Since being finally ousted from the governor's mansion, Scott Walker has been scrambling to find a soft place to land through the conservative welfare system. One of the empty figurehead jobs he got was the chief national fundraiser for a right wing front group, National Republican Redistricting Trust, which goal is to raise money to help the inevitable gerrymandering the Congressional Republicans are going to try to pull. Because of this, Walker will occasionally throw up some lame rationalization for gerrymandering on social media and/or his podcast, ironically names "You Can't Recall Courage."
Media Matters caught an exceptionally gobsmacking moment from Walker's podcast on July 5:
During the July 5 edition of You Can’t Recall Courage, Walker offered further justification of his tweet. Complaining about high voter turnout in liberal-leaning Madison and “unbelievably big” Democratic margins of victory in districts in and around Madison, Walker said it’s a “flawed argument” to say that “a vote in Madison counts the same as a vote in a very rural community or in a suburban community.”
“Just because a bunch of votes are packed into one given area doesn’t mean the rest of the state has to have an equal number of legislative districts held by Republicans and Democrats,” Walker added.
The logic behind this argument is confounding. For example, high margins of victory are a direct consequence of partisan gerrymandering, where minority-party voters are packed into small numbers of districts with the goal of diluting the impact of their votes. And Walker’s previous citation that the vast majority of districts in Wisconsin -- which, again, have been gerrymandered for partisan advantage -- voted Republican in 2018 is itself an argument that boils down to saying that plots of land, rather than residents, should determine representation in the Assembly.
There's a couple, three things that Walker omitted and Media Matters subsequently missed.
One, Milwaukee is also a Democratic stronghold so it's just not one area that is seriously affected.
Secondly, the Republicans have their own strongholds that they heavily depend on to carry statewide elections, the WOW counties:
Wisconsin’s “WOW” counties — Waukesha, Ozaukee, Washington — are legendary for delivering turnouts and landslides that made them among the highest-performing Republican counties in swing-state America.
They aren’t about to turn blue, and they haven’t “abandoned” the GOP the way some suburban counties have in other states. But the Republican vote has now lagged there for two elections in a row.
This only strengthens Media Matters’ point of how severely gerrymandered Wisconsin is right now.
Thirdly, and most significantly, these urban areas that Walker is disdaining, especially Milwaukee, has the highest concentration of African Americans. In other words, Walker is saying that African American voters aren't as important as the white, rural voters.
While the Republican effort to gerrymander the entire country is obviously a control issue for them because they know they couldn't win in fair elections, but now we have further confirmation on whom they want to disenfranchise to maintain that control.
