MADISON, Wis. - In his final State of the State address, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announced that he plans to call a special legislative session in the Spring to put an end to partisan gerrymandering “once and for all.”
And he will keep calling lawmakers into session until happens.
- YouTube youtu.be
“There’s one thing that we should all be able to agree on, which is that politics should stay out of redistricting from start to finish,” he said.
He noted that while political differences may get in the way of creating a nonpartisan redistricting commission, state lawmakers and officials can still work together to ban partisan gerrymandering.
And so, he is going to call a special session so that the legislature can adopt a constitutional amendment to make the practice illegal. He also said he was willing to keep calling the legislature into session until they pass the amendment.
“I won’t hesitate to bring the Legislature into special session later this year in August. Or September. Or October,” he remarked. “Heck, I’m old enough to remember when the legislature was willing to meet in December!
- YouTube youtu.be
Evers’ announcement fell under the radar nationally at a time when officials in other states are still trying to push new congressional maps on voters and candidates – like in Virginia and Maryland.
Additionally, 5 states have implemented new maps passed by their legislature in 2025, including Texas, California (which voters approved under Prop 50), Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio.
Utah will also use a new congressional map under court order.
Evers said the current chaos created by this bipartisan gerrymandering fight started with President Donald Trump, which is true. But then he added, “Democratic Legislatures have been put in the unthinkable position of having to respond by trying to restore balance to our elections.”
This suggests that Democratic-controlled states like Illinois, New Mexico, and Maryland didn’t already have egregiously gerrymandered maps – and that what started with Trump was not also an opportunity for Democrats.
In California, for example, Democrats tossed out an independent congressional map approved unanimously by the state’s redistricting commission for a map that gives their party an advantage in 92% of the state’s US House districts.
On the same day California Prop 50 passed, Maryland Governor Wes Moore called for the creation of a redistricting committee to come up with a new map that would hand the Democratic Party all of the state’s congressional districts.
Moore is getting pushback in the Maryland Legislature.
This is why independent reformers do not refer to the “you take our seats, we will take yours” mentality as “rebalancing.” They call it a race to the bottom, because when officials "fight fire with fire" everyone inevitably gets burned.
While Evers may not be willing to hold his own party accountable for its role in escalation, he wants no part of the power grab.
“Compared to all of the chaos, dysfunction, and recklessness in Washington, here in Wisconsin, we’ve worked to lead by example. And a big part of that is the fact that, today, lawmakers are elected under the fair maps I signed into law,” he said.
“But here’s the problem, Wisconsin: new maps are redrawn every ten years. While we have fair maps today, we still don’t have a nonpartisan redistricting process in place. That means there’s no guarantee Wisconsinites will still have fair maps after the next US Census.”
In 2024, Evers signed into law new legislative maps that he initially submitted to the state Supreme Court for consideration. The Republican-controlled Legislature passed his maps with bipartisan support.
The maps enacted for state House and Senate have been given A grades by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. However, the state’s congressional map still has an F, failing in partisan fairness in particular.
Evers previously pledged to push for an independent redistricting process that takes map drawing out of the hands of legislators. His remarks at the 2026 State of the State signal his skepticism that it will happen under the current political environment.
So, for now, the proposed constitutional amendment will have to do – if the legislature gets on board. In order to amend the state constitution, a proposed amendment needs to clear the legislature in two consecutive legislative sessions.
Tony Evers’ Final Mission as Governor: End Partisan Gerrymandering for Good was originally published by Independent Voter News and is republished with permission.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.