2024 Wisconsin State Assembly election


The 2024 Wisconsin State Assembly election was held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, alongside elections for the State Senate. All 99 seats in the Wisconsin State Assembly were up for election. The primary election was held on August 13, 2024. The filing deadline to appear on the ballot was June 3, 2024.
Prior to the election, 64 Assembly seats were held by Republicans, 34 seats were held by Democrats, with one seat, formerly held by a Democrat, vacant. The race for chamber control was considered far more competitive in this cycle than at any point in the past decade. Following the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, the newly-seated liberal majority on the court ordered the drawing of new legislative districts. Many saw the implementation of new maps as undoing one of the most egregious gerrymanders in the entire country. Bolstered by the new competitiveness, both parties ran candidates in more Assembly seats than normal and spent heavily on the races.
Aided by the new districts, Democrats gained 10 seats from the Republicans. They failed to win a majority, but they won their largest seat share in the Assembly since before the 2010 elections. Elected members took office on January 6, 2025, with Republicans entering the 107th Wisconsin Legislature with a reduced majority of 54 out of 99 seats.

Background

This election was significantly affected by the legislative maps drawn as a result of the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, which declared the previous legislative district map to be unconstitutional on December 22, 2023. The court was in the process of selecting a remedial plan, when the legislature chose to embrace the map proposed by governor Tony Evers. Evers signed the plan into law on February 19, 2024.
Under the new maps, these were expected to be the first competitive elections for the Assembly since 2010, when Republicans won control of the chamber. Democrats were expected to gain a number of seats, and while the maps were still considered slightly Republican-leaning, either major party could have won a majority of seats if they won a majority of the popular vote in the state. Over 40 incumbent representatives had been drawn into districts with one or more other incumbent, with most of them being Republicans.
Democrats last won a majority of seats in the state assembly in the 2008 elections.

Gerrymandering

In the 2010 elections, Republicans won significant majorities in both houses of the Legislature and the governorship. Republicans used their majorities to pass a radical redistricting plan after the 2010 census which substantially shifted the partisan bias of the state legislative maps. The map itself was the product of a Republican project known as REDMAP, created to maximize the partisan bias of redistricting by utilizing new statistical and mapping software. The maps were first used in the 2012 elections, which saw Democrats win 52% of the statewide vote in the Assembly, but they only won 39% of its seats going into the 2013–2015 session. This disproportionality would only grow with future elections, with Republicans consistently winning a large majority of seats while the statewide vote would remain relatively close.
During the 105th Wisconsin Legislature, Wisconsin was again under divided government. The Wisconsin Supreme Court re-asserted a role in arbitrating redistricting disputes for the first time in 60 years. The conservative 4–3 majority on the Court chose to take original jurisdiction over the redistricting case at the urging of state Republican leadership, breaking from prior precedent of deference to federal courts.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in November 2021, in a 4–3 decision on ideological lines, that the standard they would use to draw new maps would be to seek the "least changes" to the existing maps necessary to comply with the new census data. The standard conferred significant partisan advantage to the Republican Party in this map-making process due to the 2011 map's existing partisan tilt. After initially adopting Democratic governor Tony Evers' "least change" proposal, the United States Supreme Court tossed the decision, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court adopted the Republican "least change" proposal, instead.

''Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission''

In 2022, Republicans won 64% of the seats, three away from a supermajority. The following April, the 2023 Wisconsin Supreme Court election flipped the majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court to a liberal majority for the first time in over 15 years. The day after Janet Protasiewicz was inaugurated, a lawsuit was filed against the 2022 "least change" map.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court released their decision in the case, Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, on December 22, 2023, declaring the legislative maps unconstitutional in a 4–3 opinion along ideological lines. The court declared that state legislative districts must be composed of "physically adjoining territory" and pointed out that 50 of 99 existing Assembly districts failed that constitutional criteria. The majority decision also declared that the "least changes" methodology used by the court in 2022 for the Johnson v. Wisconsin Elections Commission case was never properly defined and was without legal or constitutional foundation.
The court was in the process of selecting a remedial plan when the legislature chose to pass the map proposed by governor Tony Evers. Evers signed the plan into law on February 19, 2024. Republicans showed the most favorability towards Evers' proposal due to pairing the fewest incumbents and providing Republicans with the best opportunity to retain a majority in the fall elections.

Outgoing incumbents

Retiring

Two recall petitions were filed with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, both against Robin Vos.

First recall petition

In January 2024, Matthew Snorek, a resident of Burlington, filed paperwork to recall Robin Vos. In the paperwork, Snorek gave a list of grievances against Vos, which included insufficient support for former president Donald Trump, refusing to impeach Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator Megan Wolfe, and his refusal to decertify the 2020 presidential election. Many of the people who were involved in the recall campaign were the same people who were involved in the primary challenge against Vos in 2022. On March 10, the recall campaign claimed to have collected over 10,000 signatures, which would be more than enough to trigger a recall election.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to answer the question of what map would be utilized for the recall election, which was in conflict due to Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission. ''Clarke'' prohibited the use of the old maps in any future state legislative elections, while the law establishing the new legislative maps would not take effect until the November general election. After a review by the Wisconsin Elections Commission staff, it was found the recall organizers did not collect enough signatures within either set of boundaries to trigger a recall.