Wisconsin voters stopped a legislative power grab. How did it happen and what does it mean?
Wisconsin voters stopped a legislative power grab. How did it happen and what does it mean?
"Tuesday’s vote illustrates a kind of formula for restoring Wisconsin’s struggling democracy."
The Recombobulation Area is a thirteen-time Milwaukee Press Club award-winning weekly opinion column and online publication founded by longtime Milwaukee journalist Dan Shafer. Learn more about it here.
This piece is written by Phil Rocco, associate professor of political science at Marquette University. Rocco is a regular contributor at The Recombobulation Area, and the winner of a gold award from the Milwaukee Press Club for his work at the publication.
In yesterday’s August primary, Wisconsin voters roundly defeated two proposed constitutional amendments introduced by Republicans in the state legislature.
If passed, these amendments would have increased the legislature’s already significant control over federal funds delivered to the state. The amendments would have also created new barriers to the spending of future federal emergency aid, and may have even derailed a boost to long-term care provider pay and child care programs. Additionally, ambiguities in the text of the amendments might have given the legislature additional wedges to enhance its authority.
Yet the victory of the “No” side, which received nearly 60% of the votes in Tuesday’s election, suggests that Republicans’ strategy of pushing controversial amendments onto the back of a ballot in a low-profile election was no match for a strong cross-cutting coalition, and a campaign that spoke to voters across the state.
By the time the ballots were counted, the message was clear: Wisconsin voters were unwilling to give greater power to a legislative branch which, over the last six years, has used its power to halt policy initiatives supported by majorities of Wisconsinites.
“Getting to No” means expanding the conflict
The defeat of the amendments marks a departure from a trend in Wisconsin politics. Thanks in part to gerrymandering, Republicans dominate the state legislature. Yet statewide elections, including elections for Governor, have trended in the Democratic column. This has meant that Republican efforts to consolidate political power — by centralizing control of federal dollars in the state legislature, for example — face a certain gubernatorial veto.
As a result, Republicans have short-circuited the standard legislative process by placing vaguely worded constitutional amendments, which are routinely approved by majorities of Wisconsin voters, on the ballot. Since 2000, voters have ratified all but three proposed constitutional amendments. Two of those were on yesterday’s ballot. Tuesday’s election also marked the first time in the state’s history that voters saw constitutional amendments on the ballot of a lower-turnout August primary.
Republicans’ maneuver to place amendments before a smaller subset of voters is a classic example of what the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider referred to as manipulating the scope of conflict. “The outcome of every conflict,” Schattschneider wrote in 1960, "is determined by the extent to which the audience becomes involved in it.”
Political actors routinely try to guarantee their preferred outcome in a conflict by shaping who shows up to the fight. By burying important constitutional changes in vague prose and scheduling a vote on constitutional amendments during a lower-turnout election rather than in November, where turnout is typically twice as high as on August ballots, Republicans were trying to limit the scope of conflict, increasing the chances of a favorable result, and consolidating power.
Indeed, the fate of recent legislatively referred constitutional amendments suggests that Republicans’ efforts to stack in their favor often win. Prior to Tuesday’s vote, Wisconsin voters have approved all but one constitutional amendment put before them since 2000. This includes two amendments on April’s ballot — inspired in part by 2020 election conspiracy theories about voter fraud — which reduce the resources available to municipal election clerks by limiting the involvement of community members and volunteers in elections.
But Republicans did not succeed. This is because opponents of the amendments — a broad cross-cutting coalition including not just Democratic Party leaders and progressive organizations, but also groups representing small businesses, farmers, and local public-health officials — managed to expand the scope of conflict.
“Nothing attracts a crowd as quickly as a fight,” as Schattschneider puts it, “Nothing is so contagious." With the deck stacked against them, opponents of the amendments had no alternative but to draw in voters who would otherwise not have shown up to the polls on Tuesday. This is significant because there were no big-ticket primary contests for governor or U.S. Senate on the ballot. Of Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts, only two (District 3 and District 7) saw a contested Democratic primary. There were three contested Republican primaries (in Congressional Districts 2, 4, and 8).
If the “No” coalition learned any lessons from the last decade of constitutional amendment fights, it is that drawing a crowd means spending money. In Wisconsin, “No” campaigns on constitutional amendments that fail to devote resources to mobilizing voters — and which rely on scraps of “earned media” alone — are born losers. Indeed, the only constitutional amendment Wisconsin voters had defeated between 2000 and 2024 was a 2018 Republican-backed initiative to eliminate the State Treasurer’s office. After a highly visible campaign by the “Save Our Fiscal Watchdog” committee — which spent more than $87,000 — that illustrated the potential adverse consequences of the move, the “No” side won with over 60% of the vote. Contrast this with the uniformly unsuccessful “No” campaigns in 2020, 2023, and April of 2024, which spent $0 on paid advertising.
Evidently aware of this history, the “No” campaign on Tuesday’s amendments raised more than $3.2 million, dwarfing the efforts of the “Yes” campaign, with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and the Institute for Reforming Government expected to spend $250,000, collectively. This historic level of fundraising on a Wisconsin state constitutional amendment campaign no doubt reflects opponents’ calculation of the stakes of the fight. It also illustrates their understanding of the difficulties of boosting turnout in a partisan primary that featured few high-profile races.
With murky language on the ballot, winning meant informing voters.
The quantity of spending alone cannot account for the “No” campaign’s victory, however. One must also look at the qualitative character of that spending.
One of the most significant challenges opponents of the amendments faced was clarifying the stakes of the amendments for voters in clear, digestible language. Unlike a number of other states, Wisconsin does not provide voters with a plain-language guide to referendums before they head to the polls. For example, prior to voting on ballot initiatives, California voters receive a guide that includes plain-language interpretations, fiscal analyses, and a sample of arguments for and against each measure.
In the absence of publicly-financed voter guides, organized supporters and opponents of Wisconsin’s referendums must provide voters with clear information that resolves their uncertainties. As Milwaukee Record’s Matt Wild put it, the party label of supporters and opponents of the amendments likely does a lot of work here: “If you typically agree with Republicans, vote YES on both referendum questions. If you typically agree with Democrats, vote NO on both referendum questions. That’s it.”
But if the results of recent amendment votes are any indication, party cues would not have been enough to sink vaguely-worded constitutional amendments. While a county’s vote for Donald Trump in 2020 explains over 70% of the variation in its vote share for the amendments on the April 2024 ballot, these amendments outperformed Trump in the majority of Wisconsin counties.
The “No” campaign was thus wise to go beyond partisan appeals and to focus on the substantive implications of the legislation for the release of federal emergency aid, as well as their violation of core small-d democratic values, including the legislature’s use of the constitutional amendments to undermine “checks and balances.” Well-timed ads by groups opposing the amendments were buoyed by a raft of op-eds and letters to the editor in publications around the state. The voices opposing the amendment included not just popular Democratic Party leaders but small-business owners, first responders, and farmers. This not only dragged the amendments into the harsh light of day, it illustrated a broad, cross-cutting coalition of Wisconsinites opposed to them for a variety of reasons.
By casting a spotlight on the amendments’ effects, the opponents also forced the “Yes” side to identify themselves, and to put their arguments into the public sphere. This expanded the scope of conflict further still by illustrating that the only visible public constituency in support of the amendments were the allies of Republican legislators, who would gain greater power if they were enacted.
Tuesday’s outcome
The “No” side’s mobilization efforts appear to have worked. While voter turnout statistics have not yet been finalized, it appears that more than 1.2 million voters cast ballots on Questions 1 and 2. Despite the absence of high-profile primaries for US Senate, this is roughly comparable to turnout in the 2022 August primaries, which represented a 40-year high. In Dane County alone, roughly 38,000 more voters turned out to vote on the referendum questions than voted in the 2022 partisan primaries. This was not on its own decisive, as the “No” side’s margin was over 185,000 votes. Still, it more than made up for lower turnout in other population centers, giving the “Yes” campaign a steeper hill to climb.
The “No” side not only won a decisive majority of the votes statewide, it carried in 35 of the state’s 72 counties, which suggests opposition to the amendments could be found across the state’s diverse political geography.
To be sure, the “No” side’s heartland was in Democratic Party strongholds. Tony Evers’ two-party vote share in 2022 accounts for about 80 percent of the variation in county-level results for yesterday’s elections. Even so, the “No” campaign outperformed Evers’ 2022 vote share in all but two counties. Opposition to the amendments was by no means limited to loyal Democrats.
One could see the pattern in miniature by looking at the results on Questions 1 and 2 in new State Assembly District 61, which includes parts of Milwaukee’s south side as well as wards in suburban communities of Franklin, Greendale, Greenfield, and Hales Corners. On Tuesday, voters in the new district rejected both amendments by a margin of over 6%.
The pattern makes sense. Not only was the “No” campaign supported by a broad cross-cutting coalition, it could also tap into a deep reservoir of voter discontent with the state’s legislature. As an August Marquette Law School Poll revealed, only 34% of registered voters approve of the job the legislature is doing, while 58% of voters disapprove. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos has a favorability rating of 14%.
Beyond the vote
The most immediate impacts of Tuesday’s vote may be difficult to feel directly, but they are estimable. The failure of the amendments keeps the current balance of power between the legislative and executive branches in place.
As I wrote in June, the legislature’s Joint Finance Committee will still hold a great deal of authority over most kinds of federal funds — including authority that will make it impossible to expand Medicaid without legislative approval. Even so, the legislature will not gain control of unanticipated emergency funds, and the opportunity to block current long-term care and child care initiatives funded with federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars.
The vote also sent a strong signal about voters’ disapproval of legislative overreach. That message dovetails with the message sent by the Wisconsin Supreme Court in Evers v. Marklein, which held that statutes empowering the Joint Finance Committee to veto land-conservation expenditures violated the executive branch’s core power to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
Still, the success of the “No” campaign has implications well beyond the results of the election itself.
First, it shows that Wisconsin voters simply do not support the aggrandizement of the legislature’s power. We saw a similar result in Janet Protasiewicz’s victory in the 2023 State Supreme Court election — a result which led to the historic reversal of the state’s legislative gerrymanders. Even in a sleepy, low-turnout August primary, a majority of voters in the Badger State came out to derail a legislative power grab.
Second, Tuesday’s vote illustrates the value of expanding the scope of conflict. Over the last few decades, the safe bet is that if a constitutional amendment is on the ballot, Wisconsin voters will support it.
But as I wrote back in June, the outcome in these referenda would hinge on “whether the opponents of the proposals can dredge them out of the bog of legalese, and into the spotlight.”
This is precisely what the “No” campaign, following in the footsteps of the 2018 campaign to save the State Treasurer’s office from destruction. In short, while Wisconsin voters won’t tolerate power grabs, they also need to be mobilized — especially in otherwise low-profile elections, and when the amendment text is vague.
With a strong enough “No” campaign, voters could more easily see — and resent — vagueness and obfuscation in constitutional amendments. Strategic ambiguity can only be called “clever” and only works in the absence of a mobilized electorate.
The “No” campaign was of course a rearguard action — a successful rebuke of a Republican effort, likely not the last of its kind — to consolidate power at the ballot box. Yet do Tuesday’s results contain insights for positive changes, like broadly popular proposals to expand access to child care, paid family and medical leave, and Medicaid expansion? Quite possibly. At minimum, the defeat of the amendments suggests that Wisconsin voters prefer a government that is responsive to the needs of the many. If informed and mobilized, they will turn out to vote down efforts to limit popular rule, even in the dog days of summer.
Perhaps more importantly, Tuesday’s vote illustrates a kind of formula for restoring Wisconsin’s struggling democracy. State politics alienates voters when it is reduced to a form of inside baseball — an indecent array of acronyms, abstruse language, esoteric funding formulas that define how government works.
But, however out of sight, these technicalities add up. And over the last decade they have added up in ways that have made it difficult for Wisconsin residents, families, and communities – urban and rural alike – to flourish. Changing the game in Wisconsin means converting the energy of Tuesday’s “No” vote into campaigns for hotly contested state-legislative seats. It will also require cutting through the complexity – showing voters the consequences of obscure government decisions for their wages, their working conditions, the quality of their health care, their roads, their parks, and their schools.
In short, there’s reason to believe that Tuesday’s vote could be the start of something big.
This piece is written by Phil Rocco, associate professor of political science at Marquette University. Rocco is a regular contributor at The Recombobulation Area, and the winner of a gold award from the Milwaukee Press Club for his work at the publication.
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I have to give a big hat-tip to The Recombobulation Zone (Substack posts on June 20 and August 9), and to the League of Women Voters, for supplying clear explainers that I was able to share with friends and acquaintances who were confused by the wording of the proposed amendments.
I saw the links I shared rippling out through my social-media circles and I really do believe they made a difference.
Dane County doing numbers per usual, 45.4% turnout in an August primary, granted in several of our districts it was effectively a general election for senate and assembly districts as well as county exec, still an impressive showing.