The opening to an Associated Press story on Tuesday’s elections for Wisconsin State Assembly:
Wisconsin Democrats scored a major victory in Tuesday's election when they staved off Republican hopes to win supermajorities that would have allowed them to legislate without fear of vetoes by a Democratic governor.
The Democrats remain a feeble minority in heavily gerrymandered Wisconsin. But they just managed to retain enough seats to prevent Republicans from the two-thirds majorities that could have overridden the vetoes that Gov. Tony Evers used frequently in his first term.
Republicans needed to flip five Assembly seats and one in the Senate. They got the Senate seat when Romaine Quinn defeated Kelly Westlund for an open seat in far northwestern Wisconsin.
But Democrats defended three of the six seats Republicans had targeted in the Assembly. . . .
Evers vetoed nearly 150 GOP bills during his first term. With enough votes to override Evers, the GOP could have dramatically reworked state politics over the next two-year legislative session—including reshaping election administration to their advantage in a key battleground state.
Um, pardon me AP, but you've buried the lede with that fleeting allusion in the second graf to "heavily gerrymandered Wisconsin." The statewide vote tally for the Assembly is incomplete, but Wisconsin Democrats won the races for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general. It's a 50-50 state, unless it's 51-49 in favor of the Dems. Yet on account of gerrymandering the Dems are reduced to celebrating the "major victory" of having "staved off" the prospect of a Republican supermajority in both houses of the state legislature: We got as many votes as they did, probably a few more, and as a result the expert map drawers will have a veto-proof majority in only the Senate! In the Assembly, our deficit will be no worse than 35-64! Whew!
I love how the story says that Republicans, had they done only a little better on Tuesday, would then have been in position to "reshape election administration to their advantage." LOL!
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