The Recombobulation Area is a 21-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning opinion column and online publication founded by Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer.
This article was part of the extended column, “8 Takeaways from the 2026 Election in Wisconsin,” which was first available for paid subscribers on Nov. 7.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled previous state legislative maps to be unconstitutional on Dec. 22, 2023, and Tony Evers signed new maps into law on Feb. 19, 2024, but The Gerrymander that warped Wisconsin politics for more than a decade wasn’t fully in our rear view mirror until the 2026 election.
While the Assembly competed on new maps in 2024, with Republicans winning a fair-and-square majority, only half of the Senate was up that year, because state senators serve four-year terms. That means this was the first fully post-Gerrymander election, and it sure is fitting that the first result on these fully fairer maps is a Democratic trifecta.
This proves once again that the outsized majorities that Republicans enjoyed from 2012 to 2024 were not earned — they were rigged. The GOP used their wave election in 2010 to try to cement permanent one-party rule, by drawing the maps so egregiously tilted in their favor that even when Democrats won statewide races and had more votes in the Assembly, Republicans could still maintain majorities. For that 12-year stretch, Republicans held 60 or more seats each year in the Assembly. In 2024, that number shrank to 54, and two years later, to 46.
Everything Republicans were able to do for those 12 years should have an asterisk attached to it. What they were able to do was not representative of the actual voters, of the actual people of Wisconsin.
One of the other big winners from Tuesday’s election was democracy itself. Many of Republicans’ attempts to gerrymander congressional seats backfired, like in Texas, where Donald Trump encouraged Gov. Greg Abbott to go ahead with a mid-decade redistricting, only to lose seats and see Abbott himself lose, too. Every election denier running for governor in a swing state lost, and this time, they’re not contesting their massive losses. Astronomical levels of spending, like Elon Musk spending half a billion dollars in Texas and the Uihleins spending what might be more than $100 million in Wisconsin alone, tested democracy’s resolve.
As our friend Kristin Brey noted on “Point Taken,” the “shenanigans” and fearmongering surrounding this election — on mail-in voting, on ICE at the polls, various attempts at election-meddling, etc. — were overcome by “the voice of the people” and that “voters still have a limit for what they will put up with, and because we still live in a democracy, we have the power of the vote to overcome so much money and still have a voice.”
As true here in Wisconsin as it is anywhere, and for Republicans bemoaning the end of their 16-year majority, they should know that if they were competing on a fair playing field, that never would have lasted as long as it did.
This new Democratic trifecta — that sure is fun to type, isn’t it? — has many things to address after years of being shut out of even the most basic conversations in state government, but on the list should be issues relating to democracy — closing the Walker loophole that allows the egregious campaign funding we’ve seen, expanding voting access, finally passing early count for absentee ballot processing, and passing some form of independent redistricting. Structural changes need to happen to prevent the kind of small-d democracy backslide that we saw in Wisconsin under Republican rule, and to better put the people at the forefront of our politics — as it should be.
But let the record show that in the first fully post-Gerrymander election in the state legislature, Democrats delivered a trifecta.
Dan Shafer is an independent journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. He worked with Civic Media from 2024 to 2026. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle Business Magazine, the Milwaukee Business Journal, Milwaukee Magazine, and BizTimes Milwaukee. He’s won 24 Milwaukee Press Club Excellence in Journalism Awards. He’s on Twitter at @DanRShafer.
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