October 29, 2022

Democracy Is Hanging By a Thread in Wisconsin. Blame Extreme Voting Maps.

On a new episode of Reveal, our National Voting Rights Correspondent Ari Berman delves into how Republicans cemented control of the state legislature. In this October 2021 photo, opponents of the Republican redistricting efforts staged a rally at the state Capitol in Madison.Scott Bauer/AP

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On Saturday, former President Barack Obama will be campaigning in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for Democratic candidates in close contests for governor and U.S. Senate, urging voters to go to the polls. But when it comes to controlling state politics, Democrats are facing an uphill battle.

While elections are often decided by razor-thin margins in this pivotal swing state, Republican control of the state legislature is now all but assured. Thanks to rampant gerrymandering, Wisconsin Republicans are within grasp this year of gaining a two-thirds supermajority in the legislature, which would give them remarkable power to override the governor’s veto and implement an extreme and unpopular agenda on issues ranging from guns to education to abortion. It could even give them the ability to overturn the results of elections.

My recent feature for Mother Jones exploring how the state became the GOP’s laboratory for dismantling democracy is now accompanied by a podcast and radio show produced with Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. The segment goes deep inside the GOP’s decade-long strategy to make Wisconsin voter-proof and looks at how what happens in 2022 will determine the future of fair elections in 2024 and beyond.

You can listen to my segment here:

My reporting trip to Wisconsin is part of a bigger Reveal episode studying how extreme new laws built on Trump’s Big Lie are cracking down on a phantom problem: widespread voter fraud. I hope you will check it out here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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