DARLINGTON — Political insiders in Wisconsin have been transfixed as liberal and conservative leaders wrangle over lines on a map and jockey for control of the powerful state Assembly and Senate.
The debate over legislative districts has occupied months of energy, money and time, shaped a race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court and led to a bombshell that dropped just before Christmas — when the court ordered new lines to be drawn in time for the 2024 elections.
But in a slice of southwest Wisconsin, about 70 miles from the state Capitol, the bomb barely detonated.
The issue of new Assembly and Senate maps has taken a backseat to caring for children or aging parents, to opening new businesses, to cheering for Darlington’s 20-2 boys basketball team.
“I think a lot of it has been noise,” said Ashley Kleiber, getting a cup of coffee before returning to work at her salon in downtown Darlington. “I don’t think that the impact is as great as they want.”
But in communities across the state, from River Falls in the northwest to Sheboygan in the east and Darlington in the southwest, new maps would mean big change. In some cases, cities that are now split into multiple districts would be reunited in one, increasing their voting power. Elsewhere, parts of the state that have been politically linked for years would be newly divided.
The Cap Times spoke with over a dozen sources in three regions far beyond Madison’s political bubble — former state legislators, local elected officials and business leaders, community activists and everyday residents — who said the new lines could change how issues they care about are handled in the Capitol, how they feel about state government and how Wisconsin is governed for years ahead.
A Fair Maps WI sign is displayed in the window of the Lafayette County Democratic Party office on Main Street in Darlington.
Southwest Wisconsin: Rural-urban divide
Since at least 2002, the state’s 17th Senate District, which includes Darlington, has sprawled across all of southwest Wisconsin. Driving from Cuba City near the Iowa border to the northern tip of the district in Juneau County can take two-and-a-half hours.
Residents here have a long list of issues they feel need to be addressed in the Legislature, ranging from better internet access to the fate of their local schools as rural districts are short of money and teachers.
But under new maps, Lafayette County, the most agriculture-dependent county in the state, would stay in the 17th District — joined by a chunk of Mount Horeb, Cross Plains and Verona in Dane County. Some don’t see the connection.
“There’s a big difference in the way you look and feel and act in a small, rural (town) and a big city,” said Tim Appell, who farms and runs a commercial grain facility in Shullsburg with his wife. “I’m not saying it's bad … (but) when you go to a big city, you don’t typically run into somebody very often who wants to talk about farming.”
There is no doubt about what powers Lafayette County, where it is difficult to drive around without seeing a creamery, or dairy farm, or a tractor hauling hay bales on a county highway.
Nearly 54% of the jobs in the county are tied to agriculture, according to University of Wisconsin-Extension data. Yet Lafayette County has lost nearly a third of its dairy herds in the last decade — part of a statewide trend of smaller farms shutting down or consolidating into large-scale operations — and that has raised concerns about the industry’s future.
Kriss Marion never expected to trade city life for an organic farm and a bed-and-breakfast in Blanchardville.
After growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Marion vowed to stay in Chicago — until her rheumatoid arthritis worsened and she and her husband thought a change of scenery would help. They put down roots and Marion began getting involved in the community, getting elected to the Lafayette County Board and, eventually, running twice for the state Legislature.
But Marion fears for the area’s ability to maintain its population and economic stature going forward. Blindly creating more jobs won’t necessarily be the answer, she said, pointing to the county’s unemployment rate of 1.9%, which is below the state average.
Instead, she argued there needs to be a focus on protecting its agricultural and tourism heritage by ensuring clean water, which had been threatened by PFAS contamination and nitrogen levels in private wells.
Marion said those issues haven’t always gotten a fair shake in the Legislature.
“I think tourism could be a really big draw here,” Marion said. “But we'd have to take the water seriously and the environment seriously to do it.”
Kriss Marion takes a walk around her farm in Blanchardville. Marion, who has twice run for the state Legislature, argued that some issues, such as water quality, don't get a look in the Capitol currently.
Dale Schultz, a Richland Center farmer who represented the 17th Senate District from 1991 to 2015 as a Republican, said residents in this part of the state often feel neglected.
That includes redistricting, Schultz said. Southwest Wisconsin often is the last part of the state that map drawers consider, he said, and that leads to districts that are less compact.
To explain why local representation matters, Schultz noted that residents in his neck of the woods were devastated last year by the closure of a University of Wisconsin branch campus in Richland Center. The situation, he said, was met with a meager response from state officials.
“I think people are really feeling forgotten by both political parties,” he said. “And it's almost like the Democrats have decided this is a Republican area, and they don't want to compete. And it's like Republicans own the area, and they're going, ‘We don't have to compete, all we have to do is throw red meat on the table for the (pro-Trump “Make America Great”) crowd, and that's it.’ As a result, what's happening is we're really suffering out here.”
This corner of the state is often regarded as one that swings between political parties.
In 2022, Republican Tim Michels got more votes than Democratic Gov. Tony Evers did in Lafayette County, but not by much. Former President Donald Trump won the county in both 2016 and 2020, but so did U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, in 2018.
The area's current state senator, Republican Howard Marklein of Spring Green, won by 20 percentage points in the 2022 election. The last time the seat was represented by a Democrat was 45 years ago.
Redistricting, however, could shake things up.
Under Senate and Assembly maps proposed by Evers, the 17th would lean toward Democrats by nine percentage points, based on election results in the last six years. Republicans on Tuesday adopted Evers’ maps, a move that could end the state Supreme Court’s role in the redistricting process.
Other lines, which extend all the way to Verona, would give Democrats an even heftier election advantage.
Sitting on a stoop while playing with her children during a break from her job as an office manager in Darlington, Rayna O’Brien drew a parallel between upheaval with the legislative districts and other institutions she believes have left the area behind.
The Diocese of Madison had recently rolled out a plan to consolidate parishes across the region, meaning some senior citizens in rural parts of Lafayette County will have to drive 45 minutes to get to church.
Raising her four kids — not redistricting — has taken up most of her energy lately, but O’Brien wondered if the cases of voters and churchgoers might not be all that different.
“When you combine too many places together that are different — there are benefits to that too, but it can hurt the little people,” she said.
Rayna O'Brien sits on a stoop with two of her four kids, Connor (age 8) and Molly (age 7) in Darlington. Some in southwest Wisconsin worry that they could be left behind if they are included with Dane County in a new legislative district.
Some see more in common between rural and urban residents than what might meet the eye.
While Lafayette County is heavily farmed, so are some parts in western Dane County. And it is not unusual for residents to go to the Madison area to run errands.
“I shop there, that’s where I get my food,” said Michelle Haas, who owns Driftless Shaman in downtown Darlington. “I lived there for 10 years. I have friends there.”
Both the Madison area and Darlington are undergoing demographic changes.
In 2000, less than 1% of Darlington’s residents were Hispanic or Latino. In 2010, fueled by immigrants coming to work in dairy plants and farms, that jumped to 12% and, a decade later, the Latino community makes up nearly one-quarter of the population.
Mixing cities and more remote areas within the same legislative districts, Marion noted, would also help to break down tensions between communities that she said are often pitted against each other for state funding.
“I think the siloing of urban and rural (areas) has really hurt Wisconsin,” she said. “It's hurt us when it comes to talking about infrastructure. And it just means we can't have productive conversations about how do we keep our kids here and how we get families to move here.”
But Marion is concerned about political bias in new maps, even if they come from the Democratic Party she’s aligned with.
She’s among southwest Wisconsin residents who want the Legislature to use a nonpartisan map-drawing system. Assembly Republicans argued a proposal mirroring a model used in Iowa would do that, though Evers and Democrats disagreed. Amid all the debate, the bill died.
Marion said she hoped lawmakers would try again to help end the back and forth over redistricting once and for all.
“We're still looking at political maps right here,” she said. “This is not going to fix the gerrymandering problem.”
St. Croix River Valley: The 'quadrapus'
To Don Leake, the legislative districts for his hometown look an awful lot like a “quadrapus.”
Leake is from River Falls, which is possibly the most unusual city in Wisconsin’s redistricting landscape: It has two representatives in the state Assembly, the Senate and in Congress.
Between 2012 and 2020, before the maps rejected by the state Supreme Court were put in place, River Falls was together with the nearby city of Hudson in one puzzle-piece shaped district that was relatively compact.
At the time, the two districts in and around River Falls and St. Croix County were among the fastest-growing in the state. Amid all this change, some portions of the area, notably the university city of River Falls, remained blue — and that’s why GOP legislators bisected his hometown in 2022, Leake said.
“This new map … I think deliberately divided River Falls in half to cut the Democratic voting power,” the retired UW-River Falls math professor said.
That move shifted Leake, who lives in the southern part of the city, from a district represented by Rep. Shannon Zimmerman of River Falls, to one held by Rep. Warren Petryk, whose hometown in Eau Claire County is over an hour’s drive from Leake’s house. Both Zimmerman and Petryk are Republicans.
Leake has been analyzing the maps with the advocacy group he helps lead, the Wisconsin Maps Assessment Project, and said he is satisfied with his current representation but he called the existing lines “fishy.”
A Hudson, Wis. sign spans the entry to Lakefront Park in Hudson, Wisconsin.
While River Falls was a Democratic stronghold in the 2020 presidential election, the district’s "quadrapus" tentacles stretch east to rural portions of St. Croix County that voted for Trump 2-to-1 and reach south to grab part of Pierce County where Zimmerman lives.
Of the maps submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, most would keep River Falls in one Assembly district, combining it with Hudson in a return to what existed in the 2010s.
For the state Senate, the plans are more varied. Two map proposals would effectively keep all of the St. Croix River Valley intact, running the district from River Falls 100 miles north to Burnett County, near where the St. Croix is met by the Namekagon River, beginning its flow downstream in earnest toward the Mississippi.
Others would take a different approach. Evers proposes splitting the region, with one Senate district that stretches all the way north to Lake Superior and another that includes River Falls and Hudson but runs farther south nearly to La Crosse.
Dave Fodroczi would rather keep the entire St. Croix River Valley together in one Senate district.
His family, he said, is typical for the area. Moving back to western Wisconsin from Madison, he settled in Osceola, in Polk County. His children, however, moved to Minnesota after they grew up to start their own families.
The interconnectedness between the two states means watching Minnesota Vikings games on television and residents often “knowing more about what's going on in Minnesota state government than they do Wisconsin state government,” Fodroczi said.
“There's a synergy there,” said Fodroczi, who worked for St. Croix County and served as director of the Kinnickinnic River Land Trust. “It's symbiotic. I mean, people from Wisconsin go to work on the other side of the river. People from Minnesota come over here to recreate and clear their heads from working.”
But an influx of new residents also means the area can’t keep up in terms of housing, particularly units suitable for families or those selling for $200,000 or less. This has stunted the area’s ability to attract new workers.
“Our school districts are starting to see their projections for student counts have plateaued or even gone down a little bit,” said Russ Korpela, who serves as executive director of the River Falls Area Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Bureau. “Our high school classes are smaller now just because of the post-baby boomer demographics. But also because we're not importing new families with kids fast enough to make up for the kids that are graduating and moving on.”
The River Falls chamber often works with others in the region to lobby on issues they have in common. But the status quo with district maps also serves the chamber in an interesting way. A divided city means twice the number of legislators who can go to bat for your community when it comes to funding or policy priorities.
“We just see it as a natural way to expand our reach,” Korpela said.
Dean Knudson, a Hudson Republican who represented the area in the state Assembly between 2011 and 2017, knows the old district lines well.
Part of the logic at the time, Knudson said, was to create as many districts where Republicans stood a chance at victory, rather than give the party a higher number of safe seats. When campaigning in 2012, he recalled visiting the small town of Roberts in St. Croix County, which sits between River Falls and New Richmond.
Residents there, he said, were shocked to find an Assembly candidate showing up on their doorsteps after years of largely being sidelined during campaign season.
“It was stunning,” Knudson said. “I'd go around and it's like, ‘Wow, you know, all of a sudden, we're getting some attention that we hadn't been getting, just because things are more competitive.’ And I think every (round of) redistricting probably does that to a certain extent.”
But Knudson is not so sure the districts proposed by Democrats make a lot of sense.
Hudson and River Falls could each anchor their own Assembly districts, he argued. And he called it a conscious choice for Democrats to propose Senate districts pairing much of the area with three counties that have more in common with Eau Claire or La Crosse.
“That was just gamesmanship, I think,” he said.
New lines could mean an opportunity for somewhat more competitive races, at least in the state Assembly. While Zimmerman won each of his last two races by double-digit percentage points, the new Assembly districts voted Republican by a slim margin, based on election results in the last six years
To Leake, the former math professor and redistricting aficionado, that’s the name of the game.
“What we would say is at least it's competitive,” he said of the new map proposals. “And that’s what we’re all about here. … What we like is if there are possibilities of competition. You don’t have to twist and turn and add arms to get that district.”
Former Wisconsin Rep. Dean Knudson, R-Hudson, was the last lawmaker to represent River Falls when it was contained in one Assembly district during the 2010s.
Sheboygan: Lost cause for Democrats
In the last decade-and-a-half, Mary Lynne Donohue has seen a number of bright-eyed candidates running for state Assembly who were convinced they could be the one to bring Democratic representation back to Sheboygan.
She knows better.
“One of the hard things is recruiting people,” Donohue, who ran for the state Assembly in 2020, said. “Getting them enthusiastic and saying ‘And of course, you know, you’re going to lose.’ I mean, I went into (running) wide open. I knew I could not win. But we recruited a very lovely person in 2022. And she always had this glimmer that it was going to happen. And of course, it didn't.”
Donohue grew up in the Sheboygan area and ultimately decided to return after a time away. Runs for school board, city council and the state Assembly followed, and she is co-chair of the local Democratic Party.
The reason for her pessimism when it comes to the state Legislature has to do with the design of the 26th and 27th Assembly districts. The dividing line between the two districts bisects Sheboygan along a key street, Superior Avenue, before weaving and ducking its way through the city limits.
Prior to 2012, the city of Sheboygan had enough residents to have an Assembly district all to itself. The city often leaned Democratic and that was reflected in its representation in the Assembly, although Republicans could compete.
The new map proposals could return to those days, creating a seat where Democrats could once again be competitive. Both districts that currently include the city are held by Republicans.
“It’s not really about partisan politics,” said Emily Vrbensky, chair of the Sheboygan chapter of the League of Women Voters. “We’re very diverse within the community too — it’s not like when you redraw it we’ll all think the same way. But it will be all working toward the same goals, because there are a lot of the same goals.”
Sheboygan has changed considerably since Donohue’s youth.
In 1990, the city was nearly 90% white. By 2020, that number dropped to around 70%, with sizable Hmong and Latino communities. There are roughly 1,900 bilingual students in the Sheboygan Area School District, speaking 36 distinct languages.
When Andre Walton ran for Sheboygan City Council in 2022 — a race he lost in a tiebreaker — he found that many residents of color would turn out to vote after being engaged in the conversation, but it was a challenge to get them interested in a mostly white government.
“The City Council and city government, policing — I think there is a lack of representation,” Walton said. “But I think it's trying to improve … I wouldn't say it's stagnant. It's changing.”
State government was a whole different story, he said. The most engaged voters were weary of feeling as if their vote didn’t matter under the current maps. Others had no idea the city was split into two districts at all.
“They don't believe in the political system,” Walton said. “It creates distrust and it creates a situation where people believe democracy is essentially dead. And I would have to agree with them, especially in the state of Wisconsin.”
Residents are hurt by a lack of public transportation, affordable housing and child care options, Walton said. All of those issues have remained unresolved since he moved to Sheboygan in 2018, and he said legislative interest has been largely absent. Vrbensky of the League of Women Voters said there is only one day care in town that is open 24/7, leaving many overnight shift workers in the lurch.
“Just having that person be selfishly, solely focused on our community and representing it in the Legislature might be beneficial,” Sheboygan Mayor Ryan Sorenson said.
The Eighth Street bridge rises to allow a sailboat to pass on the Sheboygan River in Sheboygan. For over a decade, the city has been split into two legislative districts.
Russ Otten sees the change in Sheboygan a bit differently. A lifelong resident, he said that the city, while still a great place to be, needs to return to values it once embraced. And he is frustrated that local officials haven’t been as transparent as he would like, particularly when it comes to what he views as too much diversity, equity and inclusion programming locally.
But Otten, who is chair of the Republican Party of Sheboygan County, agrees that there is value to having the city of Sheboygan in one district, even if it might tilt in favor of Democrats.
“I think that the city ought to have one representative. I think that it would be a good thing,” he said. “Because at least the city would be represented and the outlying areas, which have different values or a different set of objectives, would be represented. I don't like the idea of splitting for the purposes of not giving any representation. I think that that's wrong.”
Sheboygan became a city divided in the 2012 round of redistricting, an example of what political scientists would label “cracking,” where an area that leans toward one political party is divided and split among other districts, with their votes diluted by supporters of the other party and denying them a chance of forming a unified voting bloc.
The first election under the new maps was competitive, decided by fewer than 1,000 votes. Since then, however, Republicans have dominated in both the 26th and 27th districts, winning by an average of 21 percentage points across both seats.
In 2015, Donohue was part of a lawsuit challenging the lines in federal court, arguing they ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution. After an early victory, the U.S. Supreme Court brought the suit’s progress to a screeching halt, saying the plaintiffs hadn’t demonstrated adequate harm and would need to bring new evidence if they were to succeed.
“Redistricting principles tell us that we should try to keep municipalities together to the greatest extent and it just didn't happen,” Donohue said.
But all of the maps offered to the Wisconsin Supreme Court by Democrats after the court’s December order were remarkably consistent: The 26th District would no longer divide Sheboygan but rather would center on the city itself. Sheboygan Falls, Kohler, Oostburg and Plymouth, which orbit around Sheboygan, would be left to a different district.
The new city of Sheboygan-centric district has voted for Democrats by four to five percentage points over the last six years, but Otten said he felt that his party could still be competitive under new maps.
“Do we have a chance as a Republican, as a strong Republican with a strong message that applies to more than just Republicans? Yeah, I think there could be a chance for a candidate to win,” he said. “It's not like it's always been Democrat.”
To Walton, it represents a chance to once again convince local residents as to the value of democracy. But, he added, it would be a mistake to assume that to be an overnight process.
“I think it's gonna take some time for people to start to realize that the maps are more fair, more equally distributed,” he said. “So I would say that's a hard thing to gauge. But I think, you know, if we have good candidates, and good volunteers to help go and knock doors and explain their situation to people, I think that will help increase the pace of people being engaged and understanding that their voice counts again.”
