the state legislative maps, but yes, the congressional maps have been gerrymandered too. There's certain federal restrictions that play in there, but yes, probably, there's six Republicans in Congress from Wisconsin now and two Democrats, and they have been-- This process is called packing and cracking, where they'll pack Democratic districts and those people send--

It's in Madison and Milwaukee mainly, and they win by huge percentages because the Democrats are packed in there. Yes, it does play out. The legal case was involved in the state legislative maps, and they have wide implications because it's essentially made the governor, not exactly powerless, but he has a veto, but it's really limited any ability. In fact, in such a closely divided state, they now have a supermajority in the state Senate, and they're two votes away in the state assembly in which they could override any of Governor Evers's vetoes.

In fact, they're trying to pick off a couple of Democrats to pass their version of this fair maps bill. It's really distorted the state to such a massive degree, a state that is widely pro-choice and still has a strong progressive tendency in a lot of issues, but it's being governed in this way that doesn't really reflect that. Going back to it again, I think that's one reason Janet Protasiewicz resonated with so many people, including many Republicans, who felt that they weren't getting proper representation, including from the Republican legislators because their only fear was that somebody further to the right might challenge them in a primary.

In fact, Robin Vos, the speaker, was almost knocked off by a fringe right-wing candidate that Trump endorsed because he was upset that Vos wasn't investigating Wisconsin's 2020 election strongly enough, even though there was no basis for any kind of fraud or anything like that. Vos then immediately set up a sprawling and baseless taxpayer-funded investigation that led nowhere. That's the context, and it's really distorted the idea that these representatives--

In fact, somebody in my piece at the end, a Republican former state senator, talked about that and how there used to be a tradition of independence in the state and how that has been corroded and corrupted by this gerrymandering. Even Republicans used to-- there were many representatives that used to feel proud to do things for their constituents, and now, they're subservient to their leadership and not willing to buck them even on the most extreme. Essentially what Vos is saying is we're going to nullify this Supreme Court election that was just overwhelmingly the choice of the people.

Brian Lehrer: So much of this that's so disturbing to a lot of people in Wisconsin, I gather, and now some of our listeners because now our phones are blowing up. Sometimes people just need--

Dan Kaufman: Where are you cheeseheads? I like that line, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Sometimes people just need a little bit of a nudge, and my producer suggested that we give a personal invitation on the air now to a guy named Aaron Rodgers who used to live in Green Bay and is now in the New York area and has a lot of time on his hands. I'm sorry to even make that joke, fellow Jets fans, I know the state of grief. Of course, we're also told that Aaron Rodgers might be more likely to listen to a certain kind of alternative media, but that's another show.

A listener texts, "Wisconsin resident, longtime listener. I'm horrified by the GOP in my state and fear that my ability, and quite frankly, any citizen's ability to be fairly represented will be forever denied by the GOP. They will never give up their power, do anything, change any law or procedure by any means to drive their mission, and thus destroy my beloved state. It's horrifying, diabolical, and utterly disgusting." What do you really think? I ask that listener.

Dan, it gets to the point that I was starting to make, which is that so much of what we're talking about isn't like, are you for abortion rights or against them? Are you for certain labor rights or against them? All these policy questions. There's so much aggressiveness, I guess we can call it, around how democracy works in Wisconsin and trying to change the rules and change the rules and change the rules some more to give one side an advantage.

Dan Kaufman: Exactly. I think it goes back even to Act 10, which I would put in this category. Walker never ran on that, and that was a dramatic-- There was more than 100,000 people at the state capitol. It was a mass-- It was really the first widespread labor uprising in decades in the United States. That continued to the-- There was after Tony Evers won, and the Attorney General who was also a Democrat won in 2018, they stripped those offices of some of their powers in a lame duck session.

There's been this constant intervention, and I think as you say, it goes beyond whether you support this issue or not, but it's into the civic infrastructure of the state. Wisconsin is interesting because it has this history of really promoting public participation in an active citizenship. A famous senator fighting Bob La Follette around the turn of the century really promoted this idea of wanting to get government closer to the people, and in fact, the state capitol is designed for easy access so that people could see their representatives and so on.

I think this most recent iteration is, as the Republicans have lost more and more statewide races since 2018, they've only won 3 out of 17 statewide races. These measures are becoming more and more extreme and you can see them in starker relief. As the listener said, it does seem like they'll stop at nothing. Other people, observers said, "Why not just accept this and then try to--" In fact, the person that I interviewed, the Republican state senator, put forward a positive message and tried to win a majority of the electorate, but that's not the route they're going.

They're trying to do anything to cling to these mechanically gained advantages that don't really reflect the people's will. You could see that really in strong relief with Janet's Protasiewicz 11-point margin, which is really unusual in a closely divided state like Wisconsin.

Brian Lehrer: Brady in Chicago, and no New Yorkers, that's not in Wisconsin, but Brady in Chicago, you're on WNYC. Hi, Brady.

Brady: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. I'm a little nervous, sustaining member. I grew up in Madison and went to UW-Milwaukee, and after sticking around there, during Act 10 which you're discussing, I eventually moved to Chicago, largely just due to economic opportunities. I feel like the situation in Wisconsin, it makes me sad. I feel like the wealthy interests and powered interests are using these tactics. The GOP is super powerful and I feel like so much of it is GOP social or cultural war issues being used to have people essentially vote against their interests.

Something that I learned about recently was, I think one of Trump's former economic advisors who's notorious in the state for avoiding property taxes, meanwhile, property taxes are going up for all sorts of regular people who own homes in the state.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you one quick follow-up because our time is short, Brady, but did you tell our screener, for you, as somebody who left Wisconsin, that you see the dismantling of democracy we've been discussing as driving a brain drain of maybe college-educated people like you out of the state?

Brady: Yes, I feel like that's maybe a longer-running trend, but I can only see that escalating for young people in the face of what's going on because it's crazy.

Brian Lehrer: Brady, thank you. Thanks for checking in. One more call. Stephanie in Thiensville, Wisconsin. Did I say the name of that right? Stephanie, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Stephanie: Yes. It's actually Thiensville.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, Thiensville. T-H. Got it.

Stephanie: Yes. Thank you for taking my call. I used to live in Astoria and still listen very often. I've been in Wisconsin for about 14 years and I just yesterday sent an email off to my state senator expressing my dismay with the efforts to impeach the newly elected justice. A staff person returned that email within a half hour saying that my state senator, Dan Knodl, had no influence on this because it had to move through the assembly first and then proceeded to send me a link to what Scott Walker thought about it.

No other information was provided on my state senator's position on this, but the legislature here has been the classic do-nothing legislature, going so far as to gavel in and gavel out major issues that affect everyday people. I'm so frustrated in the gerrymandered districts to never seem to be able to get any momentum towards people in the legislature that are willing to actually do their jobs.

Brian Lehrer: Stephanie, thank you. I will say, listening to your call, that being in Wisconsin for 14 years has definitely had an effect on you because you sound like you're from Wisconsin now, from the Midwest, and not from Western Queens.

Stephanie: Oh no, I don't like that.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your call. Let us end on some prospects for the presidential race there next year, Dan. If Wisconsin was so close, being in the closest three states in one direction in 2016, the other direction in 2020, would you say it's a swing state in terms of their really being swing voters? Are people going back and forth? This is an eternal perennial conversation that we have and people say, "Well, are there really swing voters or are there just swing districts?"

Is it that there are a lot of people in Wisconsin who were really on the fence between, let's say, Trump and Biden, or is it more about whether the Democrats are more motivated to turn out or the Republicans?

Dan Kaufman: I think my own view on that, Brian, is that part of the closeness is that neither party has really addressed the underlying economic malaise that's affecting Wisconsin and a lot of Rust Belt states. I think you saw a different side of that in 2008 when Barack Obama won the state by 14 points, running basically as an economic populist. He opposed NAFTA and so on. He was also very critical of corporate agriculture, which is a huge issue in rural Wisconsin. I think he reactivated the state's progressive side, but it's been far on the margins more since then.

Trump obviously tapped into a right-wing populist version of the anger over economic decline in the state that the decline of well-paying manufacturing jobs and the collapse of agriculture as a way to make a living through consolidation and so on. I think it's complicated, I guess I'd say, but I think that the possibility exists, particularly on the Democratic side for somebody to win quite big if they ran a different race. We'll see how 2024 plays out.

On the other side, something to mention before we finish is that the Republicans are still attacking the state's election infrastructure. A parallel story to the impeachment or the threatened impeachment is that they are trying to oust the nonpartisan head of the Wisconsin Elections Commission in the state Senate, and she is really important to overseeing the elections. She became a focal point for all these election conspiracies, even though she's a nationally lauded election administrator.

I think they're doing it in a way to potentially undermine whatever rulings she makes. The state Senate voted last night in a theatrical vote to ouster, even though they don't have the power to, and then she sued and it will go before the courts. I think it's part of a process to undermine faith in the elections. That's what happened after 2020. A lot of election officials, and I wrote about it for The New Yorker, were being even violently threatened.

I think that is very ominous moving forward. The state's importance to the GOP cannot be overstated. They're holding their convention in Milwaukee, and in fact, the first debate.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, the National Republican Convention next summer. Yes.

Dan Kaufman: The National Republican Convention, right. It's absolutely a must-win state for who's ever on the Republican side. We shall see. I think it'll be, once again, the epicenter of American politics. That's why all of this stuff that's happening now is so important. It's somewhat laying the groundwork for what's going to happen in 2024 and how they might challenge the election.

The state Supreme Court came within one vote of throwing out 200,000 ballots from Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two largest, most Democratic counties. That would've altered the outcome.

Brian Lehrer: Dan Kaufman, journalist, author of the book, The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics, and author of the recent story in The New Yorker headline, The Wisconsin G.O.P.'s Looming Judicial Attack. Dan, thanks so much, and please come back on with us during 2024, okay?

Dan Kaufman: I would love to, Brian. It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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