How much will gerrymandering actually affect the 2024 election?

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has long argued that Wisconsin is a purple state.The state’s voting record on the national level would suggest he’s right.

In 2020, President Joe Biden won the state by just around 20,000 votes – less than one percentage point. In 2016, former President Donald Trump beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by about the same margin – also within one percentage point.

But looking at the state legislature over the last decade, you would see a solidly red state.

“It was just clear over the last 10 years that the previous maps did not reflect the people’s wishes,” Evers tells The Independent. “Let’s just use my race as an example: I won one race by 1 per cent and another one by 3 per cent [but] the Republicans had a supermajority in the Senate and a huge majority in the assembly.”

When Evers was elected in 2018, Democrats won the popular vote in the state assembly by 53 to 45 per cent, but the heavily skewed map still gave the Republicans a majority of 63 to 36 seats.

This was the result of gerrymandering – the practice of drawing districts in a way that maximizes the seats of one party or another. The practice was named after Elbridge Gerry, a vice president of the United States at the time of his death, who in 1812, when he was the governor of Massachusetts, signed a bill that created a district the shape of which was compared to a mythological salamander.

Political science Professor Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University tells The Independent that “gerrymandering is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, risks we face for democracy in the United States. Obviously, I think [former President Donald] Trump presents a whole other set of risks. But … at a structural level, I