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Wisconsin consultants label GOP's redistricting map proposals as gerrymanders

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Wisconsin consultants label GOP's redistricting map proposals as gerrymanders
  • Consultants hired by the Wisconsin Supreme Court identified the Republican Legislature and a conservative law firm’s maps as partisan gerrymanders.
  • The consultants noted key criteria for map improvement, including political neutrality, compactness, contiguity and preserving communities of interest.
  • The battleground state of Wisconsin, where Republicans control the Legislature despite Democratic wins in statewide elections, faces significant political implications.

Consultants hired by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to examine maps redrawing state legislative districts said Thursday that plans submitted by the Republican Legislature and a conservative law firm are partisan gerrymanders, but they stopped short of declaring the other four maps constitutional.

Only the court can make the determination of whether any of those four plans from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, Democratic lawmakers and others are constitutional, wrote Jonathan Cervas, of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and Bernard Grofman, of the University of California, Irvine.

Any of those maps could be improved based on criteria the court identified as being important, including political neutrality, compactness, contiguity and preserving communities of interest, the consultants wrote.

WISCONSIN REPUBLICANS WOULD MAINTAIN MAJORITY IN PROPOSED LEGISLATIVE MAPS, BUT WITH REDUCED DOMINANCE

They declined to draw their own maps, but said they could do so quickly if the court instructed them to.

The Wisconsin state Capitol is seen on Oct. 10, 2012, in Madison, Wisconsin. Consultants hired by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to examine maps redrawing state legislative districts said on Thursday that plans submitted by the Republican Legislature and a conservative law firm are partisan gerrymanders. (AP Photo/Scott Bauer, File)

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The political stakes are huge in the battleground state where Republicans have had a firm grip on the Legislature since 2011 even as Democrats have won statewide elections, including for governor in 2018 and 2022. Four of the past six presidential victors in Wisconsin have been decided by less than a percentage point.

Evers hailed the report as confirmation that the Republican maps are gerrymandered.

“The days of Wisconsinites living under some of the most gerrymandered maps in the country are numbered,” Evers said in a statement. “While this is just one step in this process, today is an important day for the people of Wisconsin who deserve maps that are fair, responsive, and reflect the will of the people.”

Under maps first enacted by Republicans in 2011, and then again in 2022 with few changes, the GOP has increased its hold on the Legislature, largely blocking major policy initiatives of Evers and Democratic lawmakers for the past five years.

The victory last year by a liberal candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court, who called the current Republican maps “rigged,” cleared the path for the court’s ruling in December that the maps are unconstitutional because districts are not contiguous as required by law.

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The court ordered new maps with contiguous districts, but also said they must not favor one party over another. Republicans have indicated that they plan an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing due process violations, but it’s not clear when that would come.

The consultants reviewed proposed maps submitted by Evers, fellow Democrats, Republicans, academics and others that would reduce the Republican majorities that sit at 64-35 in the Assembly and 22-10 in the Senate.

The consultants on Thursday called the maps from the Legislature and the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty “partisan gerrymanders.” The Legislature’s map was virtually unchanged from what the current boundaries are.

The consultants rejected Republican claims that their majorities in the Legislature are due to Democratic support being concentrated in cities, while the GOP had broader support in a larger geographic area.

“That kind of insulation from the forces of electoral change is the hallmark of a gerrymander,” they wrote. “To put it simply, geography is not destiny.”

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Cervas and Grofman wrote that the four Democratic maps were similar on most criteria and from a “social science point of view,” are “nearly indistinguishable.”

Rick Esenberg, president of the law firm whose map was deemed to be a partisan gerrymander, blasted the consultants’ findings.

“The report hides its bias behind a fog of faux sophistication,” Esenberg said in a statement. “Let’s be clear, our maps have been rejected for one reason and one reason alone, they don’t produce the partisan outcomes the experts or many on the Court want.”

It ultimately will be up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, with a 4-3 liberal majority, to decide which maps to enact. The state elections commission has said that must be done by March 15 to meet deadlines for candidates running in the fall.

Evers on Tuesday vetoed a last-ditch effort by Republicans to enact new lines to avoid the court ordering maps. Republicans largely adopted the Evers maps but moved some lines to reduce the number of GOP incumbents who would have to face one another in the new districts.

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WISCONSIN REPUBLICANS HASTILY APPROVE NEW LEGISLATIVE MAPS

Evers rejected it, calling it another attempt by Republicans to gerrymander the districts in their favor.

Under most of the newly proposed maps, Republicans would retain their majorities in the Legislature, but the margin would be significantly tightened, judging by an analysis by a Marquette University researcher.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has also been asked by Democrats to take up a challenge to the state’s congressional district lines. That lawsuit argues the court’s decision to order new state legislative maps opens the door to challenging the congressional map. Republicans hold five of the state’s eight congressional seats.

The moves in Wisconsin come as litigation continues in more than dozen states over U.S. House and state legislative districts that were enacted after the 2020 census.

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Politics

Editorial: Election results may take time. That's a fact, not grounds for conspiracy theories

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Editorial: Election results may take time. That's a fact, not grounds for conspiracy theories

Election day is almost here, and the end of this tumultuous campaign season cannot come soon enough. But it may not come Tuesday night.

Given that the race for president is expected to be close, it’s quite possible that Americans will have to wait days to learn whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Trump will be the next commander in chief. Vote counting may take a while, and — despite what bad-faith actors might suggest — that’s OK. A healthy democracy can afford to be meticulous in counting every vote and patient in waiting for accurate results.

In 2020, Trump cynically and dangerously claimed that legitimate delays to count a record number of mailed ballots were evidence of fraud and asserted that Democrats were “trying to steal the election.” Trump’s lies were debunked and rejected by judges in numerous court cases, but his misinformation campaign persuaded thousands of people to show up to his “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and storm the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying the election results.

This year, election officials (both Republicans and Democrats among them) have been trying to reset expectations of how quickly votes can be counted in an attempt to tamp down conspiracy theories.

Here are the facts:

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  • More states, including California, have expanded the use of mail-in ballots and ballot drop boxes, which are more convenient for voters. These ballots take longer to count because election personnel verify signatures on ballot envelopes against state records.
  • States have different rules that may affect the speed of their counts. Pennsylvania, for example, does not allow election workers to begin processing mail ballots until election day. North Carolina is requiring a photo ID to vote this year, which is expected to increase the number of provisional ballots that have to be researched to determine eligibility, which takes time.
  • In 2020, Trump made the absurd and laughably ignorant assertion that ballots counted after election day aren’t legitimate. Election officials do not — and should not — stop tallying votes after 11:59 p.m. on Tuesday. That would be impractical and unfair. And no election has ever been certified on election day.
  • Some politicians, pundits and even media outlets may choose to “call” a race based on early returns, but that’s often irresponsible. The results can shift as ballots are counted. In the 2018 midterm election, early returns had Republican candidates leading in some key California congressional races. That turned out to be a “red mirage”: When all the ballots were counted, Democrats won the seats and control of the House. At the time, some Republicans suggested that the reversal of fortune was an indication of some type of election misconduct. It wasn’t. Election officials were simply doing their jobs and ensuring that every vote was counted.

This is a politically fraught moment. Foreign powers and opportunists have already been spreading disinformation to undermine confidence in the election. Last week, U.S. intelligence agencies blamed Russia for a viral video purporting to show a Haitian immigrant with multiple Georgia IDs claiming to have voted multiple times. Russia is also allegedly responsible for a fake video that purports to show someone destroying ballots marked for Trump in Pennsylvania.

That’s why it’s so important to rely on facts, verifiable information and reliable sources such as the National Assn. of Secretaries of State, whose members run elections, and to be a discerning consumer of social media, where so many false claims circulate.

This year’s election will test Americans and our democratic institutions. Let’s do everything possible to ensure we pass.

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Politics

How Red and Blue America Shop, Eat and Live

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How Red and Blue America Shop, Eat and Live

There are thousands of golf courses in the United States. You can find them in every state, in nearly every county; there’s probably one near you.

Take all those data points, and you can see that there are more golf courses for every 100,000 voters in redder neighborhoods than in blue ones.

There are also thousands of breweries in the U.S., but they’re much more concentrated on the coasts and in urban areas.

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+40D

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The brewery-to-voter ratio is much higher in some of the country’s bluest precincts, where Joe Biden won the vote in 2020.

You can’t tell how people vote just by whether they enjoy a drink at a brewery or a round of golf. But the geographic distribution of these two places shows how much our surroundings differ, often unintentionally, along political lines.

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It’s not just golf and brewing: People in America’s reddest neighborhoods see a different landscape of stores, restaurants and venues when they step outside their homes than those in more politically even precincts or the very bluest areas.

We wanted to look at this relationship between politics and the places around us. So, using data from the Overture Maps Foundation, we took the location of millions of different stores, restaurants, churches, parks and more and lined them up with the 2020 election results, down to the precinct.

We don’t know who goes to each place. But we know how the neighborhoods surrounding each locale vote.

The results are sometimes obvious: Yoga studios and cocktail bars skew toward deeply blue spaces, and gun stores and farms toward redder precincts. But they show how our politics, geography and lives intersect, not always in obvious ways.

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In many cases, these graphs look the way they do largely because of the urban-rural divide. Certain activities, like golf, need space, and the more rural parts of the country tend to vote for Republicans. Meanwhile, a small, Democratic-leaning urban area might be a commercial hub for a redder county, with a brewery, coffee shop and bookstore; those businesses would look blue in our data set even if they were frequented equally by Republicans and Democrats.

“The placement of businesses is probably motivated primarily by income level and population density,” said Nick Rogers, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “It just so happens that an area’s political ideology is highly correlated with these things.”

Some places, of course, are just everywhere:

And some kinds of places don’t fit easily into one bucket or the other.

Consider Baptist churches: A majority of the tens of thousands of these churches in the U.S. are in the South. That means they’re heavily concentrated in both Republican neighborhoods and largely Black, heavily Democratic areas. The resulting distribution looks like this:

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Wineries, too, show a double hump. You can see that in California alone — with wine production clustered along both its bluer coastline and the redder Central Valley.

For many brands, the partisan map emerges from the regional footprint of the business. Piggly Wiggly mostly serves redder states in the South, while Food Lion is spread across a more politically varied area in the Southeast.

But the maps cut across people and places in different ways. A liberal voter in Los Angeles may have never heard of Piggly Wiggly. But it’s also possible that person has never heard of Stop & Shop, a supermarket in the bluer Northeast.

Other brands that aren’t so regionally clustered have expanded in pursuit of the clientele they already know. For example, Whole Foods, Peet’s Coffee and the upscale sportswear brand Lululemon have a high-earning urban customer base.

The Overture data in this analysis reflects businesses and places that have logged their locations on either Meta or Microsoft platforms; the data is imperfect and includes mislabeled locations and closed stores. But this is the best publicly available data set of its kind, and it lets us see patterns in the data that aren’t captured by surveys of consumer preference.

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Here’s a roundup of them.

Fast food

One fast food chain in many deep blue precincts is Popeyes. The chicken purveyor is found in many Southern cities but also across the West Coast and up and down I-95.

Its competitor Chick-fil-A — despite an early 2010s controversy over gay rights — is also in many blue areas.

Among the chains found in redder places are Tennessee-based Hardee’s and Oklahoma-based Sonic.

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And Burger King, like McDonald’s, is everywhere.

Coffee shops

Starbucks is by far the nation’s largest coffee chain, and while it might feel as if it’s everywhere, it hews toward slightly denser locations.

Some smaller coffee chains have a more significant skew. West Coast chains like Blue Bottle and Peet’s Coffee are common in some of the bluest areas; the largest chain in our data with a strong presence in redder areas is Scooter’s Coffee.

Breakfast spots

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IHOP neighborhoods are bluer than those around the largely Midwestern restaurant Bob Evans. Huddle House is the major breakfast chain with the highest frequency in red areas in our data.

Convenience stores

7-Eleven started in Texas, but it has since spread across many blue places.

Regional convenience store chains in redder areas include Casey’s General Store and Allsup’s.

Religious institutions

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The headquarters of the Mormon Church are in blue Salt Lake City. But it has many temples in rural parts of the Mountain West.

First Congregational Church, on the other hand, is a common name for a church in the United Church of Christ, a socially liberal Protestant denomination common in New England.

First United Methodist churches are in redder areas:

Hindu and Buddhist temples are both typically in more liberal areas.

Professionals

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Occupations also have recognizable patterns in our data, probably in large part because of the rural-urban political divide.

Some professions lend themselves to cities:

Others, to the countryside:

And yet others can find business just about anywhere:

Leisure

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A lot of the activities we do for fun also map across politics.

Services

Even basic services follow similar patterns. Fire departments skew red because they have to be everywhere, regardless of how many people live there. Even a small, rural area needs a fire department. When you consider population density, you get this:

Elementary schools, meanwhile, are more population dependent.

Train stations, including those with subway stops, tend to be in more urban areas.

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And propane suppliers, though everywhere, typically have more business in rural areas, farther from natural gas pipelines.

Taken together, the patterns are a reminder of how big and varied the country is — in its places and its politics.

You can explore the distribution of 100 large coffee chains, grocery stores, shops and other places below.

See More: Political Geography of 100 Large American Businesses

Methodology

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Place of interest data is from Meta and Microsoft via the Overture Maps Foundation. Nearly 10 million places were used in this analysis. This is the most comprehensive data set of its kind available publicly, but it is by no means perfect.

The data includes businesses and places that have logged their locations on either Meta or Microsoft platforms as of Oct. 23, either through an individual social media account, or when a large chain offers all of its location data to the platforms. Locations may also be included if they were mentioned by users in posts to Meta and Microsoft apps.

The data includes some erroneous locations, typos, mislabeled locations and closed stores. It may also omit businesses that have not yet put their information online. To limit the inclusion of bad data, we filtered the data using Overture’s confidence measure and excluded locations with fewer than 15 votes.

The 2020 precinct-level election results were compiled from Harvard Dataverse. For each precinct, the vote margin was calculated by comparing the number of votes for Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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Alaska, Iowa, Montana, 7 other states end early in-person voting on Monday

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Alaska, Iowa, Montana, 7 other states end early in-person voting on Monday

Ten more states are wrapping up their early in-person voting periods on Monday as the country sits on the eve of Election Day.

Here is everything you need to know to cast an early ballot in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island and Wyoming. 

Montana’s hotly contested Senate race

Montana is a Republican stronghold at the presidential level, but it also hosts one of the most competitive Senate races in the country this cycle. Incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester faces Republican Tim Sheehy in a race where Trump’s popularity and Sheehy’s discipline gives the GOP an edge. It’s Lean R on the Power Rankings.

Sheehy, left, and Tester, right. (Getty Images)

Other key down-ballot races in today’s states

  • Alaska’s at-large district: In 2022, moderate Democrat Mary Peltola pulled off a historic upset when she beat former Gov. Sarah Palin in the final round of the state’s ranked choice ballot tabulation. This year, Republicans hope that second-time candidate Nick Begich will return the state to GOP hands. Peltola has made the fishing industry a focal point of her campaign; Begich is focusing on energy policy. This race was last ranked Lean D on the Fox News Power Rankings.
  • Iowa’s 1st District: Second-term GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks won this seat by six votes in 2020, and while redistricting gave her a more comfortable win in the midterms, she remains vulnerable in the Davenport and Iowa City district. Former state Rep. Christina Bohannan is the Democrat candidate. It’s a toss-up in the Power Rankings.

SLOTKIN SLAMS FELLOW DEM BIDEN FOR ‘GARBAGE’ GAFFE AMID HEATED SENATE BATTLE

Nevada voting booth

The last states in the U.S. are wrapping up their early voting periods on Monday. (Getty Images)

  • Iowa’s 3rd District: The southern 3rd District is represented by Republican Rep. Zach Nunn, who flipped the seat during the midterms. It was another close race, with 2,145 votes separating him and his Democrat opponent. This year, he’s up against Democrat Lanon Baccam, who recently worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This is a Lean R race.
  • Colorado’s 3rd District: The 3rd District stretches across most of western Colorado. Thanks to a largely rural working-class population (Aspen is the exception), it’s been safely Republican for over a decade. But in 2022, the race came down to just 546 votes. Incumbent Rep. Lauren Boebert is moving to safer Republican turf this year, making this a race between her former Democratic challenger, Adam Frisch, and Republican attorney Jeff Hurd. It’s Lean R on the rankings.

TRUMP CALLS FOR SUPPORTS TO ‘FORGIVE’ BIDEN IN SHOW OF UNITY AFTER PRESIDENT CALLS SUPPORTERS ‘GARBAGE’

Fox News Power Rankings on the US House

Fox News Power Rankings House table as of Oct. 29, 2024. (Fox News)

Fox News Power Rankings forecast for House is a toss-up

Fox News Power Rankings House forecast. (Fox News)

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How to vote in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Wyoming

Voters who have received their mail-in ballot have until Nov. 5 to deliver it to state officials. Monday is the final day for early in-person voting.

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