Gerrymandered legislative majorities can nullify the results of elections they lose

Evidence

The same happened in Wisconsin. Under Scott Walker, the governor at the time, Wisconsin Republicans gave themselves a structural advantage in the state legislature through aggressive gerrymandering. They redrew the state’s maps with such precision that they could continue to win a near supermajority of seats in the legislature even with a minority of the overall vote. After the Democratic candidate toppled Walker in the 2018 governor’s race, the Republican majority in the legislature rapidly moved to limit the new governor’s power and weaken other statewide offices won by Democrats. They restricted the governor’s ability to run public-benefit programs and set rules on the implementation of state laws. And they robbed the governor and the attorney general of the power to either continue or end legal action against the Affordable Care Act. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 656

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader structural-advantage argument about how minority rule is engineered; relevant to the reader’s interest in reframing vs. empirical claims since this is concrete, checkable data. — connects to: Judges recognize partisan gerrymandering as a constitutional harm but lack an enforceable remedy — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 99; Entrenched policy outcomes can be locked in through either electoral or legislative means — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 161; Unintelligible government structure defeats accountability between elections — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 455 (+2 more)